What Makes Us Impatient? |
Is there a pattern to what tends to make us impatient? And if you are designing a space where you know that people are going to have to wait for something, what would you intentionally try to do to keep people’s impatience to a minimum?
Thanks to recently published research by the University of Riverside psychologist Kate Sweeny and her colleagues, we have some data to use to help address these questions. Across three studies and a total of 1,401 participants, Sweeny et al. created a number of different hypothetical scenarios to see if they could isolate features of a person’s environment that would help to predict their becoming more impatient.
For instance, in one of her scenarios, imagine you are at the movies when a child nearby is being loud. A given participant in the study would be presented with one of two versions of this scenario. In one version, the parents of the child do not do anything to try to quiet their child down; in the other version, the parents try their hardest to keep the child quiet. Reactions by half of the participants to the first version could then be compared to reactions by the other half of the participants to the second version. As you might suspect, this scenario is designed to probe what contribution blameworthiness makes to people’s level of impatience—in this case, someone........