Can't wait to pay: The desire for goal closure increases impatience for costs.

We explore whether the desire to achieve psychological closure on a goal creates impatience. If so, people should choose an earlier (vs. later) option, even when it does not deliver a reward. For example, they may prefer to pay money or complete work earlier rather than later. A choice to incur earlier costs seems to violate the preference for positive discounting (indeed, it may appear like negative time discounting), unless people value earlier goal closure. Across seven studies, we consistently find that people preferred to pay more money sooner over less money later (Study 1) and complete more work sooner over less work later (Studies 2-5) more when they had a stronger desire for goal closure, such as when the sooner option allowed them to achieve goal closure and when the goal would otherwise linger on their minds (compared to when it would not). The implications of goal closure extend to impatience for gains (Studies 6-7), as people preferred less money sooner (vs. more later) when it allowed them to achieve goal closure. These findings suggest that the desire to achieve goal closure is an important aspect of time preferences. Taking this desire into account can explain marketplace anomalies and inform interventions to reduce impatience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Can't wait or won't wait? The two barriers to patient decisions.

Impatience results from the belief that waiting is either too hard or not worth it. Distinguishing between these barriers informs which intervention will increase patience. Making waiting easier increases patience when people are unable to wait. Increasing the value of waiting increases patience when they lack the desire to wait.

Hiding success.

Self-promotion is common in everyday life. Yet, across 8 studies (N = 1,687) examining a broad range of personal and professional successes, we find that individuals often hide their successes from others and that such hiding has relational costs. We document these effects among close relational partners, acquaintances, and within hypothetical relationships. Study 1 finds that targets feel less close to and more insulted by communicators who hide rather than share their successes. Study 2 finds that hiding success harms relationships both when the success is eventually discovered and when it is not. Studies 3 and 4 explore the mechanism underlying these relational costs: Targets infer that communicators have paternalistic motives when they hide their success, which leads them to feel insulted. Studies 5-7 explore the contextual cues that elicit inferences of paternalistic motives, such as private (vs. public) settings (Study 5), direct (vs. indirect) questions (Study 6), and close (vs. distant) relationships (Study 7). Across our studies, we also explore the emotional and impression-management consequences of hiding success. Although the relational consequences of hiding success are universally negative, the emotional and impression-management consequences are mixed. Whereas previous research highlights the negative consequences of sharing one's accomplishments with others, we find that sharing is superior to hiding for maintaining one's relationships. Thus, we shed new light on the consequences of paternalism and the relational costs of hiding information in everyday communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Love is patient: People are more willing to wait for things they like.

How does liking of a target affect patience? One possibility is that the more people like a target the less patient they are for it, because it is more difficult to resist the attractive smaller-sooner option to wait for the larger-later option. However, across six studies (N = 2,774), we found evidence for the opposite effect. Specifically, an increase in liking was correlated with an increase in patience (Study 1), and when people made decisions about a target they liked more, they were more willing to wait for a better quality version of it (Studies 2 and 3) and a larger amount of it (Study 4). This is because when people like a target more, they perceive a greater difference in subjective value between its smaller-sooner and larger-later versions. Thus, the perceived difference in subjective value mediated the effect of liking on patience (Study 5). Further, consistent with this proposed mechanism, we found that liking increased both willingness to wait for a better quality version of a target and willingness to pay to receive the target sooner (Study 6). These findings suggest that patience, in part, results from believing the larger-later reward is worth waiting for. These findings also offer practical recommendations for people struggling with impatience: Individuals may benefit from reminding themselves why they like what they are waiting for. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Difficult conversations: navigating the tension between honesty and benevolence.

Difficult conversations are a necessary part of everyday life. To help children, employees, and partners learn and improve, parents, managers, and significant others are frequently tasked with the unpleasant job of delivering negative news and critical feedback. Despite the long-term benefits of these conversations, communicators often approach them with trepidation, in part, because they perceive them as involving intractable moral conflict between being honest and being kind. In this article, we review recent research on egocentrism, ethics, and communication to explain why communicators overestimate the degree to which honesty and benevolence conflict during difficult conversations, document the conversational missteps people make as a result of this erred perception, and propose more effective conversational strategies that honor the long-term compatibility of honesty and benevolence. This review sheds light on the psychology of moral tradeoffs in conversation, and provides practical advice on how to deliver unpleasant information in ways that improve recipients' welfare.