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Patience is a coping strategy, not a virtue

New research untangles the concepts of patience and impatience, and proposes a new lens through which to understand them.

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. 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.

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