From decision patience to process patience: A decision–process integration of the choice to wait and the experience of waiting

Abstract

Consumer impatience has long been examined through the lens of intertemporal choice, where patience is inferred from decisions to accept delayed rewards. Yet, this conceptualization captures only the choice to wait, not the experience of waiting. Sweeny's Process Model of Patience (PMP) shifts the focus from temporal preferences to temporal affect, defining impatience as a negatively valenced emotional response to objectionable delays and patience as the active regulation of this emotion. In this commentary, I bridge these two traditions by mapping the psychological drivers of intertemporal choice—affective urges, cognitive representations, construal, subjective time perception, and future-self connectedness—onto the mechanisms that shape waiting experiences. This decision–process integration of impatience reveals where the two perspectives converge, where they diverge, and why these distinctions matter for understanding consumer behavior. I propose several testable predictions illustrating how choice patience and process patience dissociate, how motivations and mental representations shift across the decision–waiting timeline, and how environmental cues can reduce uncertainty at choice yet heighten impatience during the wait. Together, these insights suggest a more complete temporal model of impatience—one that begins before the decision is made and continues throughout the delay that follows.