“Cabin dividers also serve as psychological privacy barriers between passenger classes. It remains more ambiguous whether cabin dividers are beneficial or detrimental. “The curtains that hang between service classes also operate as screens, permeable for the flight attendants, but not for the passengers, and shielding groups of passengers from fully realizing their differences as well as their similarities.”[8] It may be that cabin dividers function as symbols of the socioeconomic divide between first class, business, and economy passengers. Studies have shown that this class-based division—manifested physically by the cabin divider—can increase conflict between passengers and incidents of “air rage.” It remains to be seen whether cabin dividers help or hurt in exacerbating antisocial behavior arising from situational inequality. One point of note is that the study demonstrated an increase in antisocial behavior in both economy and first class, with “emotional outbursts” more commonly taking place among economy class, and “belligerent behavior” occurring more commonly among the first class.” — Ali Sayegh, Haoxuan Song, Zackary Seibold, and Ivy He, On Flying: The Toolkit of Tactics that Guide Passenger Perception, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2020.
A replica of a Ukrainian airline's movable cabin divider, photographed at the National Gallery of Art and the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius during off-hours.