Patience is a coping strategy, not a virtue
20 comments
·March 28, 2025handfuloflight
atoav
Exactly. A virtue is a personality trait that allows you to do things people without that virtue can't do. That does not mean that this virtue does not come without downsides in other situations. Someone who is couraged may put themselves into deadly danger in the wrong situation for example.
A patient person can solve e.g. technological issues others with less patience cannot. A person with a lot of patience can also endure more abuse before taking countermeasures — this can be both good and bad for them, depending on the situation.
The cool thing about the virtue of patience is that given enough experience patient people can decide with whom or what to be patient with, so if they smell abuse they can cut it short.
The opposite isn't true of impatient people. If they encounter a situation where a little bit of patience would have given them a prefered outcome they cannot just "decide" to be patient. Being impatient means just that: you can't regulate your emotions even if it would be preferential for you if you did.
smnrg
George Carlin on the ridiculousness of euphemistic language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
jajko
Yeah having hard time agreeing with that article which even concludes that its maybe, who knows, but more study needed. All based on some questionnaires about things that are often hard to describe in a/b/c/d manner.
I have personally tons of patience, more than most people I know personally and professionally, and its one of the best assets to have in the toolbox. Why shouldn't it be a virtue? Even if we decide not, who actually cares about labeling. Life is simply better, reaching long term goals is much easier, one is more content if not outright happier (or happiness level overall is higher).
mattmanser
Yeah, doesn't look like this article is very good and has drawn it's own conclusions.
Reading the abstract of the paper, it doesn't mention virtue once. Unfortunately the paper is paywalled:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672241284028
It does say it's investigating:
"patience as a targeted form of emotion regulation"
Emotion regulation sure sounds like what a layman might describe as a virtue to me.
delichon
It's what the Reverend Mother tested Paul for with the Gom Jabbar. She considered it a way to discriminate between human and animal. This is Herbert claiming emotional regulation as the foundational virtue of humanity.
NoNotTheGreeks
> Emotion regulation sure sounds like what a layman might describe as a virtue to me.
Err, do you mean the opposite? I'm 95% sure you meant the opposite. "Emotional regulation" has well-grounded semantics, assuming you accept having control over emotions. Virtue is the woo-woo word without any clear semantics.
rcxdude
Virtue's not a particularly vague word: it's used to describe a trait that is morally good to have (in the view of whoever's calling something a virtue).
mattmanser
You should learn about a few of these things, you're pretty off on most of it:
- 'Modern' morality was only invented in the late 1700s. Not millennia ago. Millennia ago was Aristole's Nicomachean Ethics which was pretty much based around virtues. Mill's utilitarianism and Kant's Categorical Imperative were written in the late 1700s
- Quibbling about the meaning of words is basically a waste of your life. Calling words you don't like woo woo is a waste of everyone else's time. pg wrote a good essay on why: https://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
joemazerino
The people who write these types of papers and articles ignore virtue altogether.
NoNotTheGreeks
We can also choose to just toss virtues out the window as antiquated. It's not clear what value they bring modern society. As most of them are floating signifiers they seem to cause more harm than they solve.
aithrowawaycomm
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.
handfuloflight
I was far more impatient before I deliberately practiced patience.
UncleEntity
Patience is also a pretty good skill if you're lying in wait for dinner to walk by.
Wait, no, food just fell from the sky in prehistoric times.
amelius
Virtues are a coping strategy.
rollinDyno
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.
bitbang
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.
Y_Y
- Kindness is for the weak, winners are heartless.
- Courtesy is a symptom of dysentry.
- Empathy makes you look like a moron.
- Being decent to other humans is worse than Hitler.
(Generate a list of clickbait headlines in the form "<virtue> is actually <negative>, not <positive>".)
meepmorp
> Courtesy is a symptom of dysentry
I probably would click on this just to see how silly it was
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.