Biases

The only biases associated with this study is that the security personnel will know that they are being watched -- or observed -- and thus they may modify their behavior in order to appear more patient, accommodating, etc. Likewise, people who would perhaps be more difficult to deal with may alter their behavior in order to appear calmer, nicer, etc. However, the latter bias could be eliminated if they did not know that they were being observed. This holds true for the first bias as well but it would be much harder to do because of security measures that would have to be taken (especially in an airport) to observe this type of situation.

One other issue with this type of experiment, a naturalistic observation experiment, is that we will only be able to describe the behavior of the...

We often hear about individuals who have a little bit of power abusing that power and this study will aim to non-obtrusively observe how individuals with that power behave.