Growing up, my mother always reminded me that patience is a virtue.
However, it’s difficult to keep this in mind when the water for your pasta takes forever to boil. It’s hard to be patient when the line at the coffee shop is unusually long. Traffic during rush hour? Forget about it.
In trying to understand impatience, some psychologists have treated it as a personality trait to correlate with other behaviors. Others, however, have characterized impatience as an emotional state, in which our experience of time stretches in anticipation of a future positive emotional state. From this perspective, impatience occurs when a person imagines a better option relative to his or her current situation.
Whatever its origin, impatience can motivate someone to act impulsively, leading to negative consequences due to a lack of consideration and planning. For example, a study published in 2007 by the Research Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision-Making found that people who were less patient engaged in riskier behavior, which led to things like lower credit scores and higher default rates.
The only certainty around impatience is that it pervades our everyday lives. As technology gets more efficient and accessible, human beings are uncovering more opportunities to be impatient. As the Center for Humane Technology has often argued, our world of technology has evolved to constantly stimulate and instantly reward us with content, items, and services, which has made us more impatient.
According to a 2015 study by Microsoft, people’s attention is interrupted every 8 seconds on average, a likely byproduct of our increasing reliance on technology. Furthermore, this study concluded that “multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli” and theorized that this was a result of the brain’s ability to change and adapt to digitized environments.
Another study, published by World Psychiatry, found that those who engaged heavily in media multitasking were easily more distracted. Brain scans of the study’s participants revealed greater activity in the right prefrontal region of their brain, which is usually active in response to distractive stimuli. The results of these brain scans suggested that media multitasking, such as switching between tabs in a browser, requires more cognitive effort to maintain concentration.
According to Narayan Janakiraman, a professor at the University of Texas, Arlington, our fast-paced technological environment has heightened our reliance on instant gratification and strengthened our bond with impatience. In 2011, Jankiraman conducted a study on the psychology behind the decisions to abandon waiting. Participants were asked to wait for downloads and stay on hold over the phone, leading many of them to abandon their process of waiting. This abandonment often occurred at a time that was “suboptimal for many waiting time distributions.”
Instant gratification provides fulfillment or a reward without having to wait. It can play a role in why we would rather have Amazon Prime two-day shipping over the standard or binge-watch a Netflix show than wait each week for a new episode. We are more likely to check our phones for “likes” right after posting an Instagram photo or messages from our group chat minutes after sending a funny meme.
According to a 2018 article posted on Harvard University’s Science in the News, the notifications we receive curb our craving for instant gratification. The authors note that dopamine is released in the brain “when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions.” Since social media has offered us an unlimited supply of virtual social stimuli, it can create continual, on-demand dopamine influxes in our brains. Neuroscientists have indeed shown that social stimuli activate our dopamine-reward pathways.
Our need for instant gratification can be found in our everyday lives and it is consistently fulfilled by the technology around us, whether we realize it or not. When these items, services, and results are delayed or withheld, we may find it frustrating and inconvenient.
The need for instant gratification has affected our attention spans, which is only now being noticed. A 2016 study published by the MIT Media Lab concluded that people could only focus on a computer screen for an average of 40 seconds before their attention was broken, in which they either switched between apps or clicked away to other content. Furthermore, in a study conducted by Common Sense Media in 2012, interviews revealed that 70% of teachers of elementary, middle, and high school students agreed that media-use was hurting their students’ attention spans.
According to Ramesh Sitaraman, a computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, technology has made people come to expect things more quickly due to their reliance on instant gratification. He mentioned that after examining the viewing habits of 6.7 million internet users in his study, subjects were only willing to wait for content to load for 2 seconds. After 5 seconds of waiting, 25% of participants had abandoned the content. After 10 seconds, half of the participants were gone. Sitaraman’s findings suggest that technological advances have an effect on our level of patience by worsening our ability to counteract impatience and withstand delayed gratification.
While some feel that the technology’s disruption of our patience is balanced by even greater benefits, others feel that by allowing technology to intimately moderate our lives, we are damaging an important virtue.
Harold Schweizer, an English professor at Bucknell University, said that the “promise of technology was that it would make us masters of time … It has, ironically, made us into time’s slaves.”
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