Patience

patience Patience (or forbearance) is the ability to endure difficult circumstances. Patience may involve perseverance in the face of delay; tolerance of provocation without responding with disrespect or anger; forbearance when under strain, especially when faced with longer-term difficulties; or being able to wait for a long time without getting irritated or bored. Patience is also used to refer to the character trait of being steadfast. Antonyms include impatience, hastiness, and impetuousness. Delayed gratificationReward dependence and Reward system In psychology and in cognitive neuroscience, patience is studied as a decision-making problem, involving the choice of either a small reward in the short-term, versus a more valuable reward in the long-term. In a 2005 study common marmosets and cottontop tamarins chose between taking an immediate small reward and waiting a variable amount of time for a large reward. Under these conditions, marmosets waited significantly longer for food than tamarins. This difference cannot be explained by life history, social behaviour, or brain size. It can, however, be explained by feeding ecology: marmosets rely on gum, a food product acquired by waiting for exudate to flow from trees, whereas tamarins feed on insects, a food product requiring impulsive action. Foraging ecology, therefore, may provide a selective pressure for the evolution of self-control. Patience of human users in the online world has been a subject of research. In a 2012 study of tens of millions of users who watched videos on the Internet, Krishnan and Sitaraman showed that users lose patience in as little as two seconds while waiting for their chosen video to start playing. Users who connect to the Internet at faster speeds are less patient than their counterparts at slower speeds, demonstrating a link between the human expectation of speed and human patience. These and other studies of patience led commentators to conclude that the rapid pace of technology is rewiring humans to be less patient.