Proverbs 16:32 · Subject · Patience
Patience and the Impulse
Six studies published from 1989 to 2018 measured how children and adults wait for a reward and hold back an impulse, and what that predicts in later life.
A preschooler's choice between a treat now and a greater one later became the famous test of self-control, and researchers still argue over what it measures.
He who is slow to anger is better than a warrior, and he who controls his temper is greater than one who captures a city.
- Books
- Proverbs, Galatians
- Hold in memory
- Proverbs 16:32
Summary
Galatians 5:22 to 23 names patience and self-control together among the fruit of the Spirit, and psychologists study one part of that strength as delay of gratification, the power to wait for a greater reward. Their follow-up studies tie waiting and self-control in childhood to somewhat better schooling, health and wealth later in life, by less than was first reported. They also find that a child's wait measures trust as well as willpower. The command to be patient rests on the faithfulness of God, and the studies stand beside it as later and smaller witnesses.
- Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda and Monica Rodriguez reported in Science (1989) that four-year-olds who delayed gratification longer grew into more competent adolescents, with higher school performance and better coping with frustration and stress.
- Terrie Moffitt and colleagues (2011) followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32 and found that childhood self-control predicted health, wealth and criminal offending apart from intelligence and social class.
- Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan (2018) found the link between waiting at four and achievement at fifteen half the size of the original studies. Controls for family background, early ability and the home reduced it by two thirds.
- Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard Aslin (2013) found that 28 children waited significantly longer in a setting shown to be reliable than in one shown to be unreliable.
- In a test of 23 laboratories and 2,141 people (Hagger and colleagues, 2016), the idea that self-control is a resource used up by exertion showed an effect whose interval included zero.
What Scripture Says of Self-Control
Two proverbs and two letters set the control of one's own spirit among the strengths God gives and asks for.
Patience in Scripture has two sides, waiting for what God has promised and bearing with other people, and both call for the control of impulse. Psychologists have measured one part of the first side, the waiting for a larger good, in children and adults, and many readers now ask what their studies show.
The question this subject answers is what the research on delay and self-control has found and how much weight it bears beside the text. The page gives the verses first and then six studies side by side in a table. After that come the findings, the size of the link, the limits of the research and the reason a child waits. Two early teachers, the debate over what the famous test measures, and the ground on which the command stands close the page.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who does not control his temper.The proverb pictures the man who cannot rule his temper as a city with no defence, open to every attack.
Through patience a ruler can be persuaded, and a gentle tongue can break a bone.The proverb credits patience with power over a ruler, so in Proverbs self-command is a strength as well as a restraint.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.The verse credits self-control to the Spirit, so in Scripture the strength the studies measure grows by the work of God.
For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness;Peter adds perseverance to self-control in one chain of growth, so holding back an impulse and holding on through delay belong together.
Galatians 5:22 to 23, 2 Peter 1:5 to 6
Six Studies Side by Side
The studies range from laboratory tests of preschoolers to cohorts followed from birth into adult life.
Four studies tie early waiting and self-control to later outcomes, one finds that trust changes how long a child waits, and one finds no reliable sign that self-control runs out with use.
| Study | Who was studied | What was found | The limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mischel, Shoda and Rodriguez, Science, 1989 | Four-year-olds tested in laboratory delay situations and followed into adolescence | Children who delayed longer "developed into more cognitively and socially competent adolescents, achieving higher scholastic performance and coping better with frustration and stress" | The abstract gives no effect size. |
| Moffitt and colleagues, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011 | A cohort of 1,000 children followed from birth to age 32, and a second cohort of 500 pairs of siblings | Childhood self-control predicted physical health, substance dependence, personal finances and criminal offending; the sibling with lower self-control had poorer outcomes "despite shared family background" | The abstract gives no effect size, and the measure was general self-control in childhood. |
| Casey and colleagues, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011 | Nearly 60 adults in their mid-forties who had taken the delay test as preschoolers, 26 of them scanned by functional imaging | Low delayers did worse at holding back a response to a happy face; "the prefrontal cortex differentiated between nogo and go trials to a greater extent in high delayers, the ventral striatum showed exaggerated recruitment in low delayers" | The scanned group was small, and the brain finding concerns one task. |
| Kidd, Palmeri and Aslin, Cognition, 2013 | 28 children with a mean age of four years and six months | "Children in the reliable condition waited significantly longer than those in the unreliable condition (p<0.0005)" | The sample was 28 children in one laboratory task. |
| Hagger and colleagues, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016 | 2,141 participants in 23 laboratories following one preregistered protocol | The ego-depletion effect was d = 0.04, with a 95 percent interval from minus 0.07 to 0.15 that includes zero | It tested one standardized protocol of two tasks in sequence. |
| Watts, Duncan and Quan, Psychological Science, 2018 | Children measured at age 4 and again at age 15 | Each additional minute waited at 4 predicted about one tenth of a standard deviation more achievement at 15; the link was half the size of the original studies and two thirds smaller with controls | The finding concerns children whose mothers had not completed college. |
What the Studies Found
The first study followed preschoolers into adolescence, and two studies of 2011 followed children into their thirties and forties.
The research program of Walter Mischel measured how long four-year-olds would put off a reward for the sake of a greater one. The same program found attentional and thinking processes that help a young child to wait, and it found that some preschool waiting situations predict later competence better than others.
Terrie Moffitt and colleagues measured self-control across a whole cohort of children, and the adult outcomes followed what the authors call a gradient of self-control, rising by degrees across the whole range of children. The effects could also be separated from mistakes the children made as adolescents.
B. J. Casey and colleagues returned to people who had taken the delay test as preschoolers four decades before. Those who had waited least as children had also shown low self-control in their twenties and thirties. In their forties they found it harder to hold back from a happy face, though not from a neutral or a fearful one. The authors conclude that resistance to temptation, as the preschool test first measured it, is a relatively stable difference between people.
How Large the Link Is
A conceptual replication tested how strongly waiting at four predicts achievement at fifteen.
Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan set out to replicate and extend the paper of Shoda, Mischel and Peake (1990), which they call the famous marshmallow study. They describe it as showing strong bivariate correlations, that is, links between two measures taken alone before any other cause is counted.
When they allowed for family background, early cognitive ability and the home environment, most of the link went with those controls. Most of the variation in achievement came from whether a child could wait at least 20 seconds, and the links between waiting and behaviour at fifteen were much smaller and rarely statistically significant.
The Limits of the Research
Each study measured waiting or self-control in a laboratory or a cohort, and its findings reach as far as its measures.
A popular model holds that self-control is a limited resource that runs down with exertion, a state psychologists call ego depletion. Hagger and colleagues tested it with one protocol in many laboratories at once, and the effect they found could not be told apart from zero, so this test gives the model no support.
The follow-up studies watched people over time without changing their self-control, so they show that waiting and later outcomes go together and leave open what causes what. A claim that the marshmallow test proves patience brings success says more than these sources carry.
The one imaging study measured activity in two regions of the brain during one task, and none of the six studies measured a chemical messenger such as dopamine.
Scripture also commands patience with people, the bearing with others under wrong, and none of these studies measured it.
Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with hearts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with one another and forgive any complaint you may have against someone else. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.Paul ties this patience to forgiveness, with the Lord's forgiveness as its pattern.
Juliette Ratchford and Sarah Schnitker define patience in a paper of 2024 as "the ability to remain calm in the face of frustration, suffering, or delay in goal pursuit". That definition is wider than anything a delay test can time. Thomas a Kempis set the same wider test in The Imitation of Christ, book 3, chapter 19, in William Benham's translation. He wrote, "He is not truly patient who will only suffer as far as seemeth right to himself and from whom he pleaseth."
Why a Child Waits
A laboratory study asked whether a child's wait depends on more than willpower.
Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard Aslin gave children the classic marshmallow task in a setting shown beforehand to be either reliable or unreliable. They conclude that the children's wait-times reflected reasoned beliefs about whether waiting would pay off, so that the time a child waits measures beliefs about the stability of the world as well as self-control.
By faith Sarah, even though she was barren and beyond the proper age, was enabled to conceive a child, because she considered Him faithful who had promised.Sarah's waiting rested on the character of the One who had promised, and the children of the study waited longest where experience had taught them that waiting pays.
The likeness is an analogy, and the study itself makes no claim about faith in God.
The Mind That Rules Itself
Two teachers of the fifth and sixth centuries read the proverbs of patience as the mastery of oneself.
died 435 · John Cassian
John Cassian turns to the proverbs of Solomon to ask where an angry outburst comes from.
“Everyone knows that patience is derived from passion and endurance and therefore that you cannot call anyone patient unless he endures indignities without annoyance. So Solomon rightly praised the patient person: ‘Better is the patient man than the strong, and he who restrains his anger more than he that takes a city,’ and ‘A long-suffering man is mighty in prudence, but a fainthearted man is very foolish.’ Therefore, if a wronged man flares up in anger, the wrongful abuse should not be thought of as the cause of his sin but the manifestation of a hidden weakness.”
John Cassian · CONFERENCE 18:13 · on Proverbs 14:29Patristic
died 604 · Gregory the Dialogist
Gregory the Dialogist uses the proverb of the city taken to show how high patience stands among the virtues.
“For Solomon again indicates how great is the height at which the virtue of patience excels, saying: ‘The patient man is better than the strong man, and he who rules his spirit than he who captures cities.’ It is therefore a lesser victory to capture cities, because what is conquered is external. But what is conquered through patience is greater, because the mind is overcome by itself, and it subjects itself to itself, when patience prostrates it in the humility of forbearance.”
Gregory the Dialogist · 40 Homilies on the Gospels, Homily 35 · on Proverbs 16:32Patristic
What the Marshmallow Test Measures
Researchers read the delay studies in three ways, and each reading has its holders and its objection.
An early trait that predicts later lifeMischel, Shoda and Rodriguez; Moffitt and colleagues; Casey and colleagues
On this reading the power to wait is a lasting difference between people that shows itself in the preschool years and goes with later schooling, health and wealth.
The objection comes from the replication of Watts, Duncan and Quan, whose controls for the home took away most of the link with achievement.
A modest link that the home largely explainsWatts, Duncan and Quan
On this reading the link is real but small, and a child's family and early ability lie behind much of both the waiting and the later success.
The objection is Moffitt's comparison of siblings, who share one home and still differed in outcome by their self-control.
A reasoned judgment of trustKidd, Palmeri and Aslin
On this reading the wait is a sensible choice made on the evidence of the setting, so the test shows what a child has learned to expect.
The objection is the size of the study, 28 children in one laboratory, set against cohorts followed for decades.
The Command Rests on God
The research agrees with Proverbs in part, since children who waited and children with more self-control tended to fare better later. The command does not rest on these studies, and it would stand if every study were overturned.
Let us hold resolutely to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful.The verse gives the reason a believer keeps waiting, and that reason lies in God Himself.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda and Monica L. Rodriguez, Delay of gratification in children, Science 244, no. 4907 (1989): 933 to 938.
- Terrie E. Moffitt, Louise Arseneault, Daniel Belsky, Nigel Dickson, Robert J. Hancox, HonaLee Harrington, Renate Houts, Richie Poulton, Brent W. Roberts, Stephen Ross, Malcolm R. Sears, W. Murray Thomson and Avshalom Caspi, A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 7 (2011): 2693 to 2698.
- B. J. Casey, Leah H. Somerville, Ian H. Gotlib, Ozlem Ayduk, Nicholas T. Franklin, Mary K. Askren, John Jonides, Marc G. Berman, Nicole L. Wilson, Theresa Teslovich, Gary Glover, Vivian Zayas, Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, Behavioral and neural correlates of delay of gratification 40 years later, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 36 (2011): 14998 to 15003.
- Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard N. Aslin, Rational snacking: young children's decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability, Cognition 126, no. 1 (2013): 109 to 114.
- M. S. Hagger, N. L. D. Chatzisarantis and 62 co-authors, A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect, Perspectives on Psychological Science 11, no. 4 (2016): 546 to 573.
- Tyler W. Watts, Greg J. Duncan and Haonan Quan, Revisiting the marshmallow test: a conceptual replication investigating links between early delay of gratification and later outcomes, Psychological Science 29, no. 7 (2018): 1159 to 1177.
- Juliette L. Ratchford and Sarah A. Schnitker, Virtue in pursuit of goals: a goals-based approach to patience measurement, Journal of Personality Assessment 106, no. 2 (2024): 181 to 195, published online in 2023.
- Gregory the Great, Forty Homilies on the Gospels, Homily 35, on Proverbs 16:32.
- John Cassian, Conferences 18.13, on Proverbs 14:29 and 16:32.
- Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, book 3, chapter 19, translated by William Benham.
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