Is there a happiness cost to being too patient?

We find that excessive patience is costly for individual well-being. This result is consistent across nine different measures of subjective well-being. Our measure of patience varies from a minimum of -1.31 to a maximum of 2.76 (this measure has standardized mean of zero and standard deviation of 1). For one of the main well-being indices, the life evaluation index, the level of patience that maximizes happiness is equal to 1.56, a numerical value similar to the one obtained using other well-being indicators.

And:

…moving from a level of patience of 1.40 corresponding to the peak in the positive experience index to the 99thpercentile in patience reduces the positive experienced index by 1.07, equivalent to 26% of the difference in happiness between those who completed college (7.16) and those with a high school diploma (3.12).

Contrary to how the language of the authors might be interpreted, this is a correlation rather than an established relationship.

The 13 pp. paper by Paola Giuliano and Paola Sapienza is too short, but interesting nonetheless.  I also would like to see a study on how the patience of parents affects the happiness of their children and grandchildren.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed