Impatience Over Time

Abstract

Waiting is ubiquitous yet painful. We find that the discomfort of waiting intensifies as the wait draws closer to its end. Using longitudinal studies that measured impatience for real-world events, we documented greater impatience closer to learning the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election (Study 1), receiving the first COVID-19 vaccine (Study 2), and boarding a bus (Study 3). Follow-up experiments found that a desire for closure underlies this effect, and that impatience increases at the end of the wait controlling for how long people have already been waiting (Supplemental Studies 1–4). These findings suggest that the distress of waiting escalates when the wait is almost over.