You had to be really unlucky to be on the China National Highway 110 on August 14, 2010. One of the longest traffic jams on record ensued, ensnaring thousands of vehicles over more than 100 kilometers and lasting more than 10 days. The unluckiest drivers were stuck for five full days. As the days dragged out, vendors popped up along the highway to keep people fed and hydrated—often for a high fee.
Would sitting in traffic for five days make you impatient? I strongly suspect that even the calmest, most zen among us would answer with a resounding “yes!” Patience fails everyone at some point or another. It probably takes a lot less than a multiday traffic jam to send most of us into a spiral of impatience and defeat.
And yet philosophers, religious scholars and poets alike tout patience as a “virtue,” imbuing the term with moral righteousness. Does that make it immoral to fidget in a long meeting, grumble and groan in line or want to hit the fast-forward button when someone drones on and on? To say that patience is a virtue implies that you either have it or don’t and that having it is always a good thing.
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As a behavioral scientist, I think about patience differently. Sure, some people find it easier than others to calmly endure various insults to the value of their time. But I’m not that interested in identifying saints and sinners, winners and losers in the human lottery of personality. To me, it’s far more interesting and useful to think about patience as something we do rather than something we have—a process rather than a virtue. In recent research, I’ve explored what we might learn by reframing patience as a process.
Consider first what it means to be impatient. We all know the feeling: fingers drumming the table, leg bouncing, nearly jumping out of our seat with the desire to end whatever seemingly endless suffering the world has seen fit to dole out that day. In psychology, we call those tics psychomotor agitation.
But why does this frustrating feeling arise? Most emotion researchers take what’s known as a functionalist perspective, in which emotions motivate us to do specific things that are good for our survival. The prolific Dutch psychologist Marcel Zeelenberg coined the phrase “feeling is for doing” to get at this idea. In the case of impatience, our mind and body are trying to tell us to get moving, to find a way to bring the objectionable delay to an end. It motivates us to find a way around the traffic or to cut short a co-worker’s question that turned into a monologue. It can even be the engine that drives social change when pointed toward injustice or structural inequality.
Of course, just because we evolved to feel impatient doesn’t mean it always helps us. In cases where we’re truly stuck and have no way to accelerate progress, impatience is like the annoying child in the backseat asking, every few minutes, “Are we there yet?” It can even steer us away from our goals. In negotiations, for example, impatience is a recipe for failure, leading to impulsive decisions and subpar outcomes.
In a series of recent studies with more than 1,400 participants, my colleagues and I presented people with a series of familiar but hypothetical scenarios to investigate why some situations trigger teeth-grinding impatience while others barely perturb people. For example, we asked them to imagine having to wait in a doctor’s office, sit in traffic on the way to a concert or endure a seemingly endless conversation with an annoying colleague. The participants then answered questions about how they were feeling.
Across the various scenarios, a few factors seemed to clearly ramp up impatience. People were more impatient when the thing they imagined waiting for was very appealing—and when the wait itself was unappealing. Being delayed for something you dread, such as an unpleasant work event, is easier than a similar delay for a much-anticipated performance by your favorite band. And if you have a comfortable car and a good audiobook cued up, that’s easier than being stuck on the freeway in the summer with no air-conditioning and a broken stereo system—no matter where you’re going. We also found that people were more impatient when someone was to blame for the delay. Traffic linked to a morning rush hour doesn’t feel as bad as a backup caused by a reckless driver (or worse, by lookie-loos slowing down to see the accident).
In follow-up studies that are still unpublished, we tested one particular predictor of patience, namely how a delay compares with an affected person’s expectations. We figured that the length of a delay wouldn’t matter as much as whether the person saw it coming. Are you going on a 10-hour road trip? No problem. Are you stuck in a 10-hour traffic jam? No fun at all. In one experiment, we told participants that a tedious task—essentially staring at a blank screen—would last either one, three or five minutes. In all cases, it actually took three minutes, but participants who expected just 60 seconds of aggravation felt far more impatient than those who knew they were in for a longer ordeal. And other studies that are currently underway are beginning to confirm that these experiences of impatience have all the qualities of an emotion, just like sadness, boredom, guilt or anger.
If impatience is an emotion, what is patience? In my view, patience is simply our best response to impatience. In technical terms, it’s a form of emotion regulation—a tactic to change how we feel, usually with the goal of feeling and doing better. When we take a deep breath instead of snapping at our spouse or remind ourselves that the scary movie isn’t real, that’s emotion regulation.
Patience works the same way. When we start to feel impatient at the hassle or hardship or hanger-on, we can let that feeling rage—or we can regulate it. Are you facing a long delay at the airport? Shift your focus toward the new book you brought along. Are you waiting weeks to find out if you got that job? Dive into your favorite hobby to distract yourself for a few hours. Are you at your wit’s end after a long day of childcare? Give yourself a grown-up time-out until you’re ready to reengage with patience.
What I’ve just described—impatience as an emotion and patience as a process that soothes the emotion—offers a new way for all of us, including scientists, to think about these concepts. There’s still a lot we don’t know about patience, including why some people seem to find it easier than others and how we can get better at it. Fortunately, those are simpler questions to answer when we reduce the challenge from virtue acquisition to emotion regulation.
Ultimately, it may seem like a stark contrast from poetic descriptions of virtue, but I’ll take practical wisdom over virtue any day.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to Scientific American’s Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at dyuhas@sciam.com.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
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