Patience and Intelligence: Are Smarter People More Patient?

Smarter people are a little more patient, on average. A meta-analysis of 24 studies found a correlation of about .23 between intelligence and the willingness to wait for a larger, later reward instead of taking a smaller one now, which means IQ accounts for roughly 5% of the differences between people in this kind of patience.

That is a real link, but a modest one. Plenty of high-IQ people are impatient, and plenty of people with average scores are very good at waiting. This page covers what the largest studies show, what the famous marshmallow test really found, why patience and reasoning ability overlap, and why claims about "patient nations" need care.

Researchers usually measure patience with "delay discounting" tasks, in which people choose between a smaller reward now and a larger reward later (for example, $50 today or $100 in six months). People who "discount" steeply take the smaller, sooner option even when waiting would pay well. Low discounting is the lab version of patience.

Noah Shamosh and Jeremy Gray pooled the research in 2008. Their meta-analysis combined 26 effect sizes from 24 studies and found that higher intelligence went with lower discounting, with a weighted average correlation of r = -.23. The link held across different discounting tasks and different types of intelligence test, and they found no evidence of publication bias. Studies in which payoffs depended on chance showed weaker links than studies in which all rewards were real or all hypothetical.

Larger single studies point in the same direction, with smaller effects once background is controlled:

• Human Connectome Project: Yeh, Myerson and Green analyzed 1,206 young adults. A general ability factor built from 11 cognitive tests correlated .21 and .25 with patience on two discounting tasks. After controlling for income and education, the correlations with individual tests that had been significant shrank by about a third, from an average of .18 to .12. Vocabulary, reading, Raven's matrices and a line-orientation test were the measures still linked to patience after those controls.

• German adults: Thomas Dohmen and colleagues tested roughly 1,000 adults in incentivized choice experiments. Lower cognitive ability went with more impatience, and the link survived controls for education, income and credit constraints.

• Trainee truck drivers: In a sample of about 1,000 trainees, Stephen Burks and colleagues found that people with stronger cognitive skills were more patient over both short and long horizons.

To put r = .23 in IQ terms: comparing two people 15 IQ points apart, you would expect the higher scorer to be about a quarter of a standard deviation more patient, which is noticeable on average and close to useless for judging any one person.

The most famous patience study is Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test," in which preschoolers could eat one treat now or wait alone for two. In a 1989 Science review, Mischel, Yuichi Shoda and Monica Rodriguez reported that 4-year-olds who waited longer in certain lab situations grew into adolescents with higher school performance and better coping with frustration and stress.

Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan revisited the idea in 2018 with the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, a much larger and more diverse US sample. Two findings matter for the IQ question. First, waiting time at 54 months correlated .37 with the same children's scores on a math problems test, its strongest correlation with any of the cognitive measures. The marshmallow test partly measures early cognitive ability. Second, among children whose mothers had not completed college, the link between waiting and achievement at age 15 was about half the size of the original reports and fell by two thirds once family background, early cognitive ability and the home environment were controlled, from 0.24 to 0.08 standard deviations. Most of the benefit came from being able to wait at least 20 seconds.

Economists Armin Falk, Fabian Kosse and Pia Pinger objected that the newer study capped waiting times more tightly, which biases its correlations toward zero, and that some of its controls were themselves shaped by the child's self-control; their reanalysis with only predetermined controls gave estimates closer to the originals. Watts and Duncan replied that their models help clarify what the correlation might mean. The reasonable reading is that early self-control predicts later achievement modestly and that a good share of the prediction runs through cognitive ability and family circumstances.

Choosing between "now" and "later" is partly a reasoning problem. You have to hold two options in mind, compare amounts across time and picture a future payoff, which leans on "working memory," the mental workspace that holds information while you use it. Our guide to what working memory is explains why it is so closely tied to IQ.

Several lines of evidence support this:

• Load makes people impatient: In experiments by John Hinson and colleagues, giving people a heavier working memory load while they chose led to steeper discounting of delayed money.

• The overlap runs through general ability: In a brain-imaging study of 103 adults, Shamosh and colleagues found that working memory explained no variance in discounting beyond general intelligence, and that activity in the left anterior prefrontal cortex partly accounted for the link.

• Reflection matters: Shane Frederick's three-item Cognitive Reflection Test, which rewards people for overriding a tempting but wrong first answer, predicted time preferences in his samples.

Patience in this sense is not the same thing as being calm or conscientious. In the Connectome data, discounting was not correlated with conscientiousness or neuroticism, the personality traits most tied to everyday self-control. Steep discounting also has a biological basis of its own. A twin study of adolescents estimated its heritability at 30% at age 12 and 51% at age 14, and a genome-wide study of more than 23,000 adults found that about 12% of the variance in discounting was tagged by common genetic variants, with genetic overlap with cognition, ADHD and smoking.

Patience and IQ overlap, but each predicts life outcomes on its own. In a cohort of about 1,000 children followed from birth to age 32, Terrie Moffitt and colleagues found that childhood self-control predicted health, finances, substance dependence and criminal convictions, and these effects could be separated from intelligence and social class. In a second cohort of 500 sibling pairs, the sibling with lower self-control did worse despite sharing a family.

Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman reached a similar conclusion in two small samples of eighth graders. Self-discipline, measured partly with a delay-of-gratification task and monetary choice questions, explained more than twice as much variance in final grades as IQ did, and still predicted grades after controlling for IQ and earlier achievement test scores. Grades reward steady effort more than IQ tests do, which helps explain the result.

Putting off work is a related but separate habit; our page on IQ and procrastination covers that evidence.

The economists behind the Global Preference Survey measured patience, risk-taking, trust and other preferences in about 80,000 people across 76 countries. Within countries, preferences varied with age, gender and cognitive ability. In a follow-up, Uwe Sunde and colleagues reported that patience is strongly correlated with income per person and with the accumulation of physical and human capital, across countries, regions and individuals. Niklas Potrafke then paired the patience data with national IQ estimates and reported that higher-IQ populations were also more patient.

These are correlations between national averages, and they need to be read with care. National IQ estimates rest on samples of very uneven quality, as our page on why IQ rankings by country are unreliable explains. Wealth, schooling, institutions and stable access to credit can all make waiting more sensible, so national patience may partly reflect circumstances. None of this says anything about an individual from any country.

It is a weak sign. Across 24 studies the correlation between intelligence and patience in reward choices was about .23, so patience tells you a little about IQ on average and very little about one person.

Partly. In a large US replication, waiting time correlated .37 with preschoolers' math problem scores, and much of its link with teenage achievement disappeared after controlling for early cognitive ability and family background.

Not necessarily. The overlap is modest, it shrinks further once income and education are controlled, and many highly able people make impulsive choices.

Probably, to a degree. Patience in reward choices was only partly heritable in one twin study (30% at age 12 and 51% at 14), so environment matters too. Reducing mental load while making decisions also helps, since working memory load makes people choose the sooner reward more often.

Yes. Childhood self-control predicted adult health, wealth and criminal records in a 1,000-child birth cohort even after accounting for intelligence and social class.

Patience and intelligence go together, but only modestly: higher-IQ people are somewhat more willing to wait for a larger reward, a correlation near .2 that shrinks when income and education are controlled. Part of the overlap reflects the reasoning and working memory that weighing "now" against "later" requires, and patience also predicts life outcomes beyond IQ. If you want to know where your own reasoning ability stands, you can take a full-length online IQ test.

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