Is there a pattern to what makes us impatient? And if you’re designing a space where you know people will have to wait, what would you do to keep their impatience to a minimum?
Woman leaning out of car window stuck in traffic.
Thanks to newly published research by Riverside University psychologist Kate Sweeny and her colleagues, we have some clues that help address these questions. Across three studies and a total of 1,401 participants, Sweeny created a number of different hypothetical scenarios to see if she could isolate features of a person’s environment that help predict their becoming more impatient.
For example, in one of her scenarios, imagine you’re at the movies when a kid nearby is being loud. A given study participant would be presented with one of two versions of this scenario. In one version, the child’s parents do nothing to soothe their child; in the other version, the parents try their best to keep the child calm. Then, the reactions of half of the participants to the first version can be compared with the reactions of the other half of the participants to the second version. As you might suspect, this scenario is designed to investigate what guilt contributes to people’s level of impatience, in this case blaming someone else for not trying to keep their child calm.
What were some of Sweeny’s findings? Among the factors she found to predict increased impatience were:
- How unpleasant is the situation that you are stuck while waiting to achieve your goal.
- How much you want to achieve that goal, that is, how important it is to you.
- Whether someone is worthy of blame for holding you back from that goal, and if so, how worthy they are.
- If the delay is longer than you expected, it would be premature.
Interesting, what he did NO what seems to matter about impatience was the length of the delay itself. In some cases, a delay of say 3 days may not cause impatience, while in other cases a delay of 30 minutes may.
However, upon reflection, it makes sense. If the 3 day delay is for closing on a new house, and the 30 minutes is how long you’ve been on hold with the cable company, then it’s not at all surprising to see impatient people in one case and not in the other. others.
Another potential factor also ended up making no difference. This is how the passage of time in the situation stands out, let’s say by having a large watch next to you or having your phone with you. I would have thought that having a visible reminder of how time is passing would make people more impatient, but overall the study participants didn’t think it would.
Of course, not all people will react in the same way when a situation arises that can lead to impatience. After all, some people get angry or frustrated when the line at the DMV takes forever; others, however, respond calmly. Sweeny and her colleagues were interested in whether individuals would react differently to similar situations, and if so, what personality traits would predict these differences. They found that—not surprisingly—people who were higher in the traits of need for closure and neuroticism were especially likely to be impatient. Qualities such as flexibility, agreeableness, self-awareness, emotional awareness, and executive function appeared to give a boost to patience. These are qualities we can cultivate in ourselves and look for in others to try to better choose who are the most patient people in our lives.
To be sure, future work is needed to replicate and extend Sweeny’s findings, she notes, especially beyond the English-speaking participants who were taking the study online. Other patience measures besides surveys for purely hypothetical scenarios would also be welcome.
Results such as these may have a number of practical applications. In our own lives, they can help us consider in advance whether a future situation (going to the DMV, waiting for test results, seeing a traffic jam ahead) is likely to make us more impatient. If so, we can try to sidestep that impatience ahead of time (by bringing, say, a book, distracting ourselves by playing games, listening to soothing music, etc.). Research findings may also be useful for those designing environments where waiting will inevitably be involved (service centers, medical testing companies, and so on).
Impatience is often a significant detriment to our well-being, and the more we can recognize the warning signs and work against them, the better.
