Reducing patience to a mere "coping mechanism" misses what makes virtues meaningful. The study doesn't debunk virtue; it just describes its mechanics. By this logic, we could reduce courage to "threat response management" or honesty to "cognitive consistency maintenance." The interesting finding isn't that patience has psychological underpinnings (of course it does), but that it functions primarily through emotion regulation rather than moral reasoning. Still, its moral value comes from what patient behavior enables: better social relations, more considered decisions, and recognition of values beyond immediate gratification. Mechanisms explain how virtues operate; they don't negate the virtues themselves.
<p><pre><code> Specifically, better scores on the measures of impulsivity, emotional awareness and flexibility, and also the personality trait of agreeableness were all linked to higher patience scores.... But these results do suggest that patience is not so much virtue as a method to help us to deal with frustrations — and that some of us are better equipped to employ this coping mechanism than others.
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The flaw in this argument is that non-impulsiveness, emotional awareness, and agreeableness are all considered virtues! And I really don’t like the implicit suggestion that impatient people are just born that way and patient people won the luck of the draw: I was far more impatient before I started getting mental health treatment.
I'm not even interested in verifying if these claims are based on randomly controlled trials when their outcome variables are self-reported imagined impatience and predicted behavior! By now in 2025, psychology studies should be painfully self-aware of the lack of credibility in their instruments, guess not.
I have little patience for worthless studies that serve no purpose beyond a means of coping with time and effort sunk into a worthless humanities degree.
- Kindness is for the weak, winners are heartless.<p>- Courtesy is a symptom of dysentry.<p>- Empathy makes you look like a moron.<p>- Being decent to other humans is worse than Hitler.<p>(Generate a list of clickbait headlines in the form "<virtue> is actually <negative>, not <positive>".)