The textbook treats patience as a preference to be revealed. In practice it is a story we tell ourselves after the fact. None of this is new. Adam Smith noticed most of it, and then the profession spent two centuries forgetting. If you want to see patience at work, watch a queue form where there is no reason for one. The evidence here is thinner than the confident commentary suggests, and the honest position is a shrug with a direction of travel.
What the evidence shows
Every one of us runs the same shortcut, and every one of us believes we are the exception. If you want to see patience at work, watch a queue form where there is no reason for one. None of this is new. Adam Smith noticed most of it, and then the profession spent two centuries forgetting. The measure that matters is not what people say about patience but what they do when nobody is scoring.
