Juan Pablo Bermúdez (Universidad Externado de Colombia & TU Delft, juanpa@gmail.com)

William Jiménez-Leal (Universidad de los Andes)

Gino Carmona (Universidad Externado de Colombia & Universidad de los Andes)

María Alejandra Grisales (Universidad Externado de Colombia)

 

 

Abstract

There is evidence that low socio-economic contexts have an effect on the way people value options and make decisions, sometimes in ways that make poverty hard to escape. But how does it affect the types of personal goals people set for themselves, or the way they plan and pursue them? Through a series of studies with participants across the socio-economic spectrum in Colombia, we assess how poverty affects goal-setting, planning, and goal-pursuit. Contrary to the widespread view that people in poverty have lower aspirations and more self-regulation problems, we show that low-SES agents set longer-term personal goals and rate their goals as more ambitious than their higher-SES counterparts. Lower-SES agents also are less likely to report self-regulation conflicts, instead reporting more contextual conflicts in which ‘life gets in the way’ of pursuing their goals. However, they are also significantly less likely to have a plan to pursue their goals. These results speak against the theoretical perspective whereby poverty makes us more impatient (i.e. focused on short-term goals and rewards), and instead support the view that poverty increases goal persistence: lower-SES agents pursue goals perceived as more ambitious and taking longer to achieve, despite facing more external obstacles and having less-defined plans. Collectively, these findings suggest that the challenges of poverty to agency are not primarily related to self-regulation, but to the pressures of having too few opportunities for goal advancement, and to a lack of access to goal-relevant information.

 

“I never say, ‘I can’t.’ I say, ‘I can, but I just don’t know how.’ ”

—Jainer (El Gorrión, Colombia)

 

“A strong breeze can break branches.
A whirlpool in the ocean waters can sink boats.
But a strong willpower can give you courage,
and even if your destination is a thousand miles away,
you can be successful.”

—Amit (Jigna, Uttar Pradesh)

From Moving Out of Poverty, vol. 2 (Narayan et al., 2009)

 

 

Introduction

Contexts of poverty are characterized by scarcity of opportunities and resources, and by uncertainty about the environment and one’s ability to affect it. How would living in a context of poverty affect your goals and your plans? A widely shared perspective suggests that poverty makes us more impatient: it leads us to abandon our more ambitious and longer-term goals and focus instead on shorter-term objectives (Haushofer & Fehr, 2014; Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013) and to reduce our ambitions and aspirations in potentially counterproductive ways (Appadurai, 2004; Dalton et al., 2016).

But that is drastically different from what you hear from the poor themselves. In many of the testimonies gathered in Moving Out of Poverty, people across the world living in harsh contexts of scarcity express an iron will, a relentless commitment to pursue their goals of improving their lives in the face of daunting odds. “No matter if I fall, I get up again. If I fall 5,000 times, I will stand up another 5,000 times”—says William, a 37-year-old who was displaced by the Colombian armed conflict. Amit, from India, relies on the courage of “a strong willpower” that allows you to get to your destination, no matter how far away it is. Instead of impatience, people report a sense of hardened persistence toward their goals. This, however, is accompanied by a lack of clarity about the means to get where they want to go. In the words of Jainer, a neighbor of William’s: “I never say, ‘I can’t.’ I say, ‘I can, but I just don’t know how.’”

The impatience and persistence perspectives can each provide useful explanations for  different aspects of the psychological effects of poverty. In this paper we set out to assess which one better accounts for the effects of poverty on goal setting, planning, and goal pursuit. We assess this using methods with high ecological validity in a diverse sample of Colombian adults from across the entire socioeconomic spectrum.

 

Impatience or Persistence?

To specify the different predictions of the impatience and persistence perspectives, it will be useful to introduce the notion of planning agency: the form of agency that allows us to organize and coordinate our actions over time, both intra- and inter-personally (Bratman, 2021). As a form of goal-directed agency, planning agency is built upon “future-directed intentions”: goal-states that involve one’s commitment to act in a certain way in the future. If all goes well, the elements of one’s plan system mesh together consistently and are not revised too easily; and this is what allows them to play the coordination role that makes the pursuit of complex, long-term personal goals possible.

Focusing on individual coordination across time, we distinguish three main elements of planning agency: (1) goal setting: the selection of a particular valued outcome as the focus of one’s intention and commitment of one’s resources toward its consecution; (2) planning: the selection of appropriate means towards the achievement of a goal, including the anticipation of likely obstacles and possible strategies to prevent them from arising or tackle them if they arise; and (3) goal pursuit: the allocation of psychological and other resources in the pursuit of one’s intended goal, including the use of self-control strategies to cope with motivational conflicts that may arise during the process. While this seems like a linear process, in practice it rarely is: planning can lead to reevaluation of one’s goals, and goal pursuit can reveal obstacles that require restructuring one’s plan or abandoning one’s goal. But the three elements are conceptually distinct and involve different psychological processes and skills (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The dimensions of planning agency and their interactions.

 

Understanding patience as the propensity to wait calmly in the face of frustration and adversity (Schnitker, 2012), one theoretical perspective proposes agents in contexts of poverty tend to become more impatient. This impatience perspective makes predictions for each one of planning agency’s dimensions. First consider the last one: goal pursuit. An impatience perspective could predict that poverty makes agents more prone to self-regulation challenges and failures. Scarcity environments make more frequent and pressing demands on agents to focus on urgent short-term concerns, leading them to allocate their cognitive and regulatory resources mainly to them, to the detriment of longer-term goals and concerns (Shah et al., 2012). Additionally, by increasing negative affect and stress (Haushofer & Fehr, 2014), poverty further taxes regulatory capacities. Thus, self-control conflicts are more likely to arise in poverty contexts, and agents are more likely to succumb to temptations since they have fewer psychological resources available.

This reduction of available cognitive resources would also affect planning: impoverished agents would be less likely to have plans about how to achieve their long-term personal goals because the cognitive resources required for planning for the future are occupied elsewhere.

With respect to goal-setting, the impatience perspective predicts that agents tend to set less ambitious and shorter-term goals than their higher-SES counterparts. In Appadurai’s (2004) expression, poverty hinders our “capacity to aspire”. A formal model of this phenomenon (Dalton et al., 2016) proposes that poor agents have lower aspirations because, given their more stringent external circumstances, they will tend to receive a lower reward for the same amount of effort. This leads to an “aspirations failure” in which impoverished agents fail to set personal goals that would be more ambitious but still within reach for them. This resonates with the phenomenon of adaptive preferences, in which agents reject or ‘downgrade’ a preference because they conclude, upon experiencing obstacles, that satisfying their preference is out of their reach (Elster, 1983). Poverty would then lead agents to see more ambitious goals as out of reach, and thus settle for less ambitious ones.

The impatience perspective is currently dominant in the psychology and economics of poverty. However, a persistence perspective is also available, which would suggest that agents adapt to environments of scarcity and uncertainty by recognizing that their personal goals are very ambitious given their circumstances, and giving themselves a longer time frame to achieve them. Contrary to impatience, this perspective would not expect agents to experience more self-regulatory conflicts while pursuing their goals, but rather face more ‘contextual conflicts’, i.e. more instances in which reduced access to resources and opportunities forces them to choose between solving urgent matters and advancing their goal.

Thus, the persistence perspective would predict that, during goal-pursuit, lower-SES agents would report more contextual conflicts than their higher-SES counterparts. Regarding planning, it would predict that poverty would lead agents to have lower likelihood of forming plans for their goals, not because they have fewer cognitive or regulatory resources available, but because they lack the information relevant to identify appropriate means to their goals (Appadurai, 2004). Finally, with respect to goal-setting, low-SES agents would tend to have longer time frames for their goal attainment and perceive their goals as more ambitious for someone in their circumstance than high-SES agents.

 

	1. Goal setting	2. Planning	3. Goal pursuit
Impatience perspective	Reduced ambition: H1.1. The lower an agent’s SES, the shorter-term their goals will be. H1.2. The lower an agent’s SES, the less ambitious they will consider their goals to be.	H2. Reduced planning: The lower an agent’s SES, the less likely they are to have a plan to attain their goal.	3.1. Regulatory overload: Agents in lower SES will tend to report more self-control conflicts, and more self-control failures, than their higher-SES counterparts.
Persistence perspective	Extended ambition: H1.3. The lower an agent’s SES, the longer-term their goals will be. H1.4. The lower an agent’s SES, the more ambitious they will consider their goals to be.		3.2. Contextual obstacles: Lower-SES agents will tend to report more contextual conflicts than higher-SES agents.

 

Table 1. Hypotheses according to each theoretical perspective (impatience vs. persistence), divided by the relevant planning agency dimension.

 

In sum, the impatience and persistence perspectives make contrary predictions regarding goal-setting and goal-pursuit. While they both predict that low SES agents will have fewer plans than high-SES agents, they provide different explanations for this: a cognitive and regulatory overload from the impatience perspective, and a lack of relevant information and evidence from the persistence perspective. Table 1 presents these predictions as concrete hypotheses.

Through two high-powered studies of Colombian samples (total N = 1.197), we tested these hypotheses seeking to better understand how poverty affects the psychology of agency ‘in the wild’, by asking people about their most important personal goals, their plans in relation to them, and recent conflicts they had experienced during goal pursuit. After presenting these two studies we discuss the meaning of our findings.

 

Study 1: Poverty’s effects on goal-setting

We first set out to investigate hypotheses related to goal-setting. Based on previous pilot studies, we sought to confirm hypotheses H1.3 and H1.4, expecting that poorer agents would report larger time-to-goal-attainment horizons and greater perceived goal ambitiousness.

An a priori power analysis suggested that 207 participants would be sufficient to find the expected small-size effect with a statistical power of 80%. To account for potential missing data and attention lapses, we planned to recruit 250 or more participants.

 

Study 1: Methods

Through the platform Netquest (a survey company with access to a panel of about 61.500 people in Colombia), we recruited 277 adults living in Colombia (136 male, 140 female, 1 non-binary, median age = 42, SD = 14,5).

To assess socio-economic factors, Colombia officially uses a stratification scale that splits the population along 6 strata according to the physical characteristics of their home and their access to social services given their home’s location (Acosta et al., 2014; Rosero, 2004). As an initial, albeit imperfect, proxy for SES, we aimed at recruiting the same number of people from each stratum to make statistical comparisons as robust as possible. Below we describe in some detail our key measures.

 

SES

To build a SES measure more reliable than strata (Chica-Olmo et al., 2020; Sepúlveda Rico et al., 2014) and amenable to the multidimensional nature of poverty (Angulo et al., 2016), we developed an index combining evidence of multiple facets of socio-economic realities:

1. Stratum: 1-6
2. Highest level of education reached by the individual
3. Highest level of education reached by anyone in the nuclear family
4. Type of access to healthcare^[i]
5. Occupation
6. Household income (weighed by the number of household inhabitants)
7. Household expenses (weighed by the number of household inhabitants)
8. Material deprivation scale^[ii]
9. Food insecurity scale^[iii].
10. MacArthur scale of perceived social status^[iv]

After normalizing all variables, an exploratory factor analysis with a oblimin rotation  revealed a three-factor solution that explained 61% of variance ( 23%, 21%, and  17% respectively for factors 1–3). That said, factor interpretability of each factor was very low. Given that, and in order to ensure that we could use the same SES measure across multiple studies, we decided to  run a new exploratory factor analysis by forcing a single-factor solution that explains 44% of variance and presented the following factorial loadings (Table 2). We then calculated a score of this single factor by considering the load of each variable (ω = 0.92; α =0,88 ).  We used this SES index in the analyses reported below.

 

Item	Factor	Communality	Uniqueness	Complexity
Stratum	0,796	4,372	0,367	1
Education (years)	0,728	4,372	0,470	1
Family education (years)	0,724	4,372	0,476	1
MacArthur scale	0,708	4,372	0,499	1
Material Deprivation	0,668	4,372	0,554	1
Food safety	0,66	4,372	0,565	1
Social Security	0,633	4,372	0,599	1
Per beneficiary income	0,599	4,372	0,641	1
Per beneficiary expenses	0,564	4,372	0,682	1
Occupation	0,474	4,372	0,776	1

Table 2: Factor loadings for SES dimensions in an exploratory factor analysis forcing a single-factor solution.

 

Goal setting

We asked each participant to describe the two personal goals they had focused most on recently. For each goal we asked them to answer additional goal-related questions using 0–10 sliding scales:

• Time to goal attainment: How much time do you expect it would take you to achieve the goal?
• Goal ambition: How ambitious is your goal for a person in your current situation?

 

Study 1: Results

Participants tended to report very long-term goals (Figure 1): average time to attainment was 669 days (SD = 681).  While lower-SES participants did indeed report longer time for their goals (see Table 2), this association was not significant (b = -42.21, df = 544, t = -0.968, p = 0.33). This is evidence against impatience hypothesis (i.e., that lower SES would lead to shorter-term goals [H1.1]), but it is mute regarding the persistence hypothesis (i.e., that lower SES would lead to greater time-to-attainment [H1.3]).

In relation to goal ambitiousness, lower-SES participants tended to perceive their goals as significantly more ambitious than higher SES participants (b = -0.47, df = 550, t = -5.463, p < 0.001, R² = 0.07), corroborating the persistence hypothesis (H1.4) and speaking against the dominant hypothesis (H1.2).

 

	Time (days)			Ambition
Predictors	Estimates	CI	p	Estimates	CI	p
(Intercept)	670.95	590.22 – 751.67	<0.001	7.91	7.75 – 8.06	<0.001
SES – Index	-42.21	-127.81 – 43.40	0.333	-0.47	-0.63 – -0.30	<0.001
Random Effects
σ2	305227.48			1.00
τ00	311417.45 ResponseId			1.29 ResponseId
ICC	0.51			0.56
N	277 ResponseId			277 ResponseId
Observations	545			554
Marginal R2 / Conditional R2	0.003 / 0.506			0.078 / 0.598

Table 2. Effects of SES on time to goal attainment.

 

Study 1: Discussion

In relation to ambitiousness, and contrary to orthodox expectations, SES was negatively correlated with goal ambitiousness. This suggests that poverty affects goal-setting not by leading agents to focus on more achievable goals, but rather by leading them to perceive their personal goals as in general more ambitious. This makes sense considering that poverty contexts provide agents with more frequent and difficult challenges (Pepper & Nettle, 2017), as well as with fewer examples of role-model peers who can lead by example or mentor agents on the way to their long-term goals (Albright et al., 2017).

While this illuminates the effects of poverty on goal-setting, questions remain about how to interpret the absence of evidence on the link between SES and goal temporality. Additionally, while lower-SES participants reported greater ambitiousness, we still do not know what is driving this effect: is it e.g. due to a perceived lack of skills or knowledge, or to a perception of greater obstacles? Moreover, poverty’s impact on the other two aspects of planning agency (planning and goal-pursuit) remain to be studied. We ran Study 2 to advance toward answering these questions.

 

Study 2: Poverty’s effects on planning and goal-pursuit

Our second study sought to replicate hypothesis H1.4, while further illuminating the sources of the greater perception of ambitiousness in lower-SES participants. Additionally, we sought to test H1.3 again, in an attempt to further clarify the relationship between poverty and temporality. In relation to planning, we also aimed at testing the hypothesis that lower-SES agents are less likely to have plans for their goals (H2). Finally, regarding goal-pursuit, based on prior exploratory evidence, we aimed at disconfirming the regulation overload hypothesis (H3.1), and corroborating the ‘life gets in the way’ hypothesis (H3.2).

According to an a priori power analysis, testing our main hypotheses with expected effect sizes ranging from small to moderate, would require a sample size between 250 and 400 participants. However, we calculated a larger sample size in order to be able to test a set of exploratory structural equation models we intended to run to better grasp the psychological mechanisms behind the expected effects. Using the semPower R package and considering small effects of 0.10 and noise of 0.05 in the non-direct relationships, an analytical analysis suggested a sample of 977 participants. Simulation analyses with 1,000 replications suggested a sample of 976 participants. Therefore, we aimed at collecting data from at least 1,000 participants.

 

Study 2: Methods

Through Netquest we recruited 1,152 adults living in Colombia. However, responses from 88 participants were removed due to failing the attention checks and 143 more were excluded from the analyses because they reported being distracted or not taking the study seriously. The final sample was composed of 920 participants, (453 male, 453 female, 3 non-binary, median age = 41.1; SD = 14.4).

We used the same materials and analytical strategy as in Study 1 to measure SES, time to goal-attainment, and ambitiousness. With respect to the latter, we also used an ambitiousness scale aiming to gain further insight into the drivers of ambitiousness judgments (see Supplementary Materials for a full description of the scale).

To assess the presence of plans, regarding each of participants’ two reported goals, we asked them whether they currently had a plan to reach the goal. They could reply ‘Yes’, ‘Not yet’, or ‘I don’t believe a plan is necessary’. We also sought to gauge the level of complexity of participants’ plans. Thus, if the answer was ‘Yes’, we asked them to describe their plan. Additionally, we included a series of questions aiming at assessing different dimensions of plan complexity, from knowledge of the order of means-actions required to the foresight of likely obstacles and the consideration of mitigation measures in case they arose.

Regarding the goal-pursuit dimension, we started by asking people which of the two reported goals had recently been more present to mind. We then asked them which of the following situations had more recently happened to them in relation to that goal:

1. I didn’t feel like it, but I still managed to do something for my goal.
2. I managed to do something for my goal, although I really wanted to do something else.
3. I didn’t do something I could have done for my goal because I didn’t feel like it.
4. I didn’t do something I could have done for my goal because I really wanted to do something else.
5. I wanted to do something for my goal, but some other obstacle came up.

Situations 1–4 were meant to capture motivational conflicts: conflicts in which goal-pursuit was threatened by the presence of a strong goal-inconsistent motivation (situations 2 and 4) or by the absence of the necessary motivation to advance toward the goal (situations 1 and 3). Situations 1–2 were meant to capture self-control success: instances in which the participant succeeded in exerting self-control to advance toward their goal. Situations 3–4 were meant to capture self-control failure: situations in which they failed at advancing their goal because self-control attempts were absent or unsuccessful.

Situation 5 was different: it was meant to capture contextual conflicts, i.e. hardships experienced by the agent that threatened to hinder their goal progress but were not motivational in nature, relating instead to e.g. unexpected external events (health or family emergencies, urgent demands from work, etc.) or conflicts between different goals.

Once data collection was completed, two human classifiers (one of them blind to the study’s hypotheses) checked participant answers to ensure the situations were appropriately classified as motivational or contextual conflicts, and within the motivational conflicts class, whether they were appropriately classified as self-control successes or failures.

 

Study 2: Results

 

Goal-setting

Goal temporality. As in Study 1, people tended to report very long-term goals: average time to attainment was 764 days (SD = 887). However, in contrast with the previous study, SES had a significant effect on goal temporality (b = -114.63, df = 1,793, t = -4.531, p < 0.001, R² = 0.01): lower-SES people reported significantly longer expected times to goal attainment, lending support to the persistence hypothesis (H1.3). The effect of SES remained even when age and gender were controlled (b = -91.49, df = 1,789, t = -3.210, p < 0.001). See Figure 2.

Figure 2. Time to goal attainment by SES score (segmented by quartiles)

Goal ambitiousness. Corroborating the persistence hypothesis (H1.4), this study replicated the result of Study 1: lower-SES participants tended to perceive their goals as significantly more ambitious (b = -3.89, df = 1838, t = -5.037, p < 0,001). To shed further light on this, we used the ambitiousness scale. A factor analysis of the ambitiousness scale revealed a single-factor solution (𝛼 = .795 ; ω = .838), thus suggesting that perceived ambition in terms of effort, resources, skills or overall ambition are strongly related. We then ran a mixed regression model with SES as the predictor, goal ambitiousness as outcome variables, and participants as a random variable and corroborated the previous results: lower-SES participants perceived their goals as significantly more ambitious (b = -5.55, df = 1,836,  t = -11.93, p < 0.001), and the effect did not change when we controlled age and gender (b = -5.58, df = 1,832, t = -11.017, p < 0.001) (Figure 3). .

 

Figure 3. Dispersion plot of ambition and economic score.

 

Planning

To assess whether SES had an impact on the existence of plans for attaining personal goals, we ran a pre-registered logistic regression model testing plan availability (excluding the ‘Not necessary’ responses and taking plans as a binary ‘Yes’ / ‘No’ variable) against the SES index. SES had a significant and moderate effect on plan availability (b = 0.50, df = 1675, p < 0.001, OR = 1.64): each standard deviation in the SES index (i.e., each unit) implied an increase of 87% of having a plan for their goals  (Figure 4), providing evidence in favor of hypothesis 2. The effect of the SES index remains significant after we controlled by age and gender (b = 0.32, df = 1675, p < 0.001, OR = 1.38).

 

Figure 4. Plan availability by SES score (in quartiles)

While the impatience and persistence perspectives both predict lower probability of plans in low SES, they diverge in relation to its causes. To gain further insight into this, we measured the effects of SES on a scale of plan complexity created by us. The scale has 8 items scale with a 100-point slider format which measure the complexity of plans for achieving goals (e.g., “To achieve my goal I know exactly what actions I must take”; “To achieve my goal I have designed strategies to address the weaknesses that can hold me back”). We conducted an exploratory factor analysis with the 8 items of the plan complexity scale, finding a two-factor solution: a epistemic dimension dealing with the recognition of sequences of actions, resources, and progress cues (𝛼 = .878; ω = .888); and a strategic dimension dealing with the identification of challenges (internal weaknesses or external obstacles), the selection of strategies to address these challenges, and the specification of deadlines (𝛼 = .875; ω = .887). We then ran two mixed regression models, one with each plan complexity dimension as the outcome variable, both with SES as the predictor and the participant as a random effect . We found a small but significant effect of SES on the epistemic dimension (b = 3.78, df = 1,837, t = 5.358, p < 0.001, R² = 0.02) but not on the strategic dimension (b = 1.12, df = 1,837, t = 1.394, p = 0.163, R² = 0.00). The effect of the score index on cognitive planning remains significant even when age and gender were controlled (b = 2.08, df = 1,832, t = 2.701, p < 0.001). This suggests that, compared to low SES participants, high SES participants plan their goals better in terms of steps, resources, and signs of progress, but not in terms of predicting obstacles and defining deadlines, where there are no differences. This provides initial evidence in favor of the persistence explanation: lower-SES participants report having less information relevant to planning for their goal.

 

Goal-Pursuit

In relation to goal-pursuit, SES made a significant difference in the type of conflict participants reported (b = 0.50, df = 917, p < 0.001, OR = 1.65). Higher-SES people tended to report more motivational conflicts, calling for the exercise of self-control. The lower the SES, the more likely it was for people to report contextual conflicts on their way to advancing their goals (Figure 5).  This effect remained significant even after controlling for the effect of SES on plan availability (b = 0.488, df = 917, p < 0.001, OR = 1.62), suggesting that the effect of SES on conflict type is independent from its effect on plans. The effect remains unaltered also when age and gender were controlled (b = 0.68, df = 914, p < 0.001, OR = 1.92), thus suggesting that the effect of SES is not related to any specific age or gender.

Figure 5. Conflict type by SES score (in quartiles)

 

Finally, we tested whether SES affected the likelihood of experiencing self-control failures. For this analysis, we excluded participants who reported experiencing contextual conflicts (372 participants) and conducted a logistic regression model with SES as the predictor and self-control failure/success as the outcome variable. However, we did not find a significant effect (b = 0.01, df = 546, p = 0.934, OR = 1.01).

These results weigh against the impatience perspective (regulatory overload hypothesis [H3.1]) and in favor of the persistence perspective (contextual obstacles hypothesis [H3.2]): higher-SES participants more frequently reported motivational conflicts, whereas their lower-SES counterparts reported contextual conflicts more frequently.

 

Study 2: Discussion

Study 2 was an extension of Study 1, aiming to determine how poverty affects each dimension of planning agency. In Study 2 we used a larger number of participants and included measures of planning (both presence and complexity) and conflicts in pursuing goals (motivational vs contextual).

Replicating Study 1, and contrary to the impatience perspective, we found that SES negatively predicted perceived goal ambitiousness. Supporting Hypothesis 1.4, low-SES participants reported their goals as more ambitious than high-SES participants. While the effect size remains small (10% of explained variance), it was larger than in Study 1, suggesting robustness and consistency given Study 2’s larger sample.

Regarding time, unlike in Study 1, we found a significant effect of SES on the time estimated to attain goals. Consistently with the persistence hypothesis (1.3), low-SES participants indicated they required significantly more time to achieve their goals. However, the effect size was quite small (just 1% of explained variance), which could be related to the large standard deviation of time, a problem of using days as the unit of analysis. Some reported goals required as little as one day and others as much as eleven years (4,015 days).

Concerning planning, the evidence also supported the persistence perspective. The pre-registered logistic regression model demonstrated that SES was positively related to having plans to pursue goals and the complexity of those plans (H2). The effect of SES on the probability of having plans was significant and had an effect of moderate size (OR = 1.64). Both perspectives predicted H2, but differed with respect to the explanatory mechanism. Preliminary support for the persistence perspective comes from an exploratory analysis suggesting that higher-SES participants reported plans of a greater epistemic complexity: they reported having more knowledge about the sequence of actions, identifying resources, and progress cues relevant to achieving their goals). However, SES index had a small effect on the epistemic dimension of plans, and no significant effect on their strategic dimension. Thus, the causes of the effect of SES on plan availability remain to be explained further.

Finally, contrary to the impatience perspective’s regulation overload hypothesis (H3.1), we did not find evidence suggesting that low-SES participants experienced more self-control conflicts or failures than high-SES participants. Instead, low-SES participants showed a lower likelihood of experiencing a motivational conflict in their most recent opportunity to work towards their goals. In other words, high-SES participants encountered more motivationally-challenging situations while pursuing their goals, low-SES participants faced more contextual situations that forced them to choose between working towards their goals or attending to other urgent issues. Overall, each unit decrease in the SES index implied a 65% increase in the probability of experiencing a contextual rather than a motivational conflict. These results disconfirm the Regulation Overload Hypothesis (H3.1), and instead support the persistence perspective’s Contextual Obstacles Hypothesis (H3.2).

 

 

General Discussion

We have tested the predictions of two theoretical perspectives regarding the effects of poverty on planning agency: the impatience perspective posits that poverty disrupts cognitive and attentional functioning, leading to a neglect of long-term goals. On the other hand, the persistence perspective proposes that poor people find more recurrent signs of practical obstacles between them andtheir goals, leading them to postpone their estimated completion time and assessing them as more ambitious, but continuing steadfast in their pursuit. Through two studies with Colombian participants from across the SES spectrum, we tested five hypotheses derived from the two perspectives and found consistent evidence in favor of the persistence perspective: low-SES participants reported their goals as more ambitious (H1.4) and requiring more time to achieve (H1.3). In addition, they reported more contextual and fewer motivational conflicts than their higher-SES counterparts in their efforts to achieve their goals (H3.2), and were just as likely as them to exhibit self-control failures (contra H3.1). They also were less likely to have plans to pursue their goals, and their plans were significantly less developed (H2), an effect which was partly explained to a comparative lack of knowledge about how to achieve goals on the part of lower-SES agents (supporting the persistence perspective).

These results resonate with the reports of agents in contexts of poverty reported in Moving Out of Poverty: Jainer remains committed to his goals, even if he admits he doesn’t know how he will achieve them; and Amit finds courage in a sense of a strong will, even if the destination seems to be “a thousand miles away” (Narayan et al., 2009).

While our results consistently favored the persistence perspective, it is possible that other aspects of poverty’s psychological effects may be better explained from an impatience perspective. There is, for example, evidence that agents in poverty contexts have steeper temporal discounting curves in economic experiments (Bartoš et al., 2018; Carvalho et al., 2016; Lawrance, 1991; but see Ruggeri et al., 2023) and tend to display more present-oriented behaviors that can make escaping poverty harder (Pepper & Nettle, 2017). Our results may differ, at least partly, because our participants reported on the personal goals they considered most important, and the way they treat these special goals can differ in special ways.

Our results, then, may point to a novel mechanism of persistence, perhaps complementary to those of impatience. A socioeconomic context brings with it a body of evidence composed of personal experiences, anecdotal reports, and information that ultimately influences people’s goal-setting, planning, and goal-pursuit dispositions and abilities. One type of such evidence is the contextual conflicts people face daily, which interfere with their efforts to achieve their goals not through motivational pathways, but rather by reducing the opportunities and resources required to pursue it, or by presenting a conflict between it and other priorities. The recurrence of contextual conflicts, coupled with fewer resources to cope with them, seems to affect people’s planning agency-related beliefs—specifically, their estimates of how long it will take to reach their goals and their judgments of how ambitious their goals are. Additionally, these experiences impact how people organize themselves to achieve their goals, influencing whether they design plans and the sophistication of those plans.

These studies have important limitations that can be addressed in future research. First, in this study, we inferred the frequency of motivational and contextual conflicts from their most recent occurrence in the experiences of participants immediately before responding to the survey. However, the last type of event that people experienced may not be the most recurrent. Future studies should employ less limited ways to evaluate the recurrence of these types of situations. For example, future research could construct a scale to evaluate the frequency of these conflicts or, even better, explore this aspect through longitudinal (e.g. experience sampling) methods.

Second, it is not entirely clear that having a plan or having a detailed plan necessarily leads to achieving personal goals. In contexts of poverty, given the volatility and unpredictability of the environment, the most rational strategy may be to take advantage of opportunities as they arise rather than having a fixed plan. Future studies should examine the effects of different planning agency dimensions, including plan availability, on personal goal achievement, considering the person’s socioeconomic context.

Third, like all studies involving self-report measures, it is possible that participants responded in ways they believed were most desirable to the researcher or that presented themselves in a favorable light. For example, of the 478 people who reported experiencing a motivational conflict the last time they had to do something about their goals, only 12.7% said they failed in their attempt to control themselves. Many participants may have, whether consciously or unconsciously, ignored or downplayed experiences where they succumbed to apathy or temptation, as such information could present an unfavorable image to the researchers and to themselves.

Finally, it should be noted that although an effort was made to collect data from participants across all socioeconomic levels, the sample may not be representative of their respective socioeconomic groups. This is because the participants were registered with a market research company, which requires access to and knowledge of the Internet. Future works should aim to recruit participants who are more representative of their socioeconomic levels to do a study even more “in the wild”.

 

Conclusion

Through multiple studies of samples covering the entire socio-economic spectrum in Colombia, we first assess how poverty affects goal-setting, planning, and self regulation, and then explore the psychological mechanisms underlying these effects. We find that low-SES agents (1) set longer-term personal goals, and rate their goals as more ambitious than their higher-SES counterparts; (2) are significantly less likely to have a plan to pursue their goals; and (3) are less likely to report self-regulation conflicts, instead reporting more contextual conflicts in which ‘life gets in the way’ making goal pursuit harder. Collectively, these findings suggest that the challenges of poverty to agency are not primarily motivational, but contextual and epistemic: it is the greater prevalence of conflicts between priorities, and the lack of access to key goal-related information, which seems to explain the effects of poverty on the way people set and pursue goals, and their choices related to planning for goal achievement.

 

 

References

Acosta, J., Maluendas, A., & Rivas, G. (2014). Indicadores socioeconómicos y su relación con la estratificación y la información catastral. In C. E. Sepúlveda Rico, D. López Camacho, & J. M. Gallego Acevedo (Eds.), Los límites de la estratificación: En busca de alternativas, Bogotá, Universidad del Rosario-Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá. Editorial Universidad del Rosario. https://doi.org/10.7476/9789587385373

Adler, N. E., Epel, E. S., Castellazzo, G., & Ickovics, J. R. (2000). Relationship of subjective and objective social status with psychological and physiological functioning: Preliminary data in healthy, White women. Health Psychology, 19(6), 586.

Albright, J. N., Hurd, N. M., & Hussain, S. B. (2017). Applying a social justice lens to youth mentoring: A review of the literature and recommendations for practice. American Journal of Community Psychology, 59(3–4), 363–381. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12143

Angulo, R., Díaz, Y., & Pardo, R. (2016). The Colombian Multidimensional Poverty Index: Measuring Poverty in a Public Policy Context. Social Indicators Research, 127(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-0964-z

Appadurai, A. (2004). The capacity to aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition. In R. Vijayendra & M. E. Walton (Eds.), Culture and public action (pp. 59–84). Stanford University Press.

Bartoš, V., Bauer, M., Chytilová, J., & Levely, I. (2018). Effects of Poverty on Impatience: Preferences or Inattention? SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3247690

Bratman, M. (2021). Planning agency. In L. Ferrero (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency (1st ed., pp. 348–356). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429202131

Carvalho, L. S., Meier, S., & Wang, S. W. (2016). Poverty and Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from Changes in Financial Resources at Payday. American Economic Review, 106(2), 260–284. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20140481

Chica-Olmo, J., Sánchez, A., & Sepúlveda-Murillo, F. H. (2020). Assessing Colombia’s policy of socio-economic stratification: An intra-city study of self-reported quality of life. Cities, 97, 102560. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102560

Comité Científico de la ELCSA. (2012). Escala Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Seguridad Alimentaria (ELCSA): Manual de uso y aplicaciones. FAO.

Dalton, P. S., Ghosal, S., & Mani, A. (2016). Poverty and aspirations failure. The Economic Journal, 126(590), 165–188. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12210

Elster, J. (1983). Sour grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge philosophy classics edition). Cambridge University Press.

Farcomeni, A., Pittau, M. G., Viviani, S., & Zelli, R. (2022). A European measurement scale for material deprivation. https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2250804/latest

Haushofer, J., & Fehr, E. (2014). On the psychology of poverty. Science, 344(6186), 862–867. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1232491

Lawrance, E. C. (1991). Poverty and the Rate of Time Preference: Evidence from Panel Data. Journal of Political Economy, 99(1), 54–77. https://doi.org/10.1086/261740

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Macmillan.

Narayan, D., Pritchett, L., & Kapoor, S. (2009). Moving Out of Poverty: Vol. 2: Success from the Bottom Up. Palgrave; World Bank.

Pepper, G. V., & Nettle, D. (2017). The behavioural constellation of deprivation: Causes and consequences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, e314. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X1600234X

Rosero, L. M. (2004). Estratificación socioeconómica como instrumento de focalización. Economía y Desarrollo, 3, 15.

Ruggeri, K., Ashcroft-Jones, S., Abate Romero Landini, G., Al-Zahli, N., Alexander, N., Andersen, M. H., Bibilouri, K., Busch, K., Cafarelli, V., Chen, J., Doubravová, B., Dugué, T., Durrani, A. A., Dutra, N., Garcia-Garzon, E., Gomes, C., Gracheva, A., Grilc, N., Gürol, D. M., … Stock, F. (2023). The persistence of cognitive biases in financial decisions across economic groups. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 10329. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-36339-2

Schnitker, S. A. (2012). An examination of patience and well-being. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(4), 263–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2012.697185

Sepúlveda Rico, C. E., López Camacho, D., & Gallego Acevedo, J. M. (Eds.). (2014). Los límites de la estratificación: En busca de alternativas. Editorial Universidad del Rosario. https://doi.org/10.7476/9789587385373

Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2012). Some consequences of having too little. Science, 338(6107), 682–685.

Wolfe, J., & Kimerling, R. (1997). Gender issues in the assessment of posttraumatic stress disorder. In J. P. Wilson & T. M. Keane (Eds.), Assessing psychological trauma and PTSD (pp. 192–238). The Guilford Press.

 

 

^[i] In Colombia universal health care is guaranteed by everyone who earns a salary contributing to the system (co-pay). People whitout payings jobs are part of the subsidized tier, while high earners can also subscribe to premium private services.

^[ii] The material deprivation scale measures the inability of individuals or households to afford basic necessities and desired items for an acceptable standard of living. It’s not just about income, but also about the accessibility of essential goods and services (Farcomeni et al., 2022). Example items: “I can afford one week annual holiday away from home”; “I am able to avoid arrears”.

^[iii]  The food insecurity scale assesses limitations in the stable access to food, thereby estimating the access to stable nutrition for the person and their families (Comité Científico de la ELCSA, 2012). Example items: “During the last 6 months, has there been a time when, due to lack of money or resources, you or someone else in your household worried that food would run out?” “During the last 6 months, has there been a time when, due to lack of money or resources, you or someone in your household has stopped eating breakfast, lunch or dinner?”

^[iv]The MacArthur scale of perceived social status is a single-item measure that assesses a person’s perceived rank relative to others in their society (Adler et al., 2000).

 

 

In “Impatience or Persistence? The Effects of Poverty on Planning Agency,” Bermúdez, Jiménez-Leal, Carmona, and Grisales investigate the relations between poverty (low socio-economic status (SES)) and goal setting, planning, and goal-pursuit. They contrast an “impatience perspective,” which they claim to be the dominant view on these relations, with their alternative “persistence perspective,” and they provide evidence in support of the latter. In this brief commentary, I’ll raise some questions about how the authors conceptualize the dominant, “impatience,” perspective and suggest two avenues for future research.

 

Is Impatience the Best Construal of the Dominant Perspective on Poverty?

Citing work by Sarah Schnitker, Bermúdez and colleagues claim that patience is “the propensity to wait calmly in the face of frustration and adversity.” They then claim that the impatience perspective makes the following predictions: (1) that individuals in poverty will set less ambitious and shorter-term goals than higher-SES individuals, (2) that poverty reduces the cognitive resources available to individuals for planning for the future, which results in low-SES individuals being less likely to have detailed plans about how to achieve their long-term personal goals, and (3) that individuals living in poverty will experience more self-control conflicts and failures than high-SES individuals because conditions of scarcity prompt people to focus more on short-term goals and concerns and increase negative affect and stress.

 

While there is a broad sense of ‘impatience’ that conveys hyperbolic temporal discounting and a greater focus on present-oriented or short-term goals (which Bermúdez and colleagues mention toward the end of their paper), I wonder whether it is correct or illuminating to connect this broad sense with the concept of patience in Schnitker’s work, which is part of personality and character psychology and specifically draws on traditions in virtue ethics where patience has a specific, morally valenced connotation.

 

Patience, in the sense involved in this virtue ethical tradition, does not seem to provide especially strong motivation for some of the above hypotheses. For example, being impatient, in the sense of having a propensity not to wait calmly in the face of frustration and adversity, does not seem to make one more likely to set less ambitious or shorter-term goals. An impatient person might still set ambitious or longer-term goals but just be less likely to achieve those goals (or be equally likely to achieve them but experience more aggravation or negative emotions—be less “calm”—in doing so than others who are more patient). Similarly, impatient people may still have sufficient cognitive resources to plan to achieve personal goals. Conversely, setting less ambitious or shorter-term goals does not indicate that one is impatient, in the virtue-ethical sense. One may be perfectly able to calmly wait in the face of frustration or adversity but set shorter-term goals because one simply has stronger desires for smaller-sooner rewards.

 

In making these comments I’m not suggesting that Bermúdez and colleagues need to connect their work more closely to patience in the virtue-ethical tradition. I am just pointing out that the work on agency and self-control in psychology and economics with which they rightly contrast their “persistence perspective” is not very closely tied to that tradition. An alternative label, perhaps something like the “cognitive resource perspective,” might avoid the potentially misleading connection between this dominant perspective and the virtue-oriented conception of patience.

 

Areas for Future Research

Bermúdez and colleagues provide some evidence for some interesting main effects of poverty on planning agency. However, there are of course many differences among people living in poverty, and future research could explore interactions between poverty and some of these different features in relation to planning agency. For example, it seems unlikely that everyone living in poverty exhibits the kind of highly persistent goal pursuit of Jainer and Amit, whom Bermúdez et al. quote from Moving Out of Poverty. Some research suggests that economic deprivation does not uniformly lower individuals’ educational aspirations, consistent with Bermúdez et al.’s findings (Cabinet Office 2008, 16). In the United Kingdom, young people who live in poor neighborhoods with more wide-ranging and diverse social networks and higher population turnover report having higher educational aspirations than young people who live in poor neighborhoods that are more isolated, with more homogenous, socially tight-knit, groups (ibid., 15-19; see also (Kintrea, St. Clair, and Houston 2011, 47-62)). It would be interesting to explore whether similar patterns occur in different populations with respect to educational and other kinds of personal goals and with respect to planning and goal-pursuit.

 

Finally, the authors report interesting results concerning the effects that low-SES may have on planning abilities, finding that low-SES may lower what they call the “epistemic dimension” of plan complexity (concerning the recognition of sequences of actions, resources, and progress cues), while leaving the “strategic dimension” (concerning the identification of challenges, selection of strategies to deal with those challenges, and specification of deadlines) unaffected. First, it is unclear to me why this result would lend particular support to their “persistence perspective.” Since, as far as I can tell, both dimensions of plan complexity concern knowledge or information relevant to planning for a goal, it seems that better (or equally good) support would have been provided if both dimensions of plan complexity were found to be negatively correlated with low-SES.

 

Setting that aside, the authors novel scale of plan complexity seems to be loosely related to recent work in the self-control literature on regulatory flexibility and the role that metacognitive knowledge, strategy repertoire, and feedback monitoring have on success in managing self-control conflicts in everyday life (Bürgler, Hoyle, and Hennecke 2021). A longer-term, planning analog of feedback monitoring may provide a non-epistemic aspect of planning that could be used to test the persistence perspective in future studies.

 

In conclusion, I applaud the authors for attempting to determine how poverty affects the psychology of agency “in the wild,” and I look forward to further highly ecologically valid research on this topic.

 

 

References

Bürgler, Sebastian, Rick H. Hoyle, and Marie Hennecke. (2021) “Flexibility in using self-regulatory strategies to manage self-control conflicts: The role of metacognitive knowledge, strategy repertoire, and feedback monitoring.” European Journal of Personality. 35: 861-880. doi: 10.1177/0890207021992907

Cabinet Office. (2008) “Aspiration and attainment amongst young people in deprived communities.” Social Exclusion Task Force: Short Studies. Department for Children, Schools and Families, London.

Kintrea, Keither, Ralf St Clair, and Muir Houston. (2011) “The influence of parents, places and poverty on educational attitudes and aspirations.” Joseph Rowntree Foundation. https://www.jrf.org.uk/the-influence-of-parents-places-and-poverty-on-educational-attitudes-and-aspirations

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bermudez et al. raise a number of important questions regarding the role of poverty on goal setting, planning, and achievement. How does poverty affect the types of goals people set for themselves? How does it affect the plans they make to achieve those goals or their progress toward reaching them?

Two different theoretical perspectives suggest different answers to these questions. According to what Bermudez et al. call the “impatience perspective”, we may expect poverty to make “agents more prone to self-regulation challenges and failures” (4). For example, we may find that agents living in scarcity environments are forced to respond to immediate challenges at the expense of making progress toward their longer-term personal goals. Increased stress and other forms of negative affect may also impede self-regulation capabilities required for goal planning and achievement.

According to the second theoretical perspective—what Bermudez et al. call the “persistence perspective”—those living under scarcity conditions are likely to set goals that they recognize are relatively ambitious, given their challenging circumstances, that they also expect will take a significant amount of time to achieve (4). On this view, a person’s context and environmental constraints—as opposed to their self-regulatory capabilities—have the biggest impact on a person’s goal setting and planning.

Bermudez et al.’s aim in this paper is to determine which theoretical perspective most accurately captures the goal-setting and planning situation of those living under scarcity conditions. In Study 1, they test two hypotheses: (1) the lower a person’s socio-economic status the longer-term their goals will be (requiring more time to achieve), and (2) the lower a person’s socio-economic status, the more ambitious they will consider their own goals (5). Results from this initial study support hypothesis 2 but not 1, finding that participants across the socio-economic spectrum reported having relatively longer-term goals with no significant difference showing up between low vs. high socio-economic participants. But there was a significant difference in perceived ambitiousness of goals set for lower socio-economic participants as compared to higher socio-economic participants, with the former reporting having more ambitious goals as compared to the latter.

A second study aimed to address several questions left unanswered by this first study: Do lower socio-economic individuals have fewer plans for achieving their goals? Do they face more self-regulatory challenges? Or do contextual factors have the greater impact on goal setting and planning? Contrary to Study 1, lower socio-economic individuals in this study reported significantly longer timeframes anticipated for achieving their goals. As with Study 1, these individuals report that their goals are relatively more ambitious as compared with higher socio-economic individuals.  Results also suggest that while high socio-economic individuals may have more, and more complex plans to achieve their goals, they face greater motivational challenges as opposed to contextual challenges faced by low socio-economic individuals.

Taken together, these findings lend support for the persistence perspective and open up several fruitful avenues for future study. For one, as the authors themselves point out the limitations of self-report measures, in general, suggesting that future work might consider  alternative measures to provide a more comprehensive picture. One possibility here may be to conduct a longitudinal diary study in which participants are prompted to respond to targeted questions regarding their goals, plans, and progress toward achieving goals via their mobile devices over an extended period of time. This sort of approach could help to address a second key limitation raised by the authors—namely, that these initial two studies shed light on participants’ most recent motivational and contextual challenges but not necessarily the most recurrent ones. A longitudinal, diary study type of approach might also help shed light on the types of challenges that most commonly recur, as well as progress toward goals or even goal achievement as opposed to just participants’ perceptions of, say, how difficult a goal will be to achieve, how successful they are likely to be in achieving it, how long it will take to achieve, etc.

This research raised three additional questions for me. First, I wonder whether there may be a helpful distinction to draw between having a goal, on the one hand, and having an aspiration on the other. As I see it, an aspiration is a kind of wish or desire one might have for oneself without thereby having or being expected to have any real plan for achieving it—e.g., because one recognizes that it is out of reach or because achieving it would involve Are those living under extreme scarcity conditions more likely to have aspirations as opposed to goals, perhaps because they recognize that achieving especially ambitious goals is all but out of reach?

Second, and relatedly, what kinds of skills might be required for transforming aspirations into actionable goals? The authors suggest at several points that goal setting, planning, and pursuit all involve different “psychological processes and skills” (3). But what might these skills be? And how might a person’s resource-related context impact skill training and development? Patience is invoked in connection with the type of self-regulatory capabilities likely involved in the goal setting, planning, and pursuit processes. Is patience a skill? If so, how? And how might a person’s individual resource-related context impact their capacity to train and improve patience? What other skills might be important here? For example, might perspective taking of some sort—e.g., the capacity to imagine one’s own future situation, challenges, feelings, and beliefs—be needed, or at least helpful?

Third, I would be curious to know what, if any, important differences in goal setting, planning, and pursuit might emerge between those with and without primary care-giving duties. For example, do we see any differences with respect to goal setting, planning, and pursuit between those who are primary care-givers and those who are not, regardless of employment status or whether the individual is a primary breadwinner? To what extent might these differences correspond to gender differences? A cross-cultural examination of this might be especially illuminating, given that many care-giving duties continue to fall dispriortionately on women in many parts of the world irrespective of employment status.

These are just some of the possible follow-ups to this fascinating and important work by Bermudez et al. I very much look forward to following future research along these and related lines.

 

Introduction

 

Patience has been treated as an ethical ideal in many traditions and worldviews: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Stoicism, for instance.[1]  Historical work in various philosophical and religious traditions emphasizes the importance of patience as a virtue, analyzing it and elaborating on its function in a good life. Yet, similar endeavors by philosophers in contemporary virtue ethics have been small in number and uptake until very recently.[2]

In what follows we orient readers to new work on the virtue of patience and situate it within historical traditions, aiming to make some headway on the analysis by doing comparative work. We show the relevance of the moral psychology of patience to live questions in ethics and political philosophy—for instance, in teasing out how patience as a virtue might involve inner conflict, and so put pressure on some conceptions of virtues as requiring inner harmony; whether patience has to be counterbalanced with moral anger, courage, and justice to benefit people under oppression; and whether it might be ameliorative in polarized political contexts.

 

• Three Questions

 

Many recent accounts of patience aim at presenting the wisdom of the past anew, whether that wisdom be of Buddhist, Stoic, Christian, or neo-Aristotelian stock. Appreciating the lineage of an account certainly can aid us in understanding it, contextualizing its claims within certain thick assumptions about psychology, morality, and the nature of suffering, for instance. But more useful than dividing up accounts by their lineage is carving up views by conceptual distinctions and commitments, some of which run orthogonal to historical divisions.

We will analyze accounts of patience based on the way they answer these key questions:

 

Object Question:                   What is the paradigmatic or defining object of patience?

 

Morality Question:                Is it possible to have too much patience or to have patience that produces immoral action?

 

Cultivation Question:            How is patience cultivated?

 

The Object Question typically generates an answer that differentiates patience from other virtues and dispositions, like self-control, anger-management, persistence, endurance, or delayed-gratification.

When asking what the object of patience is, we do not mean “object” in the sense of the goal of being patient, but rather, to what patience is applied. Is it a habit that does something to our emotions? Do we exercise patience in relationships with other people? Can we be patient with our experiences of pain or suffering?

A second point of divergence among accounts of patience has to do with the moral valence of patience. Some traditions hold that virtues can never issue in morally bad action, and so if patience is a virtue it cannot generate immoral actions, nor can a person have too much patience. Others say that patience is not a universal human virtue because it can produce immoral actions in some cases for some people. Still others claim it is a virtue and insist that, for that reason, it will always dispose the person who has it to act at least morally permissibly even if it does not benefit them in a eudaimonic sense. An account’s answer to the Morality Question indicates the possible roles for patience with respect to pressing moral and political issues like polarization and suffering oppression.

Third, each of the major accounts comes from or attempts to rehabilitate a philosophical or religious tradition that imparts wisdom about how to get or grow in patience. Any articulation of the mechanism by which one purportedly grows in patience tells us something about the psychological shape of that disposition. Accounts of how to cultivate patience provide insight into where, in the human psyche, it is housed—for instance, is it a habit pertaining to executive functioning, or a matter of willpower?

 

• Buddhist Patience

 

Buddhism is one of the oldest philosophical and religious traditions to highlight patience’s status as a virtue. Buddhists understand patience to be a moral virtue wherein one faces frustrations or suffering with a peaceful state of mind. Working from original languages of sacred Buddhist texts, Bommarito explains:

 

This calm acceptance of frustrations is closer to the term often translated as ‘patience’ in Buddhist contexts, the Sanskrit term kṣānti (Tib: bzod pa)… marked by a peaceful state of mind in the face of all manner of suffering, from annoyance to physical and emotional pain. (Bommarito 2014, 271)

 

Mahayana Buddhists define patience in terms of the absence of other states of mind such as “anger and excitement,” and “the habit of enduring or pardoning injuries and insults,” (Dayal 1939, 209 in Osto 2023). The proper object of patience on Buddhism, then, is suffering that has the potential to cause frustration and anger.

Importantly, while patience generates a peaceful state or absence of arousal in response to suffering, a person can be in such a state without patience on this view. Distraction, ignorance, or cowardice can explain absence of anger but would not count as patience; rather, patience consists in being in a peaceful state “because one has certain perceptions and awareness,” (Bommarito 2014, 273, our emphasis).

The perception and awareness that anchors internal freedom from anger has to do with an appreciation of scale:

 

“First, there is a sense of scale between particular desires and values that we have and our desires and values as a whole … Second, it involves a sense of our place in a larger context—a relationship, a family, a community, a species, or a planet; we see ourselves in the context of the world at large and get a sense of pro­portion. (Bommarito 2014, 273)

 

Thus, we can define patience on Buddhism as:

 

Patience_Buddhist : the virtue of facing sufferings and frustrations with a peaceful state of mind, free of anger, because one perceives and is aware of the relative scale of one’s desires and values, and the relative scale of one’s place in one’s larger context

 

The Buddhist account of patience gives a negative answer to the Morality Question. Something that we might be tempted to call “too much patience” isn’t really patience, or otherwise, it is not too much but rather still appropriate.  To illustrate, in “The Birth Story on the Teaching of Patience,” King Kalabu encounters an ascetic, Kundakakumaro, teaching his subjects about patience and decides to test him by having Kundakakumaro whipped and dismembered slowly until he expresses anger. The ascetic maintains his peace of mind and, after dying of his wounds, is reincarnated as Brahma (ibid.). We might count Kundakakumaro excessively patient, especially since his patience leads directly to more suffering and eventually, death. But the Buddhist view of virtue is not perfectionistic in the sense of requiring that inner virtues lead to external flourishing; the ascetic acts virtuously and does what is morally right even at the expense of his life (Bommarito 2017).

Patience, on the Buddhist account, is incompatible with morally problematic self-deprecation. Figures like the ascetic still maintain self-respect by not complying with oppressors like the King even in the face of suffering. Bommarito writes, summarizing the teaching of Van. Rerukane Chandavimala Mahathera, “Patience as weak servility is no patience at all” (Bommarito 2014, 277).

How does someone cultivate patience on the Buddhist view? A person can begin to have imperfect patience when she experiences anger but is quick to let it go (Osto 2023). A buddha’s patience does not respond to such feelings at all, though, for such a person will have attained the six (in Mahayana buddhism) or ten (in Theravada buddhism) perfections by following the Eightfold Path, especially Right Intention and Right Action, and no longer feel negative emotions from what we would call suffering. “When patience is actually perfected, it is no longer about forgiveness; since no anger arises in the person, there is none to let go of,” (ibid). The idea here is that an event or experience causes suffering only if the agent has a craving that it not occur; “the removal of this craving leads to permanent release in nirvana” (Osto 2023). Since suffering consists in a relation between a state of affairs and agent’s desires about them, we become patient by means of removing the problematic attitudes that give rise to arousal. Inner responses of lowering arousal constitute progress on the ethical path of Buddhism because they help rid us of harmful fictions about the distinctions between self and other, and about the objects causing us suffering. With these faulty beliefs removed, we will be closer to achieving the ultimate aim of life, namely nirvana.

Buddhist teachings point to several means for changing our internal attitudes and dispositions so that we can respond to frustrating situations with patience. For instance, Asaṅga suggests we replace feeling anger and upset with five attitudes:

 

Perception of feeling close to the one who harms you, perception that everything depends on interdependent conditions, awareness of impermanence, perception of suffering, and perception of fully embracing sentient beings in your heart. (Bommarito 2014, 273)

 

Stephanie Kaza (2018, 444) writes that practicing compassion will help to foster patience with others we originally perceive as injuring us, and Juliana Essen (2018, 264) explains that wandering—finding “a quiet place to meditate, to overcome desires and to seek detachment,” is a tried and true Buddhist practice for cultivating patience. Since we must experience the situations that lead us to typically feel frustrations and sorrows in order to grow in patience, Buddhist thinkers encourage seeking out and indeed yearning for such occasions (Bommarito 2020, 226).[3]

 

• Christian Patience

 

As with other traditions, there is no single view that is the Christian view of patience (Pianalto 2014, 95). For instance, Gregory the Great categorized patience as a central virtue, whereas Aquinas categorized it as a minor virtue affiliated with fortitude.  Still, we can draw on matters of consensus to formulate an account of patience that more or less represents the Christian tradition.

Timothy Pawl and coauthors have written on the Christian conception of patience and the cultivation of patience, focusing on four authors: Augustine (354-430), Gregory the Great (540-604), Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), and Lorenzo Scupoli (1530-1610).[4]

Concerning the object of patience, these Christian authors are in basic agreement that one applies patience to evils that typically cause sorrow or sadness.[5] For Augustine, patience is “that by which we tolerate evil things with an even mind,” (Augustine 1887, para. 2). And Gregory the Great specifies that “patience consists in enduring evils inflicted by others.”[6] Aquinas says:

 

A man is said to be patient, . . . because he behaves in a praiseworthy manner by suffering things which hurt him here and now, in such a way as not to be inordinately saddened by them. (ST II-II q.136 a.4 ad 2.)

 

The word translated “saddened,” tristitia, can also be translated as “distress,” (King 2011), a negative emotion broader than the contemporary concept of “sadness” and perhaps overlapping with the Buddhist notion translated as “frustration.”

Patience safeguards against detrimental distress that can arise from experiencing evils. Because it plays this protective role regarding human flourishing, it counts as a virtue. Of course, other virtues in this tradition also enable us to relate properly to evils—courage enables us to confront the evils of death and danger to life, temperance, temptations towards evils we might inflict from inordinate bodily pleasure. But in the Augustinian and Thomistic theories of virtue, virtues differ based on which faculty of the soul they perfect (subject), the proper sphere of concern (object), and how they function to safeguard the good (mode) (Beary 2018, 11).

On this view, sorrow can put pressure on the operations of a person’s reason in ways that lead us away from the good. Patience enables a person to handle sorrow without letting it overwhelm them, enabling them to continue to make use of their reason excellently. So the object of patience is not (like the Buddhist account) the evil states of affairs or experiences that are causes of sorrow, but rather the psychological propensity to react to our perceptions of those states or experiences in ways that could be damaging. In other words, it is a form of self-regulation.

A broadly Christian notion of patience has it that:

 

Patience_Christian:  the virtue of excellence in dealing with perceived evils that elicit a negative emotional response, sorrow or distress.[7]

 

Another contrast with the Buddhist view, here, is that the Christian account assumes that suffering and sorrow can be apt because the perception of evil is veridical. The world is created by an all-loving God who intends no evils as such. When we suffer from evil, the apt response is to set our wills against it, as God does; so suffering is not always an illusion of which we must rid ourselves in order to face the evils we perceive with calm or by lowering distress.

On the Christian view, a habit only counts as patience, and a virtue, when it works on our distress, anger, or sorrow in ways that are apt. Some of the other virtues in this tradition properly “dispose us to anger” (West 2016, 888). So, if we ought to be angry, then a tendency to quash or simply not feel anger does not evidence a person’s patience. Aquinas approvingly cites a work he takes to be penned by St. John Chrysostom, which says: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.” (ST II-II q.158 a.8 sed contra). Further, Augustine explains that sometimes a person can appear to suffer patiently but because the cause of suffering is her own immoral “lust” or excessive desires (Augustine 1887, par. 5), she evinces false patience, not real patience.  His example is robbers who wait “patiently” on the side of the road for a victim.  Christians typically answer the Morality Question in the negative: too much patience is not patience at all, but instead, following Aquinas, is sinful; and following Augustine, alleged patience that leads to immoral activity is not really patience, either.

Concerning cultivation, Lorenzo Scupoli gives the most in-depth discussion of this topic that the authors have found in the Christian moral wisdom tradition.  Pawl et al ((2021, 338) summarize Scupoli’s insights as follows:

 

“For Scupoli, people grow in patience by doing the following things:

(1)  Recollect – reflect to determine the cues which cause feelings of impatience.

(2)  Make an act of will – choose to suppress the negative feelings that arise from the cues to take away evenness of mind.

(3)  Repeat – repeat making patient acts of will against the negative feelings.

(4)  Use Little Occasions – make use of the little occasions for growth in patience.

(5)  Cultivate an Affection – desire and seek out appropriate instances in which to make such repetitions of the relevant acts of will.”

 

Other important Christian authors, when writing of patience cultivation, offer similar advice.[8]

 

• Neo-Aristotelian Patience

 

Denise Vigani (2017) has recently developed the only extant neo-Aristotelian theory of patience in the philosophical literature.  We thus take as uncontested various aspects of her account.

Vigani argues that for the neo-Aristotelian, patience consists in “a particular orientation towards the passage of time…consistent excellence in responding to and acknowledging the appropriate time needed to achieve a desired outcome,” (Vigani 2017, 333). Diverging from the other accounts we have looked at thus far, the neo-Aristotelian account claims that the object of patience is whatever endeavors, activities, or processes aimed at an end take a certain amount of time. Thus, the definition of patience:

 

Patience_{neo-Aristotelian}: the virtue of consistent excellence in responding to and acknowledging the appropriate time needed to achieve a desired outcome..

 

The neo-Aristotelian account can point to ordinary usage as evidence in its favor on this point. As Vigani points out, often we think of a person as being patient when she performs an activity that takes time but does not create feelings of distress or frustration. For instance, she points to “the professional calligrapher who carefully forms each letter for stack after stack of wedding invitations,” and “the musician who slowly lets the movement build each time she plays the song” (2017, 329).

While neo-Aristotelians may disagree with Christian and Buddhist accounts of the object of patience, they concur on the Morality Question. In fact, Vigani takes it to be a desideratum of any specification of the virtue of patience that it “make clear the way in which the virtue is a mean between excess and deficiency,” (2017, 328). The way the neo-Aristotelian satisfies this desideratum in the case of patience has to do with the fact that it must be exercised in the service of some goal. Since patience is an excellent orientation to the time it takes to achieve some “desired outcome,” excessive passivity, submissiveness, or apathy cannot properly motivate or underwrite the habit of patience. It must be the case that positive commitments the person endorses sustain her patience. The neo-Aristotelian will rule out any habit that appears to be excessive patience—”problematic passivity” as Vigani calls it—as faux patience.

But of course, goals themselves can be good or bad, morally speaking. What do we say about apparently patient acts undertaken for bad ends? Recall that the definition says that patience consists in responding to the appropriate amount of time it takes to achieve a desired outcome. Vigani argues that “there is no appropriate amount of time for some things, and that includes bad ends…Patience qua virtue aims only at the good and so entails goodness in its possessor,” (ibid.). Thus, genuinely patient actions done from patience cannot be morally bad, nor is patience ever bad for the possessor.

Concerning the cultivation of patience, or perhaps the mechanisms by which one successfully acts more patiently, Vigani suggests two.  First is attentional deployment, that is, “directing one’s attention away from features of the situation that might increase the likelihood that one will become frustrated and towards features of the situation that remind oneself of the desired outcome, thereby undermining potential feelings of frustration,” (Vigani 2017, 335). The second is cognitive change, namely, construing the situation differently so that frustration is less likely.

Vigani’s account builds on existing contemporary psychological research on effective mechanisms for self-control and goal pursuit. Rather than retrofitting a pure philosophical account of patience cultivation to the scientific research, she constructs an account that integrates relevant empirical information about how we change our patterns of perception and emotion regulation.

 

• Stoic Patience

 

Matthew Pianalto has recently elaborated on and defended a Stoic view of patience (2014; 2017).[9]   On this account, patience consists in a disposition to bear certain burdens well. Pianalto offers the following definition:

 

“Patience is the disposition to accept unavoidable burdens as well as those avoidable burdens that one can reasonably judge it to be wise to accept.” (Pianalto 2017, 54)

 

We might say, then, that on Pianalto’s telling, a Stoic notion of patience has it that:

 

Patience_Stoic:     the virtue of accepting and bearing with equanimity unavoidable burdens as well as those avoidable burdens that one can reasonably judge it to be wise to accept.

 

Patience here pertains to two kinds of burdens—those we cannot help but bear, and those we can reasonably think it wise to accept voluntarily. Pianalto helpfully expands on “burden” as a term of art:

 

This term should be understood as broadly as possible and as only descriptive of those things—obstacles, delays, or other forms of adversity that may give rise to undue anger or despair—to which one can respond, or fail to respond, with patience. (Pianalto 2014, 92)

 

Burden, here, differs from the Christian notion of suffering that may give rise to sorrow and the Buddhist notion of suffering as a mere appearance constructed from desires we can choose to give up. Instead, burdens can have either a positive or negative normative valence, and they do not function in the same way for each and every individual—just as “allergen” names something that generates a certain reaction in human bodies but the term leaves ambiguous who will have such a reaction and when. A cramp during a run may give rise to despair to a novice athlete but merely register as a signal to hydrate to an experienced runner. The fact that a cramp is the sort of thing that can serve as an obstacle for many runners qualifies it as a burden.

The Stoic account, like the Christian, Buddhist, and Neo-Aristotelian accounts, answers the Morality Question in the negative. Pianalto argues that the “too much patience” “worry confuses patience and mere waiting,” (Pianalto 2017, xiii).  When a person appears disposed to be patient to excess, we should describe them as being prone to wait too much or too long; as the Stoic account resists a reduction of patience to waiting, we need not say this is excessive patience. Following Seneca, he argues that the limit of patience comes at exactly the point where anger is justified. Justified anger takes over, then, but will not “swamp our capacity for clear judgment,” (ibid., 104).

Pianalto’s account allows for a patient person to act immorally, but like Aquinas, Pianalto cautions against automatically identifying patience as causes of certain immoral acts. Sometimes the absence virtues that limit patience, like courage, may be to blame for such bad actions; perhaps even a “deeper impatience” may underlie the defective behavior (Pianalto 2017, xiii; 108). However, the Stoic view here allows for the possibility of patience itself generating a morally impermissible act (even though the possibility is vanishingly small).

Pianalto’s stoic account of how to cultivate patience is inspired by Schopenhauer: we practice patience on inanimate things that frustrate us through acting contrary to our desires, reminding ourselves that they act from necessity, not from some free choice to thwart us.  In practicing on such inanimate things, we gain an ability to transfer over to humans, who, in Schopenhauer’s determinism, are similarly determined.  Pianalto also recommends, as he points out the Buddhist Śāntideva did, that one welcome the occasions of impatience that come to us, seeing them as needful for our growth in the virtue.[10]  This, too, we have seen, is the advice of Scupoli for Christians.

 

• Ethics and Politics of Patience

 

The current philosophical literature on the virtue of patience is small but growing. Questions about the ethics of enacting patience in various challenging contexts have yet to be explored in the contemporary philosophical literature. For instance, we might grant the Buddhist definition of patience as a form of freedom from anger, but then wonder whether this is a moral ideal to which we should aspire in contexts of severe injustice. Work by feminist philosophers on the importance of rage, anger, and revenge challenge the Buddhist ideal (Bell 2009, Cherry and Flanagan 2017, Cherry 2021, Srinivasan 2018). Further, we might investigate whether impatience has protective psychological value in cases where a system produces violence and widespread narratives that exculpate wrongdoers from violence; as Hirji suggests, anger and refusal to have compassion may protect victims’ psychological integrity (Hirji 2022, Shelby 2012).

Relatedly, what are we to make of historical and current appeals to “be patient” made by the powerful to the oppressed, often with a nefarious motive? If patience can be weaponized in this way, is it worth trying to recover the morally positive notion of patience as a virtue that has been so widely accepted in religious and philosophical discussions historically? Perhaps some nearby concept like being perseverant, unhurried, or deliberate better captures the aspects of patience that have political value in unjust contexts while leaving behind the dark side of patience and past associations. Nonetheless, patience with the self, or strategic patience to tolerate frustration for a set period in order to achieve justice in the long run may be beneficial and so redeem patience’s status as a eudaimonic virtue in contexts of injustice.

 

Bibliography

 

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Bell, Macalester (2009). Anger, Virtue, and Oppression. In Lisa Tessman (ed.), Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal. Springer. pp. 165-183.

Bommarito, Nicolas. 2014. “Patience and Perspective.” Philosophy East and West 64 (2): 269–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2014.0021.

———.  2017. “Imaginative Moral Development.” Journal of Value Inquiry 51 (2):251-262.

———. 2020. Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life. Guides to the Good Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Callan, Eamonn. 1993. “Patience and Courage.” Philosophy 68 (266): 523–39. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100041875.

Cherry, Myisha V. (2021). The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.

Cherry, Myisha & Flanagan, Owen (eds.) (2017). The Moral Psychology of Anger. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

De Sales, Francis. 1994. An Introduction to the Devout Life. Charlotte, NC: TAN Books.

Dolin, Josh, and Jason Baehr. forthcoming. “Intellectual Patience: Controlling Temporally-Charged Urges in the Life of the Mind.” forthcoming. https://philpapers.org/rec/DOLIPC.

Essen, Juliana. 2018. “Buddhist Ethics in South and Southeast Asia.” In The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, edited by Daniel Cozort and James Mark Shields, 0. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198746140.013.9.

Fadilah, Risydah, Setiawati Intan Savitri, Laili Alfita, and Sari Atika Parinduri. 2022. “Islamic Patience Exercises to Reduce Delinquency in Adolescents Viewed from Parenting Patterns.” Revista de Psicología Del Deporte (Journal of Sport Psychology) 31 (1): 67–78.

Granada, Louis of. 2014. The Sinner’s Guide. English Language edition. Charlotte, NC.: TAN Books.

Hirji, Sukaina (2022). “Outrage and the Bounds of Empathy.” Philosophers’ Imprint 22 (16).

Jawziyya, Ibn Qayyim al-. 2010. Excellence Of Patience And Gratefulness. al-Riyāḍ.

Jones, Paul Dafydd. 2022. Patience―A Theological Exploration: Part One, from Creation to Christ. London ; New York: T&T Clark.

Kaza, Stephanie. 2018. “Buddhist Environmental Ethics: An Emergent and Contextual Approach.” In The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, edited by Daniel Cozort and James Mark Shields, 0. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198746140.013.17.

Kempis, Thomas A. 2005. The Imitation of Christ: A Spiritual Commentary and Reader’s Guide. 1st Paperback Edition. Notre Dame, Ind: Ave Maria Press.

King, Peter. 2011. “Aquinas on the Emotions.” The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 209–26.

Kupfer, Joseph H. 2007. “When Waiting Is Weightless: The Virtue of Patience.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 41 (2): 265–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-007-9076-6.

Levin, Menachem Mendel. 1996. Cheshbon Ha-Nefesh. Edited by Dovid Landesman. Translated by Yitzchak Scher. Pocket Size. Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers.

Pawl, Timothy J. 2021. “Do Recent Findings in the Psychology of Habit Formation Contradict Christian Moral Wisdom on Virtue Formation?” Theological Puzzles, no. 3: https://www.theo-puzzles.ac.uk/2021/08/30/tpawl/.

———. 2023. “The Psychology of Habit Formation and Christian Moral Wisdom on Virtue Formation.” TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 7 (1): 148–67. https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v7i1.64333.

Pawl, Timothy J., Juliette L. Ratchford, and Sarah A. Schnitker. 2021. “Growth in Patience in Christian Moral Wisdom and Contemporary Positive Psychology.” Journal of Beliefs & Values 42 (3): 333–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/13617672.2020.1836897.

Pawl, Timothy J., and Sarah Schnitker. 2022. “Christian Moral Wisdom, Character Formation, and Contemporary Psychology.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 96 (2): 215–33. https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq2022120247.

Pianalto, Matthew. 2014. “In Defense of Patience.” 2014. https://philpapers.org/rec/PIAIDO-2.

———. 2016. “Nietzschean Patience.” 2016. https://philpapers.org/rec/PIANP.

———. 2017. On Patience: Reclaiming a Foundational Virtue. 1 edition. Lexington Books.

Ratchford, Juliette L., Timothy J. Pawl, and Sarah A. Schnitker. n.d. “Patience, Perseverance, and Goal Pursuit: Philosophical and Psychological Analysis of Aquinas’s Distinctions.” In Edurance, edited by Nathan L. King.

Ratchford, Juliette L., Timothy Pawl, Anne Jeffrey, and Sarah A. Schnitker. 2023. “What Is Virtue? Using Philosophy to Refine Psychological Definition and Operationalization.” Philosophical Psychology 0 (0): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2203157.

Rudd, Anthony. 2008. “Kierkegaard on Patience and the Temporality of the Self: The Virtues of a Being in Time.” 2008. https://philpapers.org/rec/RUDKOP.

Rusdi, Ahmad. 2016. “Patience in Islamic Psychology and Its Measurement.” In .

Santideva. 1997. A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life. Translated by Vesna A. Wallace and B. Alan Wallace. Ithaca, N.Y., USA: Snow Lion.

Schnitker, Sarah A., and Robert A. Emmons. 2007. “Patience as a Virtue: Religious and Psychological Perspectives.” In Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 18, 177–207. Brill. https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789047419648/Bej.9789004158511.i-301_012.xml.

Shelby, Tommie (2012). “The Ethics of Uncle Tom’s Children.” Critical Inquiry 38 (3):513-532.

Skog, Ole-Jørgen. 2001. “Theorizing about Patience Formation – the Necessity of Conceptual Distinctions.” Economics & Philosophy 17 (2): 207–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267101000232.

Srinivasan, Amia (2018). “The Aptness of Anger.” Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2):123-144.

Svider, Iryna, and Natalia Frasyniuk. 2020. “Patience: An Introduction to the Concept.” Wisdom 15 (2): 6–20. https://doi.org/10.24234/wisdom.v15i2.334.

Vigani, Denise. 2017. “Is Patience a Virtue?” 2017. https://philpapers.org/rec/VIGIPA.

———. 2019. “On Patience: Reclaiming a Foundational Virtue, Written by Matthew Pianalto.” 2019. https://philpapers.org/rec/VIGOPR.

West, Ryan (2016). “Anger and the virtues: a critical study in virtue individuation.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (6):877-897.

Yavari, Neguin. 2023. “Patience in the Islamic Lifeworld.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 90 (3): 549–64.

 

 

[1] Buddhist and Christian sources abound in what follows.  For Islamic discussions from medieval thinkers and contemporary social scientists, see (al-Jawziyya 2010; Rusdi 2016; Fadilah et al. 2022; Yavari 2023).  For Jewish sources, see (Schnitker and Emmons 2007, 177–78), (Levin 1996, secs. 76–77).

[2] E.g., “My friend’s dismissive attitude toward patience would not be out of place in contemporary analytic philosophy in the West. This attitude is most often expressed by neglect” (Bommarito 2014, 269); “patience has not received much attention” (Kupfer 2007, 265) (265); “almost no sustained attention has been given to patience” (Pianalto 2014, 89); “patience is not much on the radar of contemporary philosophers who discuss the virtues” (Pianalto 2016, 142); “Patience is not a virtue that has been much attended to in philosophical discussions of virtue ethics” (Rudd 2008, 491); “Matthew Pianalto’s book On Patience places a welcome spotlight on a neglected virtue” (Vigani 2019, 239).

[3] Pianalto discusses Sāntideva on this same point: “We should be happy to be confronted by enemies, precisely because they provide us a reason to practice patience when it is most difficult to do so” (Pianalto 2017, 27, emphasis in original).  He writes that the stoic, Epictetus, held a similar view (Pianalto 2017, 28).

[4] See, for instance, (Pawl, Ratchford, and Schnitker 2021; Pawl 2021; Pawl and Schnitker 2022; Ratchford et al. 2023; Pawl 2023; Ratchford et al. 2023; Ratchford, Pawl, and Schnitker, ms.).

[5] Pawl et al discuss these quotations in (Pawl, Ratchford, and Schnitker 2021, 334–35).

[6] Aquinas (ST II–II q.136 a.4 ob1.) quotes Gregory the Great’s 35th homily.

[7] This is a modified version of Ratchford et al’s presentation of the Thomistic view; (Ratchford, Pawl, and Schnitker, n.d., forthcoming).  The excellence of dealing with the negative emotional response that arises from not-yet-present evils is known as longsuffering to these authors.

[8] See, for instance, Francis De Sales Introduction to the Devout Life, Part 3, Chapter 3; Louis of Granada’s A Sinner’s Guide, Chapter 42, Section X, and Thomas A Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, Book 3, Chapters 18-19.

[9] It may undersell Pianalto’s project to label it as Stoic, since his monograph draws from all the other perspectives we’ve discussed so far – from Buddhism, Christianity, and Aristotle—as well as existentialism in an attempt to prescind from “any single metaphysical or religious outlook, taking instead a pluralistic and eclectic approach,” (Pianalto 2017, xiv).

[10] Pianalto discusses Sāntideva on this same point: “We should be happy to be confronted by enemies, precisely because they provide us a reason to practice patience when it is most difficult to do so” (Pianalto 2017, 27, emphasis in original).  He writes that the stoic, Epictetus, held a similar view (Pianalto 2017, 28).

 

 

 

Pawl and Jeffrey devote most of their paper to outlining four accounts of patience, one from each of four religious or philosophical traditions—Buddhism, Christianity, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. They conclude by briefly connecting patience to some issues in ethics and political philosophy. In these comments I will first explore some alternative meta-theoretical perspectives on the different accounts of patience the authors present and then discuss two of the questions around which Pawl and Jeffrey organize their analysis.

 

What is the relation between the accounts of patience that Pawl and Jeffrey discuss? One view is that there a single virtue of patience of which these accounts offer competing analyses. The definite description of the authors’ title, as well as their stated aim to make progress on “the analysis” (presumably of patience) via comparative work, suggests that they adopt this view. An alternative perspective sees (at least some aspects of) at least some of these accounts as complementary. For example, a single, complex virtue of patience may involve both a tendency to face negative states of affairs with calm and equanimity (as the Buddhist account has it) and a self-regulatory ability to deal appropriately with our propensity to react to (our perceptions of) those states of affairs in potentially damaging ways (as the Christian account has it).

 

Another alternative perspective questions whether there is a single virtue of patience in the first place. One version of this perspective claims that there are several patience-related virtues: perhaps one dealing with states of affairs that tend to cause suffering or frustration, another with our propensity to react to such states of affairs in certain ways, and yet another with our time-management skills and capacities. The accounts that Pawl and Jeffrey discuss may then be seen as offering accounts of these different virtues, which, again, may be largely compatible with one another (modulo whatever underlying incompatible views about the nature of suffering and evil may be present). While this perspective is compatible with moral realism, yet another perspective takes a relativist outlook and claims that there is no fact of the matter about what the virtue of patience is—there is just patience_Buddhist, patience_Christian, patience_{neo-Aristotelian}, and patience_Stoic and no point of view from which to decide which of these is the “correct” account of patience.

 

I turn now to two of the questions around which Pawl and Jeffrey organize their analysis of the four accounts. The Object Question concerns the “paradigmatic or defining object” of patience, the entity to which patience is applied. We are told that answers to this question can “differentiate patience from other virtues and dispositions, like self-control, anger-management, persistence, endurance, or delayed-gratification.” A longer treatment would benefit from more detail here. For example, it seems that virtuous anger-management (construed broadly to include anger-prevention) is a form of patience_Buddhist, since, according to the authors, the latter’s object includes states of affairs that can cause not only anger but also frustration and sorrow. If this is right, it may lead to further questions. Should we focus our investigation on virtuous anger-management and other specific forms of virtuous emotion regulation, taking patience_Buddhist to be merely a summary label for these specific virtues? Or is it more profitable to theorize with the broader category of patience_Buddhist itself? Further, it’s not clear to me that answers to the Object Question need function as Pawl and Jeffrey suggest. As I suggested above, the Buddhist and Christian answers to the Object Question need not distinguish between different concepts of patience but instead single out important components of a general, complex virtue of patience.

 

I was a bit confused by the authors’ discussion of the Morality Question (better: Morality Questions): Is it possible to have too much patience or to have patience that produces immoral action? In Section 2, we are told that some traditions hold that “patience is not a universal human virtue because it can produce immoral actions in some cases for some people.” (We are not told if these, or other, traditions also believe that it is possible to have too much patience.) However, it turns out that all four of the traditions the authors discuss answer the Morality Question “in the negative.” I take it that this indicates agreement with respect to the first disjunct of the Morality Question—that it is not possible to have too much patience—since Pawl and Jeffrey go on to write in Section 6 that “the Stoic view … allows for the [vanishingly small] possibility of patience itself generating a morally impermissible act.”

 

It is still unclear to me what accounts for this difference of opinion: what, if anything, about patience (as opposed to virtue in general) determines whether it can produce immoral actions? We are told that Christians typically believe that “alleged patience that leads to immoral activity is not really patience,” but we are not given an argument for this claim, other than the authority of Augustine. In the neo-Aristotelian context, the authors quote Vigani as claiming that “Patience qua virtue aims only at the good and so entails goodness in its possessor.” Thus, the reason that patience can never produce immoral action is simply that it is a virtue, which by definition aims only at (and necessarily attains?) the good. Given that Stoicism takes virtue to be the only good, I am still unclear how it allows for even a small possibility that patience generates immoral action. (Perhaps this reflects the fact that Pianalto’s work, from which the authors derive patience_Stoic, draws on many perspectives and adopts a “pluralistic and eclectic approach.”)

 

If one assumes that patience is a virtue and that virtue at least partially constitutes the good, a negative answer to the Morality Question(s) seems to follow trivially. It might be profitable to initially take a lighter normative touch in the study of patience, as suggested by Pawl and Jeffrey’s Section 7, where they mention granting a descriptive account of patience (such as a form of freedom from anger) and then asking whether this is truly a moral ideal in all contexts. Casting a wider comparative net might be helpful for both steps of this project. For example, it might be instructive to investigate the Roman conception of patientia, which was used to express both exalted praise and serious condemnation (depending on to whom and in what context it was applied) (see, e.g., Kaster (2002) whose discussion suggests that patience might not be an unalloyed good in social contexts because of hierarchies and differences in power, echoing some of Pawl and Jeffrey’s thoughts in Section 7). Exploring this and other concepts in the vicinity of patience (such as the Greek concept of praotēs (meekness or good temper)) might help both to delineate the psychological capacities that underlie patience and to determine the conditions under which these capacities contribute to human flourishing.

 

Reference

Kaster, Robert A. (2002) “The Taxonomy of Patience, or When Is Patientia Not a Virtue?” Classical Philology. 97: 133-144.

 

 

 

Tim and Anne discuss how patience is conceptualized in the Buddhist, Christian, Neo-Aristotelian, and Stoic traditions. I’ll raise one or two points about each section.

1. At the end of their discussion of the Buddhist view of patience, Tim and Anne discuss two ways that the Buddhist tradition recommends cultivating patience: by wandering, or finding “a quiet place to meditate, to overcome desires and to seek detachment” (Essen 2018, 264) and by “seeking out and indeed yearning for … the situations that lead us to typically feel frustrations and sorrows” (citing Bommarito 2020, 226). It struck me that these are two very different strategies, and that they seem to pull in opposite directions, the first toward quiet and a separation from frustration, and the second right into the thicket of it. Beyond the empirical question of whether either or both of these strategies are really effective, I wanted to understand more about how the tradition could recommend both of them at once. Here is a possibility: the strategy of wandering serves to cultivate the “sense of our place in a larger context” (Bommarito 2014, 273) that’s the basis of patience, while the strategy of seeking out frustrating situations serves to build the habit of responding patiently to situations of that kind. Is this right? Or is there another story about how the strategies hang together?

2. In characterizing the Christian notion of patience, Tim and Anne write that according to this tradition:

… the object of patience is not (like the Buddhist account) the evil states of affairs or experiences that are causes of sorrow, but rather the psychological propensity to react to our perceptions of those states or experiences in ways that could be damaging. (p. 6)

However, I wasn’t immediately convinced that there is a real difference here. According to both the Buddhist and the Christian view, patience seems to involve (i) negative feelings that (ii) are caused by certain objects or states of affairs, and the aim of patience is (iii) to keep these feelings from having certain damaging results—i.e., anger for the Buddhist or the bad psychological consequences of undue sorrow for the Christian. Indeed, don’t both traditions focus on cultivating a disposition or propensity to react appropriately to frustrating situations?

The more significant contrast seems to me to be the one that Tim and Ann point to at the top of the next page, namely that the Buddhist sees feelings of suffering and sorrow as necessarily illusory, because tied to a self-involved view of the world, whereas the Christian treats them as potentially veridical perceptions of real evil. Here they quote Aquinas, drawing on John Chrysostom:

He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong. (ST II-II q.158 a.8 sed contra)

The question of whether there is sometimes cause to be angry, and whether “unreasonable patience” can be a matter not just of “weak servility” (see p. 4) but also of failing to feel anger when one should, seems like an important dividing line between these traditions.

 

3. Summarizing Vigani’s (2017) neo-Aristotelian account of patience, Tim and Anne discuss two ways that patience can be cultivated according to this account:

First is attentional deployment, that is, “directing one’s attention away from features of the situation that might increase the likelihood that one will become frustrated and towards features of the situation that remind oneself of the desired outcome, thereby undermining potential feelings of frustration,” (Vigani 2017, 335). The second is cognitive change, namely, construing the situation differently so that frustration is less likely. (p. 9)

I had two thoughts here. The first is that these seem to be, as Tim and Anne suggest, strategies for acting patiently in the face of difficulty rather than of cultivating the habit of patience. In this respect, they’re unlike the strategies of cultivation discussed in connection with the Buddhist and Christian traditions. And the second is that these seem rather like ways of dealing continently rather than virtuously with respect to patience, as they involve active self-control in the face of a temptation to be impatient. It would be good to know whether the account allows for a fuller virtue of patience the exercise of which does not involve this kind of inner struggle, and if so, then how that virtue can be cultivated.

 

4. Discussing Pianalto’s (2017) neo-Stoic account of patience, Tim and Anne write that this view “allows for the possibility of patience itself generating a morally impermissible act (even though the possibility is vanishingly small)” (pp. 10-11). I had trouble following the dialectic here. In discussing the Christian view of patience, they considered Augustine’s (1887, para. 5) example of robbers who wait “patiently” on the side of the road for a victim. Augustine holds that this is not true patience, since it is exercised in pursuit of a bad end. Is this the kind of case that Tim and Anne have in mind here, or is this not really a case where “patience itself” generates the bad act, so that the robbers’ patience is “to blame” (p. 10) for what they do? Perhaps a case of the latter kind would rather be one in which, say, someone is “too patient” waiting in line, instead of switching to a different one or politely calling for a manager to address the slow service. If that’s right, then why exactly is there a “vanishingly small” possibility of such a thing happening?

 

References

Augustine. 1887. “On Patience.” https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1315.htm.

Bommarito, Nicolas. 2014. “Patience and Perspective.” Philosophy East and West 64 (2): 269–86.

———. 2020. Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life. Guides to the Good Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Essen, Juliana. 2018. “Buddhist Ethics in South and Southeast Asia.” In The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, edited by Daniel Cozort and James Mark Shields. Oxford University Press.

Pianalto, Matthew. 2017. On Patience: Reclaiming a Foundational Virtue. Lexington Books.

Vigani, Denise. 2017. “Is Patience a Virtue?” Journal of Value Inquiry 51 (2), 327-340.

 

Introduction

Some positive psychologists classify virtues based on the underlying faculties such virtues regulate. This provides a handy tri-partite division of virtues pertaining to the passions, intellect, and will. Many virtue theorists in philosophy and cognitive science have focused their efforts on the virtues related to the passions, which typically involve subverting self-interest for the sake of others or for some larger common goal. Kindness and loyalty stand out as archetypical virtues of the passions. Recently, there has been renewed interest in the intellectual virtues, especially at the intersection of epistemology and moral theory (Greco, 2010; Zagzebski, 1996). Volitional or regulatory virtues—such as vigilance, attentiveness, or spontaneity—have been relatively neglected, except for self-control.

These gaps are now being filled, as theorists have become increasingly interested in understanding the nature and norms of these regulatory virtues and their role in the moral life (Irving et al., 2024; Murray, 2024). Recent focus has turned to understanding patience and drawing on resources from philosophy, psychology, and theology to understand what patience is, how patience is cultivated, and what makes patience virtuous.

The question of definition or operationalization sits at the center of these discussions of patience. What is patience? Those with Buddhist, Christian, or Aristotelian leanings—among others—have somewhat different conceptions of what patience is. According to Pawl and Jeffrey (In preparation) in their recent review, Buddhist, Christian, and Stoic theorists partly identify patience with dispositions to bear through sorrow, suffering, or anger. Aristotelians, on the other hand, emphasize that patience partly consists in waiting for the appropriate time to act. Thus, there is some disagreement about the centrality of suffering (broadly construed) to being patient along with some excellence in temporal orientation. However, while there is disagreement about what patience aims to do, there is widespread agreement on the claim that patience cannot bring about immoral actions.

Noticeably absent from these discussions is an assessment of everyday conceptualizations of patience. This is surprising, as such conceptualizations can play an important role in determining the referent of theoretical terms like ‘patience’. This is especially true for those terms that have currency in ordinary life. Unlike concepts such as substance or determinism, people use the concept of patience to group patterns of behavior and mark out some individuals as being excellent in some way. This makes it likely that people are familiar with norms of attributing patience, that disagreements about who is patient arise and are settled through appeals to tacitly endorsed principles, and that people have some incentive to ‘get things right’ as they seek out social partners. Thus, it is likely that what patience is will align to some degree with what patience is thought to be. Even if this claim is rejected, it is still valuable for theorists to have some grip on what the everyday conceptualization of patience is, as any revisionary account will need to have some explanation for why we should prefer the revised account to the folk conceptual account (Vargas, 2017).

To that end, the studies summarized below are an attempt to understand how people think about patience. They incorporate aspects of prototype analysis, but also include more traditional experimental assessments of how people think about the morality of patience, the relationship between patience and self-control, and whether patience requires the experience of inner conflict. Prototype analysis is a procedure for identifying lay conceptualizations of concepts and has been used to understand how people think about virtues and the moral life (Carmona et al., In prep; Gulliford et al., 2022; Murray et al., 2024; Walker & Pitts, 1998)

Prototype analysis is a bottom-up method of identifying how people represent categories. Some categories are best understood as representations of nested hierarchies of features that reliably co-occur among members of the category. For example, PROFESSOR is partly represented in terms of features like ‘owning a tweed jacket’ or ‘likes to talk’. The associative meaning of any category consists in the set of properties contained in a prototype. Categorization judgments (e.g., ‘Is this person a professor?’) are made by comparing features of the target with the relevant prototype, evaluating similarity between target and prototype, and making a classification decision based on (noisy) evidence of similarity.

A prototype analysis is an experimental procedure that identifies and validates the prototypical structure of a concept. The procedure consists of 4 steps:

• Associative meaning: Identifying the features that are associated with a given category.
• Centrality: Identifying the features that are more or less central to category membership.
• Explicit cognition: Identifying the degree to which prototypical and peripheral features are associated with explicit cognitive processing.
• Implicit cognition: Identifying the degree to which prototypical and peripheral features are associated with implicit cognitive processing.

The last two steps are part of validating the prototype structure identified in the first two steps. That is, if one has approximated the correct prototype structure, then one should find predictable effects on explicit and implicit cognitive processing.

Studies 1 – 3 below provide an initial validation of the prototype structure of patience. Study 1 (N = 114) examined the associative meaning of patience. Study 2 (N = 199) assessed how central different elements of the associative meaning are with the concept of patience. Study 3 (N = 235) asked a separate sample to sort central features according to whether they are required for being patient or merely associated with being patience. Study 4 (N = 115) identified situations that people associated with being patient and looked for correlations with prototypical aspects of patience. Study 5 (N = 283) examined the association between self-control and patience and whether attributions of either changed as a function of self-control strategy. Finally, Study 6 (N = 199) manipulated whether individuals were described as performing an immoral action or a neutral action to see whether moral valence had an effect on attributions of patience.

 

Study 1: Associative meaning of patience

To assess the associative meaning of patience, participants generated a list of features related to being a patient person using open-response boxes.

Methods

Participants

115 participants from the United States were recruited on Academic Prolific. As no inferential tests were planned, sample size was determined based on recent prototype studies (Murray et al., 2024). Participants voluntarily completed demographic items after each study. 1 participant was excluded from the study for self-reported distraction (N = 114, M_age = 40.1, SD_age = 13.0, 45.6% female, 40.3% 4-year Bachelor’s degree, 77% left-leaning, 57% from urban or suburban area). On average, participants took 5.7 minutes on the task.

Procedure

Instructions were adapted from Fehr (1988). Participants were provided with sample responses related to being terrified. Then participants were asked to think about people they knew who were highly patient, what thoughts they had about patience, and the circumstances in which they notice patience. They were also explicitly told to list attributes common to loyal people rather than specific names or places. After reading the instructions, participants viewed a screen with 10 open-response boxes. Participants were told to write down characteristics related to loyalty for at least 2 minutes, and the advance button was hidden for this time.

Results

Table 1 summarizes the frequency of prototypical features for patience. Features were extracted from the data by grouping common responses and nominalizing adjectives. Larger groups were formed from similar expressions (e.g., calmness and calm under pressure were grouped together under ‘Calm’). To preserve subtle differences between linguistic categories, different terms with similar meanings were placed in distinct categories (e.g., even-tempered and composed). The one exception to this was when similar terms were mentioned by only one participant. Features mentioned by only one participant that could not be grouped into a higher-order categories were dropped from further analyses. This procedure yielded 67 features.

 

Table 1. Top ten most central and prototypical patience items

Feature	Frequency	Centrality
Willing to wait	28.7%	6.45 [6.31, 6.58]
Doesn’t get frustrated easily	3.5%	5.97 [5.81, 6.14]
Not in a hurry	11.3%	5.68 [5.48, 5.89]
Self-control	19.1%	5.62 [5.43, 5.82]
Slow to anger	9.7%	5.5 [5.3, 5.71]
Reflects before acting	2.6%	5.43 [5.22, 5.63]
Calm	7.6%	5.37 [5.15, 5.59]
Tolerant	11.3%	5.37 [5.15, 5.59]
Disciplined	2.6%	5.21 [5.0, 5.43]
Even-tempered	2.6%	5.19 [4.99, 5.38]
Understanding	35.7%	5.16 [4.93, 5.38]
Good listener	21.7%	5.04 [4.8, 5.29]
Composed	8.7%	4.93 [4.71, 5.16]
Relaxed	33.0%	4.6 [4.8, 5.01]

Note: Features are sorted by centrality. Values in brackets represent 95% confidence intervals. 7 items (Doesn’t get frustrated easily, Slow to anger, Reflects before acting, Calm, Disciplined, Even-tempered, Composed) were rated as highly central but were not highly accessible.

 

Study 2: Centrality of patience features

 

Methods

Participants

200 participants were recruited from the United States using Academic Prolific. 1 participant was excluded for self-reported distraction (N = 199, M_age = 42.66, SD_age = 13.7, 50.3% female).

Procedure

Using features generated in Study 1, participants saw all non-unique features. Instructions were adapted from Fehr (1988) to describe the concept of a prototype and an example of centrality using the concept of ‘intelligence’. Participants were then asked to rate the centrality of patience features using a 7-pt. Likert scale (1 = this feature is not a good indicator of patience, 4 = unsure, 7 = this feature is an extremely good indicator of patience).

Results

Table 1 summarizes mean centrality ratings for highly central and prototypical patience items. While some highly central features were not highly accessible, there was a modest correlation between frequency and centrality (r = .32, p < .001).

Using previous benchmarks, any feature that is highly accessible (>10% frequency) and highly central (>5.5 centrality) is considered prototypical. That leaves 3 features: Willing to wait, Not in a hurry, and self-control.

An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to understand the latent structure of participant ratings of centrality. Maximum likelihood extract methods and oblique rotation with goemin rotation criteria was used. Oblique rotation was selected because the method allows for latent factors to be correlated and assumes correlation between factors. Separate models were fit using alternative criteria (quartimax and equimax). Alternative models converged on the same solution. Most extraction methods identified four latent factors. Items were dropped when they loaded less than .40 on a factor or greater than .30 on more than one factor. Factor loadings are summarized in Table 2.

 

Table 2. Factor summaries for Study 2

PATIENCE FACTORS
Understanding	Resilience	Emotion regulation	Stoicism
Compassionate	Disciplined	Doesn’t get frustrated easily	Quiet
Forgiving	Perseverance	Even-tempered	Reserved
Gentle		Slow to anger	Stoic
Supportive		Not in a hurry
Tolerant		Willing to wait

Note. The Emotion Regulation factor contains the most central items

 

Study 3: Identifying the prototypical structure of patience

While the prototypical structure of a category is sometimes measured through a combination or centrality and accessibility (e.g., Cross et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2007), these benchmarks are somewhat arbitrary. Additionally, the notion of centrality can seem somewhat obscure. To address these problems, an additional study was conducted that asked whether particular traits are merely associated with being patient or are required for being patient (see Reynolds et al., 2023). Prototypical features of patience should be those that are accessible, highly central, and predominantly considered required for being a patient person.

 

Methods

Participants. 250 participants were recruited on Academic Prolific. Because there was no benchmark for expected effect sizes, the sample size was set to match numbers for a typical centrality study. Based on pre-registered exclusion criteria, 15 participants were excluded for self-reported distraction, not finishing the survey, or completing the survey more quickly than half of the median completion time (N = 235, M_age = 36.8, SD_age = 11.7, 46.8% female). No analyses were conducted prior to applying exclusions.

Materials and procedure

After providing consent, participants were asked whether certain traits are definitive of being patient or associated with being patient. Following Reynolds et al. (2023), participants were told that characteristics definitive of patience would make the following sentence true: “If a person is _______, then that person is patient.” Participants were told that when a characteristic is associated with being patient, then patient people may or may not have these characteristics. An example using intelligence was provided: “Many intelligent people may be successful, but being successful is not a central or definitive feature of intelligence (i.e., although many intelligent people are successful, some intelligent people are not successful, and some successful people are not intelligent).”

After the instructions, participants were presented with a list of 45 features (displayed in random order) and asked whether the features were “definitive of patience” or “associated with patience. Labels were provided to remind participants that being definitive mean the trait was required, while being associated meant the feature was not required.

The median time for completion was 3.85 minutes.

Results

A series of chi-squared tests was performed to measure the proportion of “definitive” responses for each feature. The test used 50% as the baseline for the test, as this represented responding at chance. Thus, for any feature significantly over 50%, this feature would count as required. For any feature at or significantly below 50%, this feature would count as merely associated.

Results are summarized in Figure 1. 6 features were rated as definitive of patience significantly more than 50% of the time: Willing to wait (89.3%), not in a hurry (71.9%), not easily frustrated (67.2%), slow to anger (63.8%), self-control (60.9%), and reflects before acting (57.4%).

 

Figure 1. Summary of proportion test results for features in Study 3. The Estimate refers to the proportion of “definitive” responses to total responses for each item. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

To better understand the relationship between definitiveness, centrality, and accessibility, data from Studies 1 – 3 were combined. There was no evidence for a statistically significant correlation between proportion of definitive responses and the accessibility of some feature (r = 0.25, p = .09). However, there was evidence for a strong correlation between definitiveness and centrality (r = .90, p < .001). Figure 2 summarizes the relationship between definitiveness and centrality. The most central items were also selected as definitive more often than other features. The only highly central term that was not considered definitive was calm.

Figure 2. Scatterplot of feature centrality and proportion of definitive responses. Centrality scores are centered. Terms are displayed over items where the proportion of definitive responses is significantly over 50%.

 

Study 4: Situations that require patience

[PENDING]

 

Study 5: Patience, self-control, and conflict

One interesting question about patience is whether and to what extent it can be distinguished from self-control. In some respects, patience seems like a particular kind of self-control applied to waiting or regulating emotions. This study explored ways that people might distinguish patience from self-control. In particular, it assessed the degree to which feelings of inner conflict are associated with attributions of patience and self-control and whether people view the use of externalized “strategies” as compatible with being patient. According to the Process Model of Self-Control (Duckworth et al., 2016), self-control can be deployed in different ways to target various stages of the onset of tempting stimuli. While people view the use of externalized strategies as displays of self-control (Bermúdez et al., 2021), it is unclear whether this applies to patience.

 

Methods

Participants

312 participants were recruited on Academic Prolific. Sample size was determined by a priori power analysis using G*Power software. 251 participants recommended for an ANOVA to have 95% power to detect a minimal effect size of interest (f = 0.25) at standard error thresholds (p = .05) across 4 groups. There was 25% over-recruitment to account for exclusions. Based on pre-registered exclusion criteria, 29 participants were excluded for self-reported distraction or for completing the survey more quickly than half the median completion time.

Materials and procedure

Participants were randomly assigned to read either of two vignettes:

 

Marshmallow

John wants to get a snack. His mother tells him that he can have a small snack now or wait a bit and get a bigger snack later. John feels conflicted because he wants to eat now, but he also wants a bigger snack. John is tempted to eat now, but he decides to wait for the bigger snack.

New phone

John wants to get a new phone. He can either trade in his current phone to get a replacement or he can wait a few weeks to get a free upgrade. John feels conflicted because he wants to get a new phone right away, but he also wants to upgrade to a better model. John is tempted to get a new phone right away, but decides to wait so he can get the upgraded model.

 

Participants were then randomly assigned to read about a self-control strategy that John uses to follow through on his decision. In the inhibition condition, John uses willpower to resist the urge to get the short-term reward. In the reappraisal condition, John focuses on the negative aspects of the short-term reward to ameliorate the conflict he feels around his decision. In the distraction condition, John distracts himself with something until he can get the later reward. In the modification condition, John changes aspects of his environment to pre-empt the possibility of tempting stimuli leading to akratic behavior. The inhibition and reappraisal conditions describe “internalized” strategies, while the distraction and modification conditions describe “externalized” strategies (these labels are based on analyses reported in Bermúdez et al., 2021). The vignettes explicitly described John as conflicted in the inhibition and modification conditions, while the reappraisal and distraction conditions explicitly note that John no longer feels conflicted as a result of the strategy.

After reading the vignette, participants answered three questions (people were randomly assigned to answer questions about either self-control or patience):

• Conflict: To what extent is John conflicted about his decision? (-3 = Not conflicted at all, 0 = Unsure, 3 = Very conflicted)

• Affect: To what extent does John feel negative or positive while waiting for [condition-dependent object]? (-3 = Very negative, 0 = Unsure, 3 = Very positive)

• Patience/self-control: To what extent does John display [patience/self-control] in [condition-dependent activity]? (-3 = No patience [self-control] at all, 0 = Unsure, 3 = A lot of patience [self-control])

Results

To examine whether the conflict manipulation was effective, a linear model was fitted to predict ratings of conflict from vignette, condition, and their interaction. An ANOVA identified an effect of condition on judgments of conflict (F(3, 275) = 68.04, p < .001, h²_p = .43, 90% CI[.35, .49]). There was no evidence for an effect of vignette (p = .34) or an interaction (p = .76). Participants in the inhibit (M = 2.22, 95% CI[1.71, 2.74]) and modification conditions (M = 2.10, 95% CI[1.63, 2.57]) rated that John was more conflicted relative to the distraction (M = -0.24, 95% CI[-0.76, 0.28]) and reappraisal conditions (M = -0.93, 95% CI[-1.42, -0.43]). Both internalized strategies were rated as significantly more conflicted than both externalized strategies (all p < .001, with Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons). There was no evidence for a statistically significant difference between the distraction and inhibition conditions (p = .10) or the inhibit and modification conditions (p = 1.0).

To assess whether attributions of patience or self-control differ as a function of strategy, a linear model was fitted to predict attributions from condition and attribution type (self-control or patience), and their interaction. The model statistically controlled for judgments of conflict, affect, and vignette. An ANOVA found evidence for an effect of attribution type (F(1, 272) = 8.77, p = .003, h²_p = .03, 90% CI[.01, .07]) and condition (F(3, 272) = 15.07, p < .001, h²_p = .14, 90% CI[.08, .20]) on attributions, but no evidence for an interaction (p = .14). Pairwise comparisons found that people attributed significantly more self-control than patience to participants in the inhibition and modification conditions (see Table 3).

 

Table 3. Estimated marginal means and test statistics for Study 3

Condition	Patience	Self-control	df	t-statistic	p-value	Cohen’s d
Inhibit	1.50 [1.43, 2.45]	2.25 [1.81, 2.70]	272	-2.68	.008	-0.61 [-1.05, -0.16]
Reappraisal	2.25 [1.74, 2.76]	2.16 [1.66, 2.67]	272	0.29	.77	0.07 [-0.40. 0.54]
Distraction	1.94 [1.43, 2.45]	2.25 [1.75, 2.75]	272	-1.01	.31	-0.25 [-0.74, 0.24]
Modification	0.36 [-0.15, 0.87]	1.10 [0.58, 1.61]	272	-2.44	.02	-0.60 [-1.08, -0.11]

Note. Numbers in brackets denote 95% confidence intervals. Test statistics refer to pairwise comparison of patience and self-control attributions within each condition.

 

Finally, to see whether perceived conflict or negative affect was associated with attributions of patience, a subset of data that included only patience attributions was analyzed. A model was fit to predict responses from condition, perceived affect, perceived conflict, and all possible interactions. The model statistically controlled for effects of vignette. There was no evidence for an effect of affect (B < .001, p = .96) or perceived conflict (B = -0.04, p = .79) on attributions of patience. There was also no evidence for any interactions (all p > .11).

 

Discussion

The results of Study 5 suggest that people do sometimes distinguish between self-control and patience in everyday behavior. While people attribute patience and self-control to similar degrees when individuals use reappraisal or distraction strategies, people more self-control than patience to an individual who uses inhibition or situation modification. Notably, people still associated situation modification with displays of self-control, while there was uncertainty whether situation modification counted as patience. Situation modification was the most externalized strategy used in the study, which suggests that people are less willing to assimilate patience with externalized self-control strategies. People might tend to think of patience in internalist terms compared to self-control.

Another result is that attributions of patience do not track the perceived negative affect or internal conflict of the individual. This runs contrary to some accounts of patience that emphasize bearing through hardship as an essential component of patience.

 

Study 6: The morality of patience

One common element in different theories of patience is the presumption that patience is a moral excellence. As such, exercises of patience cannot issue in immoral actions. There is some evidence that morality has an effect on attributions of self-control (Bermúdez et al., 2021) and self-control strategy selection (Murray et al., 2022). Given the close relationship between self-control and patience, there might be similar effects of morality on attributions of patience. This study explores whether morality has an effect on attributions of patience and whether everyday representations of patience approximate something like the strong demand that patience is a moral excellence.

 

Methods

Participants

200 participants were recruited on Academic Prolific. One participant was excluded for self-reported distraction. The sample size was not pre-registered. However, an analysis of achieved power found that 199 participants provided 99% power to identify an effect in the model (N = 199, M_age = 42.8, SD_age = 13.8, 49.2% female).

Materials and procedure

Participants were shown 6 short vignettes displayed in random order. 3 of the vignettes described prototypically immoral actions, while 3 described morally neutral behaviors:

Immoral

• Alex doesn’t get frustrated while trying to steal a purse without being seen.
• Taylor wants to get revenge on a rival, but doesn’t have a good opportunity, so they wait until they find the right moment to do it.
• Parker stays even-tempered while lying to their partner about having an affair.

Neutral

• Blair doesn’t get frustrated while trying to put their fussy kids back to bed.
• Sam wants a new computer, but doesn’t have much money, so they wait until they find a good discount to buy one.
• Nat stays even-tempered while sitting in traffic on their way to work.

After each description, participants were asked to complete the following items (all items used a 7-pt. scale from -3 = not at all to +3 = extremely):

Patience: How patience is this person?

Competence: How competent is this person?

Moral: How moral is this person?

Calculating: How calculating is this person?

 

Results

A linear mixed model was fitted to predict patience attributions from valence (immoral/neutral). Participants were coded as random effects to account for within-person variation. Estimated marginal means were computed using the emmeans package in R.

Participants attributed significantly more patience to individuals performing neutral actions (M = 2.39, 95% CI[2.28, 2.50]) compared to those performing immoral actions (M = 1.22, 95% CI[1.11, 1.33]) (t(994) = -19.59, p < .001, d = -1.13, 95% CI[-1.26, -1.01]). When looking at individual vignettes, however, each behavior elicited attributions of patience that were significantly above the midpoint (see Table 4 and Figure 3), which is interpreted here as indifference or uncertainty.

 

Vignette	Condition	EMM	df	t-statistic	p-value	Cohen’s d
Affair	Immoral	0.50	895	6.67	<.001	0.49 [0.34, 0.64]
Bed	Neutral	2.49	895	33.08	<.001	2.31 [2.04, 2.57]
Computer	Neutral	2.38	895	31.62	<.001	2.20 [1.95, 2.46]
Revenge	Immoral	1.98	895	26.28	<.001	1.83 [1.60, 2.06]
Steal	Immoral	1.18	895	15.61	<.001	1.09 [0.92, 1.27]
Traffic	Neutral	2.29	895	30.35	<.001	2.12 [1.87, 2.37]

Note. Test statistics refer to one-sample test of estimated marginal means against 0. Numbers in brackets denote 95% confidence intervals.

 

Figure 4. Attributions of patience by valence (left panel) and vignette (right panel). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

 

Discussion

Study 6 showed that morality has an effect on attributions of patience. Immoral actions elicit significantly lower attributions of patience than neutral actions. This mirrors effects of morality on self-control identified in other studies (Bermúdez et al., 2021). However, immoral actions were still judged to be patient to some degree, even for prototypically immoral actions (e.g., lying about having an affair). These results indicate that people do not view patience as a moral excellence insofar as exercises of a moral excellence cannot issue in immoral actions. Instead, people seem willing to accept that patience can sometimes be deployed toward immoral ends.

 

General Discussion

Theories of patience from philosophy and theology emphasize that patience is a moral excellence and that exercises of patience consist in bearing with or struggling through hardship. As noted in the Introduction, these theories rarely incorporate how ordinary people think about patience. The present studies indicate that theoretical conceptions of patience do not align with everyday representations of patience in interesting ways.

First, a major point of overlap is that people conceptualize patience in terms of temporal orientation. Waiting is central to conceptions of patience and most situations that people associate with patient behavior involve some kind of waiting. Relatedly, there is an emotion regulation component to how people think about patience. Being even-tempered, slow to anger, and reflective are prototypical of being patient. This aligns with some core elements of theories of patience mentioned at the outset.

People do not seem to accept that patience requires feeling conflicted nor that patience is a moral excellence. Perceived inner conflict had no statistically detectible relationship with attributions of patience. And people were willing to attribute some degree of patience to individuals engaged in immoral behavior. People also seemed less willing to attribute patience to individuals who use externalized self-control strategies to maintain long-term commitments. This might be related to the emotion regulation component of patience. That is, if emotion regulation is central to being a patient person, people might not see externalized strategies as the regulation of emotion. They might, instead, see such externalized strategies as the accommodation of powerful emotions.

The results summarized here suggest an alternative view of patience that more closely captures the features of everyday representations of patience. Namely, being patient consists in the disposition to wait for the appropriate time to act given the commitments or goals one has at present. Call this the Simple View of patience. The Simple View of patience incorporates the prototypical elements of patience identified in Studies 1 – 3. It emphasizes the willingness to wait that people strongly associate with being a patient person. But it does not require that people experience inner conflict or negative emotions in the process of waiting. However, when people stick with their commitments through inner conflict or negative emotions, this provides stronger evidence for the underlying disposition, which would explain why conflict and patience would be associated. Further, there is no presumption that patience is a moral excellence. This seems intuitive, as regulative “virtues” more generally seem capable of being deployed toward immoral ends. Put differently, regulative virtues are purely instrumental and can thus inherit the moral qualities of the overarching goals and commitments they are mobilized to serve (Murray, 2024). Finally, the Simple View of patience explains the close relationship between self-control and patience. Self-control and patience differ because self-control aims at top-down regulation (i.e., suppressing impulses toward contra-commitment behavior) while patience aims at temporally-extended regulation (i.e., coordinating present and future behavior in goal-congruent ways). Often, cross-temporal behavioral organization requires top-down regulation, but the two remain distinct.

 

References

Bermúdez, J. P., Murray, S., Chartrand, L., & Barbosa, S. (2021). What’s inside is all that counts? The contours of everyday thinking about self-control. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1-23.

Carmona-Díaz, G., Amaya, S., and Jiménez-Leal, W. 2024. The meaning of moral goodness in a Colombian sample (manuscript).

Cross, S. E., Uskul, A. K., Gerçek-Swing, B., Sunbay, Z., Alözkan, C., Günsoy, C., Ataca, B., & Karakitapoğlu-Aygün, Z. (2014). Cultural Prototypes and Dimensions of Honor. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(2), 232–249. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213510323

Duckworth, A. L., Gendler, T. S., & Gross, J. J. (2016). Situational strategies for self-control. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(1), 35-55.

Fehr, B. (1988). Prototype analysis of the concepts of love and commitment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(4), 557–579. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.55.4.557

Greco, J. (2010). Achieving knowledge: A virtue-theoretic account of epistemic normativity. Cambridge University Press.

Gulliford, L., Morgan, B., & Jordan, K. (2022). A prototype analysis of virtue. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 16(4), 536-550.

Irving, Z. C., Murray, S., Glasser, A., & Krasich, K. (2024). The catch-22 of forgetfulness: Responsibility for mental mistakes. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 102(1), 100-118.

Murray, S. (2024). The Nature and Norms of Vigilance. American Philosophical Quarterly, 61(3), 265-278.

Murray, S., Bermúdez, J. P., & De Brigard, F. (2023). Moralization and self-control strategy selection. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30(4), 1586-1595.

Murray, S., Carmona, G., Vega, L., Jiménez-Leal, W., & Amaya, S. 2024. Loyalty from a personal point of view: A cross-cultural prototype study of loyalty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Pawl, T. & Jeffrey, A. In preparation. The virtue of patience.

Reynolds, C. J., Stokes, E., Jayawickreme, E., & Furr, R. M. (2023). Truthfulness Predominates in Americans’ Conceptualizations of Honesty: A Prototype Analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 01461672231195355.

Smith, K. D., Smith, S. T., & Christopher, J. C. (2007). What defines the good person?: Cross-cultural comparisons of experts’ models with lay prototypes. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 38(3), 333–360. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022107300279

Vargas, M. R. (2017). Contested terms and philosophical debates. Philosophical Studies, 174, 2499-2510.

Walker, L. J., & Pitts, R. C. (1998). Naturalistic conceptions of moral maturity. Developmental psychology, 34(3), 403.

 

Zagzebski, L. T. (1996). Virtues of the mind: An inquiry into the nature of virtue and the ethical foundations of knowledge. Cambridge University Press.

 

 

 

 

 

In the theoretical discussion about patience, researchers propose a variety of dimensions as characteristic of patient persons: an excellence in relating to time, an apt management of inner conflicts, the effective handling of negative emotions, and the pursuit of moral goals, among others. In this paper, Sam Murray investigates the structure and components of the lay concept of patience. He convincingly argues that grasping the lay concept is theoretically relevant, at least insofar as researchers will want to have a proper grasp of it if they are to communicate with a wider audience without equivocating, and even more so if they want to propose conceptual revisions.

Applying prototype analysis methods to clarify the concept, Sam argues that the data support a “Simple View of patience”, according to which willingness to wait is a central and definitive trait of the concept, whereas other often-associated features, like the presence of inner conflict, the management of negative emotions, or the pursuit of moral goals, are neither central nor definitive.

I would like to comment mainly on two aspects of this interesting paper: the relationship between patience and self-control, and the effect of goal morality on patience attributions.

Self-Control

In Study 5, Sam asked participants to read vignettes where a character faces a motivational conflict. Different groups of participants read about the character deploying a different self-control strategy to attempt to solve the conflict: inhibition, attentional distraction, cognitive reappraisal, and situation modification.

Participants were then asked to rate the character along multiple dimensions. Three dimensions of interest are conflict (to what extent he was conflicted about his decision), self-control (to what extent he demonstrated self-control) and patience (to what extent he demonstrated patience).

Previous studies have shown that people tend to attribute more self-control to people implementing internal strategies (i.e. strategies relying only on one’s own psychological resources) than externally scaffolded ones (i.e. those relying at least partially on elements of the environment). Given that, and also because patience is sometimes closely linked to self-control, one could expect that participants would also attribute patience to a lesser degree in the externalized conditions (modification and distraction).

This is partially what the results suggested: Sam reports that participants attributed more self-control than patience to the character in the modification and inhibition conditions.

However, if the internal/external distinction is what explains these findings, two questions remain unanswered.

• First, why would inhibition be rated lower in patience than in self-control? After all, in inhibition the character used a purely internal strategy.
• Second, shouldn’t distraction also be rated lower in patience than in self-control? Sam mentions that this is also an external strategy since the character is described as using something from their environment to distract himself.

In light of this, I would venture an alternative interpretation: perhaps what is driving the differences in self-control and patience attribution is internal conflict. Sam reports that the character was seen as experiencing inner conflict in the inhibition and modification vignettes, and as not experiencing any conflict in the distraction and reappraisal vignettes. This suggests that perhaps patience is seen as solving the experienced inner conflict (as opposed to cases where self-control is used but the inner conflict persists).

This seems to fit nicely with the other central and definitive features of the concept of patience (see Figure 2). ‘Slow to anger’, ‘not in a hurry’ and ‘not easily frustrated’ are some of these core features of the concept, and they seem to point to the patient person’s ability to maintain or reach low levels of internal conflict. Thus, perhaps patience is linked to conflict-minimizing uses of self-control, whereas self-control would admit of regulatory attempts that aim at keeping one’s commitment while maintaining high degrees of conflict.

This might be an interesting hypothesis to test in a future study: characters would be presented as using the same strategies and initially experiencing some inner conflict. All characters would succeed in exerting self-control, but in one case they would experience high conflict throughout and in the other they would also solve the inner conflict through their regulation exercise. If it turns out that people attribute self-control in both cases, but attribute less patience in the former, this would support the view that patience is linked to the subset of instances of self-control in which people keep a commitment and also reduce inner conflicts.

Morality

Sam reports an interesting finding regarding the link between patience and the morality of aims: while people attribute lower patience to characters pursuing immoral goals, they still provide positive attributions of patience to them. That is, agents acting immorally are seen as less patient, but patient nonetheless. 

I suspect that, with a small tweak to the materials, the results would support this point even more strongly. In Study 6, participants read six different vignettes, with three depicting a character pursuing an immoral goal and three others pursuing a morally neutral goal. Of the three immoral vignettes, two received particularly lower patience scores:

Steal: “Alex doesn’t get frustrated while trying to steal a purse without being seen.”

 

Affair: “Parker stays even-tempered while lying to their partner about having an affair.”

While these vignettes depict the character as regulating their emotions and minimizing inner conflict while trying to do something immoral, they do not explicitly portray them as waiting while they do it. For contrast, consider the third immoral vignette:

Revenge: “Taylor wants to get revenge on a rival, but doesn’t have a good opportunity, so they wait until they find the right moment to do it.”

This one does explicitly mention waiting. From this perspective, it is unsurprising that it received the highest patience rating among the immoral vignettes, almost as high as some of the neutral vignettes.

I suspect that if all immoral vignettes explicitly depict the character as waiting, they will all receive higher patience attributions, perhaps even rivalling those of the other vignettes. This could strengthen the case for the Simple View, providing additional support to the idea that the morality of the agent’s goals does not play a crucial role in lay patience attributions.

Across six studies, Murray introduces a valuable new perspective to ongoing discussions regarding the nature of so-called regulatory virtues, such as self-control or patience. Despite receiving renewed attention in recent years, these discussions have largely overlooked what Murray refers to as “everyday conceptualizations”, focusing instead on theoretical conceptions that may or may not coincide with pre-theoretical understandings of these things. This is particularly true of patience. According to traditional Buddhist, Christian, and Stoic views, patience is associated with a disposition to endure sorrow, suffering, or anger. By contrast, Aristotelian conceptions see patience as a matter of waiting for the right time to take action (Pawl & Jeffrey, in preparation). But little to no attention has been paid, to date, on ordinary folk conceptions of patience. What are these conceptions? And how do they relate to traditional conceptions of patience?

Murray’s primary aim is to make progress on these questions. For the first 3 studies, Murray conducts a prototype analysis of patience. This involves a multi-step process wherein participants identify (1) features associated with a particular category, (2) the centrality of these features, as well as the degree to which these features are associated with (3) “explicit” and (4)  “implicit cognitive processing” (2). Study 4 (results still pending), seeks to identify situations that people associate with being patient and looks for correlations with prototypical aspects of patience. Study 5, explored perceived associations between self-control and patience, as well as the effect on these associations of different externalized self-control strategies—i.e., strategies involving external aids or environmental modifications to help manage impulses, behaviors, or emotions, as opposed to relying solely on internal self-regulation techniques. Lastly, Study 6 investigated the extent to which portraying individuals as performing neutral or immoral actions affected participants’ attributions of patience.

Results from these studies lend support for what Murray calls the “Simple View of patience” (13). According to the Simple View, patience involves a willingness to wait, but need not involve any inner conflict or negative emotional experience associated with waiting. At the same time, these studies suggest that individuals are more likely to attribute patience to those who do manage to persist in waiting despite inner conflict or negative emotions. Finally, patience does not appear to be perceived as a morally good quality, which Murray notes makes intuitive sense as it seems plausible that patience (as with other regulatory virtues) might be deployed toward immoral or even amoral ends.

While there are several fruitful avenues for future work to explore based on these findings, two primary questions arose for me.

First, I would be especially interested to see whether or to what extent gender interacts with attributions of patience, as well as whether or to what extent gender affects perceptions of patience in morally valenced situations. Gender stereotypes have both descriptive and prescriptive components, outlining expectations for the characteristics women and men are likely to have along with characteristics they should have (Prentice & Carranza, 2002). For example, women might be expected (descriptively and presciptively) to be warm and nurturing while men are expected (descriptively and presciptively) to be strong and assertive. And there can often be various social consequences for violating these expectations as a result of their prescriptive nature (Fiske et al., 1991; Rudman & Glick, 1999). It would be interesting to explore whether attributions of patience differ when the individual portrayed in Murray’s scenarios is obviously gendered, or even when the scenario itself involves differently gendered individuals performing stereotypically gendered tasks. For instance, is Jane less patient and even immoral if she is unable to endure a child’s temper tantrum on an airplane as compared with John who demonstrates similar behaviors and inner struggles?

Second, and pending results from follow-up work considering gender, I wonder whether the Simple View of patience might push us to talk about patience as a regulatory skill as opposed to a regulatory virtue. Switching to talk of skill may be especially helpful if the findings regarding people’s tendency not to attribute moral goodness to patience are replicated or it is otherise confirmed that patience is most commonly perceived as an amoral capability—that is, one that could be used for morally good, bad, or even neutral purposes. Following a high-level and widely accepted view, skills involve (1) knowledge how to do things that (2) manifests in intentional actions and (3) is trainable. At least on the face of it, based on Murray’s findings, patience seems to fit this bill. For example, patience might be thought of as a matter of a person’s knowing how to wait through something that manifests in their doing so. This ability also seems clearly trainable as we can become better or worse at being patient across different situations, depending on things like the extent to which we deliberately practice patience. A skill like this could also clearly be used for morally good, bad, or neutral purposes. Of course, there may be debate about whether this is, in fact, the best way to think about patience. See, for example, Vigani’s (2017) thin account of the virtue of patience, as well as Stichter’s (2018) view of moral virtues as skills for alternative ways of thinking about these issues.

These are just some of the many potentially fruitful avenues for further studies to explore, and I look forward to seeing future work on this important and still underexplored area by Murray and others.

References:   

Fiske, S. T., Bersoff, D. N., Borgida, E., Deaux, K., & Heilman, M. (1991). Social science research on trial: Use of sex stereo- typing research in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins. American Psychologist, 46, 1049–1060.

Prentice, D. A., & Carranza, E. (2002). What women and men should be, shouldn’t be, are allowed to be, and don’t have to be: The contents of prescriptive gender stereotypes. Psychology of women quarterly, 26(4), 269-281.

Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (1999). Implicit gender stereotypes and backlash toward agentic women: The hidden costs to women of a kinder, gentler image of managers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1004–1010.

Stichter, M. (2018). The skillfulness of virtue: Improving our moral and epistemic lives. Cambridge University Press.

Vigani, D. (2017). Is patience a virtue?. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 51, 327-340.

 

 

 

Introduction

Affective polarization refers to the tendency to strongly dislike one’s political opponents (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015). In its extreme forms, affective polarization manifests as seeing contra-partisans as stupid or evil (Druckman et al., 2021). In the United States, affective polarization is reaching record levels (Boxell et al., 2020) and has been getting steadily worse since 2016 (Iyengar et al., 2019). There is less trust, more animosity, and less warmth between contra-partisans. The effects of this increasing polarization are well-documented: people live in increasingly partisan bubbles (Brown & Enos, 2021) and consume increasingly partisan media (Levendusky, 2013; Stroud, 2010). Along with this, there is a growing sense of exhaustion and frustration with political discourse (Pew Research Center, 2023), with a majority of Republicans and Democrats feeling exhausted and angry when thinking about politics. Moreover, the hostility and antagonism surrounding public discourse impedes our ability to learn from those who stand across the aisle and to cooperate in undertaking to achieve the shared goals of democratic life (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2018)—both of which are key features of healthy liberal democracies.

A troubling and related trend is the marked rise in undemocratic attitudes and misunderstanding that is associated with affective polarization. Republicans and Democrats do not seem to really understand what the other side believes (Yudkin et al., 2019). While most Republicans and Democrats express support for politicians who compromise and look for common ground (Manning & Colvin, 2022), these numbers drop when finding common ground requires compromising on an issue one cares about (Voelkel et al., 2022).

Recent interventions have been developed to mitigate affective polarization (Hartman et al., 2022). Some of these focus on raising the salience of common identities that span partisan differences, such as being an American (Druckman et al., 2021; Gaertner & Dovidio, 2014; Paluck et al., 2021). Others emphasize having real or imagined positive interactions with contra-partisans (Wojcieszak & Warner, 2020). Others focus on correcting erroneous meta-perceptions of contra-partisans (Mernyk et al., 2022). The precise mechanisms that make these interventions effective is unknown, but one hypothesis is that these interventions increase feelings of similarity with contra-partisans, which might also be related to recategorizing contra-partisans as members within a more inclusive group (Gaertner et al., 1996). It is unclear, however, what—if any—causal relationship there is between affective polarization and the undemocratic attitudes described above, as interventions that successfully modulate affective polarization do not seem to affect undemocratic attitudes (Voelkel et al., 2023).

While there have been successful interventions developed to address affective polarization, many of them have focused on cognitive or affective dimensions of thinking about others. In other words, interventions have been other-oriented. This project is a preliminary attempt to assess a self-directed intervention that targets regulatory components of behavior. Affective polarization generates problems related to self-regulation. Given that people can feel distressed when talking or thinking about political conflict with contra-partisans, the ability to engage in conversation, cooperate, and find common ground requires suppressing impulses to avoid or “fight” contra-partisans. In particular, civil discourse requires patience to continue engagement in the face of distress.

While patience is an important political virtue, it has been relatively neglected by social scientists and political theorists (but see Atkins, 2024). While there is no consensus about how to operationalize patience, many theorists note that being patient requires a kind of excellence with respect to waiting (Vigani, 2019). This aligns with lay conceptualizations of patience, which emphasize both waiting and emotion regulation (Murray, in preparation). In a preliminary study, we tested whether an intervention to boost patience (Schnitker, 2012; Schnitker et al., 2017) would mitigate affective polarization and undemocratic attitudes. This project had three aims:

 

1. To test the effectiveness of regulatory interventions as opposed to cognitive and affective interventions on affective polarization.
2. To assess the role of patience in political attitudes.
3. To examine whether regulatory interventions are effective because they make people feel more similar to contra-partisans.

 

While some have argued that feelings of similarity underlie the effectiveness of interventions that target affective polarization, others have emphasized the role of empathy in mitigating partisan animosity (Read, 2021). The term ’empathy’ has notoriously been used in countless different ways to refer to a range of different phenomena (Cuff et al., 2016; Read, 2019). Here, we use ’empathy’ to refer to a distinctive form of perspective-taking that need not involve a feeling of similarity. That is, it is possible that an individual can empathize with how someone thinks about the world without thereby feeling similar to that individual. Empathy in this sense is a matter of understanding what and why a person thinks and feels as they do about a particular issue (i.e. their perspective) appraising the rational perspective of someone else, while similarity concerns a feeling of closeness. Thus, we wanted to test whether empathy or similarity was related to the effectiveness of our regulatory intervention.

We report the results of a single longitudinal study (N = 40) where some participants completed a routine that has been shown to boost patience (Schnitker et al., 2017). Other participants were in an active control group. Afterward, participants watched a video of someone presenting a view on a contentious political topic (abortion) and answered questions that measured affective polarization and undemocratic attitudes. We found some evidence for the effectiveness of the intervention on patience and some evidence that the intervention mitigated some aspects of affective polarization.

 

Methods

 

Participants. 82 participants were recruited for the study. An initial round of data was collected at Providence College (n = 32). Because we anticipated some attrition for a longitudinal study and wanted a more demographically balanced sample, a second round of data was collected on Academic Prolific (n = 50). We aimed to collect data from as many participants as possible because we had no estimated effect sizes. Participants were excluded if they failed to complete the final survey (where affective polarization was measured) or if they failed to complete more than 50% of the daily sessions (N = 40; M_age = 33.8, SD_age = 11.3, 50% woman, 49% man, 1% nonbinary, 52.5% Republican, 47.5% Democrat).

Materials. At intake, participants provided demographic information about age, gender identity, and overall political preferences (very liberal to very conservative). Participants were asked whether they considered themselves to be closer to the Republican Party or to the Democratic Party and the extent to which being a Republican or Democrat was important to them. Participants also completed the 3-Factor Patience Scale (Schnitker, 2012). The 3-FPS is an 11-item scale that measures individual tendencies to exhibit interpersonal patience, life hardship patience, and daily hassles patience. Participants responded to the following items using a 5-pt. scale (1 = not like me at all, 5 = very much like me):

Interpersonal

• My friends would say I’m a very patient friend.
• I am patient with other people.
• I have trouble being patient with my close friends and family. (R)
• When someone is having difficulty learning something new, I will be able to help them without getting frustrated or annoyed.
• I find it easy to be patient with people.

Hardship

• I am able to wait-out tough times.
• I find it pretty easy to be patient with a difficult life problem or illness.
• I am patient during life hardships.

Hassles

• Although they’re annoying, I don’t get too upset when stuck in traffic jams.
• In general waiting in lines does not bother me.
• I get very annoyed at red lights. (R)

These items were presented in a fixed, random order for in-person data collection and fully randomized across participants for online collection.

After the longitudinal phase of the study, participants again completed the 3-FPS and completed measures of affective polarization and undemocratic attitudes (participants were presented with items that were appropriate to their party identification):

Warmth

• How do you feel about Democrats/Republicans? (0 = Don’t feel favorable at all, 50 = Neutral, 100 = Feel favorable).

Commitment to bipartisanship

• To what extent would you like to see Democratic and Republican elected representatives work together? (0 = Not at all, 100 = A great deal, midpoint not labeled).
• To what extent would you like the Democratic and Republican parties to cooperate more, even if it means compromising on issues you care about? (0 = Not at all, 100 = A great deal, midpoint not labeled).

Undemocratic attitudes

• [Republican/Democratic] governors should ignore unfavorable court rulings by [Democrat/Republican]-appointed judges (0 = Strongly disagree, 50 = Neither agree nor disagree, 100 = Strongly agree).
• [Republicans/Democrats] should not accept the results of elections if they lose (0 = Strongly disagree, 50 = Neither agree nor disagree, 100 = Strongly agree).

Support for partisan violence

• When, if ever, is it OK for [Republicans/Democrats] to send threatening and intimidating messages to [Democrat/Republican] party leaders? (0 = Never, 100 = Always).
• When, if ever, is it OK for an ordinary [Republican/Democrat] in the public to harass an ordinary [Democrat/Republican] on the Internet, in a way that makes the target feel frightened? (0 = Never, 100 = Always).
• How much do you feel it is justified for [Republicans/Democrats] to use violence in advancing their political goals these days? (0 = Not justified at all, 50 = Moderately justified, 100 = Extremely justified).

Additional

• How similar are you to [Democrats/Republicans]? (0 = Not similar at all, 50 = Moderately similar, 100 = Extremely similar).
• How much anger do you feel toward [Democrats/Republicans]? (0 = No anger at all, 50 = A moderate amount of anger, 100 = A great deal of anger).
• How much empathy do you feel toward Democrats? (0 = No empathy at all, 50 = A moderate amount of empathy, 100 = A great deal of empathy).

Procedure. After completing the intake survey, participants were randomly assigned either to a control or experimental condition for the daily surveys. Links to the daily surveys were distributed via email through Qualtrics at 3pm EST for five days. In the experimental condition, participants were asked to complete an emotional reappraisal activity where they reframed an initially frustrating event from a more positive perspective. Participants wrote about the event and why it was frustrating. They were then asked to look at the situation in a different way that might lessen their negative feelings. In the control condition, participants were asked to complete a daily scheduling activity where they wrote about something they did from 7am to 10am, 10 am to 1pm, and 1pm to 4pm.

The day after the fifth daily survey was completed, participants were sent the exit survey. Participants first completed a second round of the 3-FPS. Participants were then asked their opinion about the legality of abortion adapted from the Pew Research Center: “Do you think abortion should be legal in all cases, most cases, some cases, or never?” with four options: Abortion should be legal in all cases, abortion should be legal in most cases, abortion should be illegal in most cases, or abortion should be illegal in all cases. If a legal response was selected, participants watched a short video clip of someone making the case that abortion is morally prohibited (and, hence, should be illegal in most cases). If an illegal response was selected, participants watched a short video clip of someone arguing that abortion is morally permissible (and, hence, should be legal in most cases).

When the clip finished, participants were asked to write a brief summary of the presentation. After writing the summary, participants responded to items measuring affective polarization, undemocratic attitudes, empathy, similarity, and anger toward contra-partisans.

 

Results

The results section summarizes findings related to four issues: (1) whether the intervention in the experimental condition significantly raised perceived levels of patience; (2) whether there was an effect of condition on affective polarization and undemocratic attitudes; (3) whether the effect of condition holds for different party affiliations, and; (4) whether there is any relationship between patience and political attitudes.

Effectiveness of patience intervention. Pre- and post-intervention patience scores are summarized in Table 1.

 

Table 1. Estimated marginal means [95% CI] of pre- and post-intervention patience scores

Condition	Count	Pre-inter	Post-inter	Pre-Hardship	Post-Hardship	Pre-hassles	Post-hassles
Control	21	3.33 [3.08, 3.58]	3.25 [3.00, 3.50]	2.69 [2.44, 2.94]	2.69 [2.44, 2.94]	2.62 [2.37, 2.87]	2.60 [2.35, 2.84]
Experimental	19	3.22 [2.96, 3.48]	3.10 [2.96, 3.48]	2.71 [2.45, 2.97]	2.96 [2.70, 3.22]	2.62 [2.36, 2.88]	2.84 [2.58, 3.10]

 

We fit a hierarchical linear model using the lme4 package in R. Patience scores were coded as the outcome variable, with factor type (interpersonal, hardship, and hassles), time (pre, post), and condition (control, experimental) as outcome variables. Participants were coded as random effects to account for within-person variation. Estimated marginal means were computed using the emmeans package in R.

There was no evidence for a statistically significant difference in pre- and post-intervention patience scores for participants in the control condition (all p > .46). While there was no evidence for a statistically significant difference in pre-and post-intervention interpersonal patience scores for participants in the experimental condition (t(190) = -0.98, p = .33, d = -0.32, 95% CI[-0.96, 0.33]), there was evidence for an effect of time on hardship patience (t(190) = 2.00, p = .05, d = 0.65, 95% CI[0.002, 1.30]) and a trending effect of time on hassles patience (t(190) = 1.79, p = .08, d = 0.58, 95% CI[-0.07, 1.23]) (see Figure 1).

 

Figure 1. Estimated marginal means of patience scores by time and condition. Error bars represent standard errors.

 

Effect of condition on affective polarization. Given some evidence for the effectiveness of the experimental manipulation, we examined whether there was any effect of condition on measures of affective polarization and undemocratic attitudes. We fit separate linear models to predict the relevant outcome variable with political party and condition as predictors, as well as all interactions. Figure 2 summarizes findings where there was evidence for a statistically significant or trending effect of condition for at least one political party.

 

Figure 2. Estimated marginal means of dependent variables across condition and party affiliation. Error bars represent standard errors.

There was evidence for an effect of condition on feelings of warmth toward Republicans for Democratic participants (t(36) = -2.05, p = .05, d = -0.94, 95% CI [-1.90, 0.02]), with those in the experimental condition reporting warmer feelings toward Republicans (M = 28.7, 95% CI[18,77, 38.6]) compared to those in the control condition (M = 14.9, 95% CI[5.51, 24.3]). There was a corresponding effect of condition on feelings of warmth toward Democrats for Republican participants (t(36) = -2.43, p = .02, d = -1.06, 95% CI[-1.99, -0.14]). There was no evidence for an effect of condition on feelings of warmth toward in-group members (all p > .27).

Relatedly, there was trending evidence for an effect of condition on feelings of anger toward contra-partisans, with Democrats (t(35) = 1.76, p = .09, d = 0.85, 95% CI[-0.15, 1.82]) reporting less anger in the experimental condition (M = 60.5, 95% CI[44.4, 76.6]) compared to the control condition (M = 79.2, 95% CI[64.8, 93.6]). There was no evidence for a corresponding effect of condition on Republicans (t(35) = 1.50, p = .14, d = 0.65, 95% CI[-0.25, 1.55]). There was also evidence for an effect of condition on empathy toward contra-partisans for Democrats (t(36) = -2.23, p = .03, d = -1.02, 95% CI[-1.99, -0.06]), with Democrats in the experimental condition having significantly more empathy for Republicans (M = 55.6, 95% CI[37.0, 74.1]) compared to Democrats in the control condition (M = 27.5, 95% CI[9.9, 45.1]). Likewise, there was trending evidence for an effect of condition on Republicans’  empathy for Democrats (t(36) = -1.72, p = .09, d = -0.75, 95% CI[-1.66, 0.15]), with those in the experimental condition reporting greater empathy toward Democrats (M = 55.5, 95% CI[37.9, 73.1]) compared to those in the control condition (M = 34.8, 95% CI[18.0, 51.6]). There was, however, no evidence for an effect of condition on Republicans feeling more similar to Democrats (p = .11) or Democrats feeling more similar to Republicans (p = .37).

An exploratory mediation model fitted using the lavaan package in R was used to assess whether the effect of condition on anger was mediated by changes in empathy. There was marginal evidence for an indirect effect of empathy on the effect of condition on anger (B = -5.96, p = .14), although there was not sufficient power to reliably infer mediating effects.

Effect of condition on undemocratic attitudes. There was no evidence for an effect of condition on any of the measures of undemocratic attitudes. There was no evidence for an effect of condition on either measure of support for bipartisanship (all p > .47), the acceptability of ignoring judicial rulings of contra-partisan judges (both p > .23), the acceptability of ignoring elections that contra-partisans win (both p > .77), and the acceptability of threatening, harassing, or being violent toward contra-partisans (all p > .20).

Relationship between patience and political attitudes. To explore further the relationship between patience and different political attitudes, we fitted several models to predict responses to dependent variables from the three dimensions of patience measured by the 3-FPS. We found that hardship patience among Republicans predicts warmth toward Democrats, with greater patience indicating greater warmth (B = 21.95, 95% CI[3.99, 39.91], p = .02). Interpersonal patience also predicted anger toward contra-partisans, with greater patience predicting less anger (B = -16.52, 95% CI[-33.64, 0.61], p = .06).

 

General Discussion

In a preliminary study on the effectiveness of a patience intervention on affective polarization, we found that participants in the experimental condition reported greater patience after completing a brief reappraisal exercise for 5 days. Participants in the experimental condition also reported greater warmth, less anger, and greater empathy toward contra-partisans. This amelioration of affective polarization was not accompanied by a decrease in undemocratic attitudes, although some of that might been due to such measures being nearly at floor. The sample we collected was not overall supportive of undemocratic behaviors or practices.

Caution should be used when interpreting these results. In most cases, we found evidence for trending or marginal effects. We noted these as important because future studies might focus on designs that are adequately powered to identify these effects. Even for our statistically significant results, our study was not adequately powered to identify these. We believe we have demonstrated that there is enough evidence to warrant a more resource-intensive exploration of the effects described above.

One particularly interesting result is that feelings of empathy increased for participants in the experimental condition but not feelings of similarity with members of the other political party. Insofar as there is a relationship between empathy and affective polarization, this suggests that the benefit of empathy on affective polarization is not due to increased feelings of similarity between contra-partisans. It is unclear what explains this distinction, but we speculate that this is because empathy corresponds to the cognitive activity of perspective-taking rather than an affect response to members of an out-group. That is, people who are more patient seem more capable of adopting the perspective of a member of an out-group, which thereby facilitates greater understanding and reduces hostility toward those individuals.

 

Conclusion

Efforts to mollify affective polarization have focused mainly on activating common identities with contra-partisans or correcting erroneous meta-perceptions. While these have been modestly successful at achieving short-term decrements in affective polarization, they target aspects of the relationship between an individual and members of an out-group. Here, we explored whether an intervention aimed at self-regulatory capacities might have similar effects on affective polarization. We found that a brief intervention applied over a short-time span was effective at modulating affective polarization and boosted empathy. While more work is needed to verify these results and understand their mechanisms, this approach seems like a promising complement to other interventions that target polarization.

 

References

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Druckman, J. N., Klar, S., Krupnikov, Y., Levendusky, M., & Ryan, J. B. (2021). Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America. Nature human behaviour, 5(1), 28-38.

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Iyengar, S., & Westwood, S. J. (2015). Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization. American journal of political science, 59(3), 690-707.

Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual review of political science, 22, 129-146.

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Mernyk, J. S., Pink, S. L., Druckman, J. N., & Willer, R. (2022). Correcting inaccurate metaperceptions reduces Americans’ support for partisan violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(16), e2116851119.

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In the second half of 2024, and with the November US presidential elections are on the horizon, there is no need to argue that political polarization is a critical and pressing problem. This is particularly urgent to the extent that polarization drives undemocratic attitudes that may lead to performing or justifying illegal or violent political acts.

Could fostering patience contribute to tackling this problem? In their paper, Sam Murray and Hannah Read examine the effectiveness of a patience intervention on reducing affective polarization in a sample of U.S. adults. The researchers conducted a longitudinal study where participants in the experimental group completed a daily emotional reappraisal activity, while those in the control group did a neutral task. The sample size was small, but results suggest that the patience intervention may significantly increase warmth and empathy towards political opponents while reducing anger, though it did not appear to affect undemocratic attitudes.

This is a convincing small-scale proof of concept study. I agree with the authors that it successfully shows a larger-scale study is promising and justified. What follows are a couple of friendly suggestions for the larger, more robust study that I hope will follow.

In my interpretation, one of the study’s most important results is that a greater score in (some dimensions of) patience is linked to greater warmth (for some) and lower anger (for all) towards contra-partisans. This is very encouraging because it suggests that a patience-boosting intervention could lead to a reduction in affective polarization. That said, and as the authors point out, whether affective polarization is causally linked to undemocratic attitudes is to some extent an open question.

This study found no link between increases in patience and reductions in undemocratic attitudes, but, as the researchers themselves point out, the null effect may be due to the fact that measures of undemocratic attitudes were already near the bottom even before the intervention. This is a crucial limitation: it means we still don’t know whether the intervention could be effective or not in reducing undemocratic attitudes.

A fully-powered study could tell us a lot about both the effectiveness of a patience intervention for reducing undemocratic attitudes and to what extent affective polarization mediates undemocratic attitudes. An obvious requirement for this is increasing sample size, especially since around 50% of the initial participants left the study before completion—a likely attrition rate for intensive longitudinal studies like this one. But beyond this, I think it is crucial to think about the population itself.

Specifically, it would be crucial to include in the sample participants with higher initial levels of polarization and undemocratic values, ideally from both political extremes. This would allow for a robust enough test of the intervention’s ability to reduce undemocratic attitudes. If resources were unlimited, an ideal situation would be to include sufficient participants from the entire polarization spectrum. Some people may be so radicalized that no patience intervention would reduce their affective polarization or undemocratic attitudes. Thus, if a polarization spectrum was observed, one could expect the intervention’s effectiveness to yield an inverted U pattern, where its effectiveness is greater for people with moderate undemocratic attitudes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prior research on affective political polarization has tested the efficacy of interventions on cognitive or affective dimensions of interpersonal thinking. To add to this literature, Murray and Read present the results of a preliminary study that investigated whether an intervention to increase patience would mitigate affective polarization and undemocratic attitudes, and further whether the success of such an intervention would be due to increased empathy or felt similarity with contra-partisans.

As I understand it, the study had three stages:

• At intake, they collected standard demographic information and had participants complete the 3-Factor Patience Scale (Schnitker, 2012), which measures individual tendencies to exhibit patience in interpersonal relations and in relation to life hardships and daily hassles.
• In each of the five days following the intake survey, participants in the experimental condition completed an emotional reappraisal activity in which they framed an initially negative event from a more positive perspective, while those in the control condition completed a daily scheduling activity. The emotional reappraisal activity has been shown in prior work to increase self-control and patience in adolescents (Schnitker et al., 2017).
• Following this five-day period, in the exit survey all participants completed the 3-FPS again and then answered a question about their personal views on abortion, after which they watched a short clip of someone making an argument for the opposite position. They then wrote a brief summary of the presentation and responded to a battery of items designed to measure affective polarization, undemocratic attitudes, empathy, similarity, and anger toward contra-partisans.

The results were mixed. First, and strikingly, the patience intervention did not increase overall patience among the participants, though there was evidence for a small but significant effect on hardship patience and a nonsignificant but trending effect on hardship patience. Second, the intervention significantly affected only some of the DVs of interest, as there was evidence that it increased reported feelings of warmth, reduced reported feelings of anger (for Democrats only), and increased reported feelings of empathy toward counter-partisans. The intervention did not seem to affect reported feelings of similarity toward counter-partisans, nor did it affect undemocratic attitudes or commitment to bipartisanship. Finally, in an attempt to predict responses to DVs from the three dimensions of patience, the only significant or trending relationships were between hardship patience among Republicans and warmth toward Democrats, and interpersonal patience and anger toward counter-partisans.

Given the preliminary nature of the study, it seems more valuable to comment on the method than on the results. A couple of points on that, then. First, the study had a very high attrition rate, from 82 original participants to just 40 who completed the final survey and at least 50% of the daily sessions. Given that the aim of the study was to measure the effect of an intervention on patience, there’s a real worry that the final population might have been unrepresentative in some highly relevant ways. It seems best for a study like this to be carried out using a captive audience or with a stronger incentive toward completion.

Second, I worry about whether it’s a good strategy to measure empathy toward counter-partisans just by asking participants “How much empathy do you feel …?” Beyond the reliability of self-report, I’m just not sure that enough participants will have known what the word ‘empathy’ means—especially not if their responses are supposed to pick up on an attitude that focuses on adopting another’s perspective without, necessarily, feeling similar to them. If that’s what there is an interest in measuring, then participants should be presented with a few different items that get at the phenomenon in different ways and are found to be sufficiently correlated, similar to the prompts in the 3-PFS.

Now, concerning the results. Obviously it is a disappointment that the patience intervention doesn’t seem to have been very effective in increasing self-reported patience. However, even if it had been more effective we would need to be cautious in concluding that it was by intervening on patience that the other observed effects were achieved. Sam and Hannah seem to make this assumption at the end of their general discussion, writing that “people who are more patient seem more capable of adopting the perspective of a member of an out-group, which thereby facilitates greater understanding and reduces hostility toward those individuals”. This is definitely a possible interpretation of the findings, but I would need more than the results of a mediation model to convince me to adopt it. A different possibility is this: perhaps the reappraisal activity increased empathy directly, by making participants more conscious of the different perspectives that can be taken on an event. Likewise, the activity may also have reduced anger by helping participants form a habit of taking a more positive perspective on events. Especially given the small size of the observed effects on patience, it seems hasty to conclude, or even to favor the hypothesis, that these were the basis of the other results.

 

References

Schnitker, S. A. (2012). An examination of patience and well-being. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(4), 263-280.

Schnitker, S. A., Felke, T. J., Fernandez, N. A., Redmond, N., & Blews, A. E. (2017). Efficacy of self-control and patience interventions in adolescents. Applied developmental science, 21(3), 165-183.