If you cut in line, you might just be a bad person. The queue is a regulation where the reward (the ice-cream stand/dining room/ticket booth) is earned through patience. Your choice to avoid this time-honored process will be bound to draw the anger of those you pass by, drawing remarks like "Whoa there, Chief," the passive-aggressive "There's a line, you know!" and of course, the incredibly common "Hey, Copernicus, why don't you guide yourself to the back of the line?"
But, in the moment in which you really cannot wait, for example, the entire royal family has prepared a dinner party upon you last minute, then there is a way to cut the line correctly.
There are a few different ways to consider and a few different methods to employ. The regularity of the situation is very important. If you're waiting to use the photocopier at work, you might be more likely to manage a successful cut than if you were waiting for a lifeboat on the Titanic. Sure, that might be an extreme example. But the importance of the event does matter.
For those requests in normal situations, emphasizing either the urgency of your task or the simplicity of your task proved to be effective: experimenters who said "Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the photocopier?" had a cut rate of 60 percent and experimenters who said "May I use the photocopier because I need to make copies?" saw a success rate of 90 per cent when queuing for the copy machine.
If you have a couple of extra dollars lying around, bribing members of the line also proved to be effective. And most of the time, the person being bribed didn't end up accepting the money, because even the offer showed that the briber had a sense of desperation.
