Patience is a coping strategy, not a virtue

According to a well-known proverb, patience is a virtue. According to a recent study in the Personality and Social Psychology Review, though, it's actually a coping mechanism that we employ to stop everyday frustrations from getting on top of us.

Kate Sweeny at the University of California Riverse and colleagues ran three studies to explore aspects of a theory that she has devised, called the process model of patience. This theory holds that impatience is (like anger or happiness, for example) its own emotion, triggered when an unwanted situation, such as being stuck in traffic or standing in line at a till, is taking longer to resolve than seems reasonable. Through this lens, patience serves as a form of emotion regulation that helps us to deal with that unpleasant emotional state.

In these studies, conducted on a total of about 1,400 people, the participants read hypothetical scenarios that described a range of undesirable everyday situations, some of which featured an 'objectionable delay'. They were then asked about how impatient they would feel in that situation, how patiently they would respond to it, and their general perceptions of the scenario.

Each hypothetical situation came in two versions, with one designed to provoke high levels of impatience, and the other only low levels. In one story, for example, the participant was asked to imagine that they were watching a film in a cinema and a child nearby was being noisy. In the 'low impatience' version of this scenario, the parents were doing everything they could to calm the child, while in the other, they were described as doing nothing. In addition to this, participants also completed a range of questionnaires, including a personality test and a measure of their ability to regulate their emotions.

When the team analysed the resulting data, they found three clear predictors of impatience. Participants said that they would feel more impatient when they were stuck in a particularly unpleasant state (waiting for an appointment without a seat, for example); when they particularly wanted to reach their intended goal (when they were on their way to a concert by a band they really wanted to see but were stuck in traffic); and, finally, when someone was clearly to blame for the frustration (in the cinema example, this was when the parents were described as ignoring their noisy child).

These three situation characteristics consistently provoked impatience across different scenarios, the team reports. In the third study, which also asked participants to rate the objectionableness of the situation, they found that those that had any of those three characteristics also got higher objectionableness ratings. Together, these results provide "tentative evidence" the emotion of impatience is prompted by perceiving one of these three characteristics, they write.

However, when the researchers analysed the data on how patient the participants thought they would be in the various scenarios, they found that, in general, these results were linked less to the specific situation and more to variations in individual factors. Specifically, better scores on the measures of impulsivity, emotional awareness and flexibility, and also the personality trait of agreeableness were all linked to higher patience scores.  

The researchers accept that more work needs to be done to explore the validity of the process model of patience. But these results do suggest that patience is not so much virtue as a method to help us to deal with frustrations — and that some of us are better equipped to employ this coping mechanism than others.

Read the paper in full:
Sweeny, K., Hawes, J., & Karaman, O. T. (2024). When Time Is the Enemy: An Initial Test of the Process Model of Patience. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672241284028

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