This award supports a pilot study for an innovative, new research stream studying what makes people patient and impatient. The investigator begins with the observation that people have goals both for attaining concrete outcomes and for the pace at which they attain them. In interdependent contexts, people must cope with competing pacing demands. Sometimes another person's pace is slower; sometimes, it is faster. In studying patience and impatience, she seeks to understand how people respond when someone else's pace is too slow, relative to their desires or expectations; i.e. how do people cope when their temporal goals are blocked in interdependent contexts? Holding the length of delay constant, the investigator suggests that there will be variability in the extent to which people experience such delays patiently or impatiently, and that this variability matters. If social life involves a sequence of delays and interactions, every delay is typically accompanied by a subsequent social interaction. How people respond to a given delay affects the subsequent interaction. Overall, it is suggested that patient responses to delays will lead to better interpersonal outcomes than impatient responses. Thus, the goal is to better understand the nature of patient and impatient responses in social delay contexts; namely, what are they as constructs, what are their antecedents, and what are their effects? During the award period, the investigator will conduct the pilot research and then prepare a large, multi-year grant proposal to support this research area in the future. The POWRE award is particularly appropriate for her because she has two years before tenure evaluation. Currently, less than 10% of the tenured professors at the Graduate Business School at University of Chicago are women. It is also appropriate because the investigator has been pursuing her career goals amid several challenging life transitions. The award will provide timely funding at a critical point in her research and professional development.
