Ask most people why they did what they did and they will give you a reason; ask them again a week later and the reason will have quietly changed. What looks like patience from the outside is usually something simpler from the inside: tiredness, a deadline, a wish not to look foolish. The textbook treats patience as a preference to be revealed. In practice it is a story we tell ourselves after the fact. Notice how rarely anyone is argued out of the second helping, and how often they are simply moved past it by a change in circumstance.
Where it overreaches
What looks like patience from the outside is usually something simpler from the inside: tiredness, a deadline, a wish not to look foolish. The textbook treats patience as a preference to be revealed. In practice it is a story we tell ourselves after the fact. It is tempting to call this irrational. It is more useful to ask what it is for. We describe the departure from the model as an error. We might equally describe the model as a hopeful guess about us.
