Why passengers get air rage: The real reason passengers misbehave on flights

Incidents of air rage from passengers are four times more likely if the plane has premium seating rather than just a single economy class cabin.

This is according to new research into disruptive behaviour in the skies that suggests the awareness of inequality on board is comparable to the effects of a nine-and-a-half-hour delay when it comes to angering fliers.

Katy DeCelles, an associate professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Toronto, studied data related to on-board incidents shared by an unnamed major airline and found a strong correlation between class divide and passenger misbehaviour.

The presence of a second class of cabin was known as "physical inequality".

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DeCelles, along with her co-author, Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School, compared flights that had separate first and economy class with those that did not, as well as planes that boarded from the front – so that economy passengers have to walk through what they are missing out on – with those that boarded from the back or centre.

She also looked at other possible triggers, including leg room, seat width, delays, flight length and cabin space.

The report, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the existence of a first class cabin made an incident four times more likely, while loading from the front doubled the odds of air rage over boarding from the middle. This is equivalent to the effect observed from a delay of six hours and was referred to as "situational equality".

Bizarrely, the effect was even more pronounced among first class passengers who, when having economy class passengers walk through their section, were 12 times more likely to indulge in air rage.