Is there a pattern to what tends to make us impatient? And if you are designing a space where you know people are going to have to wait, what would you do to keep their impatience to a minimum?Woman leaning out car window stuck in traffic.gettyThanks to newly published research by the University of Riverside psychologist Kate Sweeny and her colleagues, we have some data which helps to address these questions. Across three studies and a total of 1,401 participants, Sweeny created a number of different hypothetical scenarios to see if she could isolate features of a persons environment which help to predict their becoming more impatient.For instance, in one of her scenarios, imagine you are at the movies when a child nearby is being loud. A given participant in the study would be presented with one of two versions of this scenario. In one version, the parents of the child do not do anything to try to quiet their child down; in the other version, the parents try their hardest to keep the child quiet. Reactions by half of the participants to the first version could then be compared to reactions by the other half of the participants to the second version. As you might suspect, this scenario is designed to probe what contribution blameworthiness makes to peoples level of impatience, in this case someone elses blameworthiness for not trying to keep their child quiet.What were some of Sweenys findings? Among the factors she found that predicted increased impatience were:How unpleasant the situation is that you are stuck in while you wait to achieve your goal.How much you want to achieve that goal, i.e., how important it is to you.Whether someone is blameworthy for preventing you from achieving that goal, and if so, how blameworthy they are.Whether the delay is longer than you expected it would be ahead of time.Interestingly, what did not seem to matter to impatience was the length of the delay by itself. In some cases, a delay of 3 days, say, might not invoke impatience, while in other cases a delay of 30 minutes might.Upon reflection, though, this makes sense. If the 3 day delay is for the closing on a new house, and the 30 minutes is for how long you have been on hold with the cable company, then it is perfectly unsurprising to see people get impatient in the one case and not in the other.MORE FOR YOUAnother potential factor also ended up not making a difference. This was how conspicuous the passage of time is in the situation, say by having a large clock nearby or having your phone with you. I would have thought that having a visible reminder of how time is ticking away would make people more impatient, but generally participants in the study didnt think that it would.Of course, not all people are going to react in the same way when a situation that might lead to impatience comes along. After all, some people get angry or frustrated when the line at the DMV is taking forever; others, though, respond calmly. Sweeny and her colleagues were interested in whether individuals would react differently to similar situations, and if so, what features of their personality would predict these differences. They found that not surprisingly people who were higher on the traits of need for closure and on neuroticism were especially likely to be impatient. Qualities like flexibility, agreeableness, mindfulness, emotional awareness, and executive function seemed to give a boost to patience. These are qualities we can cultivate in ourselves and look for in others to try to better pick out who are the more patient people in our lives.To be sure, future work is needed to replicate and extend Sweenys findings, as she notes, especially beyond English speaking participants who were taking the study online. Other measures of patience besides surveys about merely hypothetical scenarios would also be welcome.Results like these could have a variety of practical applications. In our own lives they can help us consider in advance whether an upcoming situation (going to the DMV, waiting on test results, seeing a traffic jam up ahead) is likely to make us more impatient. If it is, we can try to circumvent that impatience ahead of time (by, say, bringing a book, distracting ourselves by playing games, listening to calming music, etc.). The research findings can also be helpful to those who design environments where waiting will inevitably be involved (service centers, medical testing companies, and so forth).Impatience is often a significant detriment to our well-being, and the more we can recognize the warning signs and work against them the better.