My dog is not very patient.
If she senses that I might feed her a treat, she comes bounding over and
sits begging. Once she is convinced that
there is food for her, it is hard to get her to wait to eat something. But, people have a remarkable capacity to
wait for good outcomes. College students
spend years studying in order to improve their prospects for jobs later in
life. We skip afternoon snacks in order
to save our appetite for a great evening dinner.
Of course, we are not completely patient. There are many
times where we do pick something good for us in the short-term rather than
waiting for something better in the future.
Losing weight is hard, because it is more pleasant to eat good food now than
to be in good shape in the future.
A 2013 paper in Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes by Xianchi Dai and Ayelet
Fishbach explores the possibility that waiting to make a choice may actually
help us to be more patient.
The idea is that when you have to wait to make a choice,
that increases the value of that choice to you.
The more valuable the choice is, the more that you want to make sure you
get the best option. So, you may be more
willing to wait even longer for the best option if you had to wait to make the
choice in the first place.
In one study, participants were contacted by email and asked
to make a choice. They were choosing
between getting $50 on some date and getting $55 20 days later. So, the choice was basically about whether
people would wait 20 days to get an extra $5. Participants were told that 2 of
them would actually receive what they chose, so it was important to choose carefully.
Two groups were told about the decision and were asked to
make their choice immediately. The Near
Future group chose between getting $50 in 3 days and $55 in 23 days. In this condition, about 30% of participants
chose the larger reward. The Distant
Future group chose between getting $50 in 30 days or $55 in 50 days. This increased time frame made people a
little more patient. About 55% of the
participants in this condition chose the larger reward.
The Waiting Period group received an email telling them
about the options and then telling them they would receive another email 27
days later when they could make the choice.
This group was choosing between $50 in 3 days and $55 in 23 days. So, this group had the same options as the
Near Future group, though their actual delay was the same length as the Distant
Future group. For these participants,
about 85% chose the larger reward.
Other studies in this paper used choices for other kinds of
products like iPods and chocolate. These
studies looked at measures of the value people gave to the choice and found
that people who had to wait to make the choice felt that the options were more
valuable to them. This greater value
made them more interested in getting the better item.
So, does waiting always make you more patient?
The researchers also explored a slightly different
choice. Sometimes, you make a selection
and then have the option to pay extra money to receive your item more
quickly. For example, on-line retailers
like Amazon will give you the option to pay extra to have something shipped
overnight for a larger fee.
The researchers speculated that if waiting makes the item
feel more valuable, then you might be more willing to pay to receive that item
quickly. In one study, participants were
offered the chance to get a box of Godiva chocolates in 48 days or to pay $3 to
get that same box of chocolates in 6 days.
The researchers manipulated how long the wait felt by either asking them
how long it had been since they last had a Godiva chocolate or just asking them
to make the choice immediately. (This
manipulation made people selecting between a smaller box of chocolates sooner
or a larger box of chocolates later more likely to take the larger box of
chocolates later.)
In this case, participants were more likely to pay $3 to get
the chocolates quickly if they felt like they had waited a long time than if
they felt like they were choosing immediately.
That is, the waiting period can make a single option feel more valuable
and can actually make people more impatient.
What does this mean for you?
If you are trying to be patient, you need to think about the
situation you are in. If you are
choosing from among a set of options, waiting to make a choice can help you to
focus on the overall value of the options rather than on the time period until
you will get them. If you are choosing
when to receive an item, though, then the waiting period may focus you on the
time period itself, which can decrease your patience.
