Published Research

Roberts, Annabelle R., Alex Imas, and Ayelet Fishbach (in press) “Can't Wait to Pay: The Desire for Goal Closure Increases Impatience for Costs,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

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 seem like negative time discounting), unless we consider the value of earlier goal closure. Across five studies we find that people preferred to pay more money sooner over less money later (Studies 1-2) and complete more work sooner over less work later (Studies 3-5) when it allowed them to achieve their overall goal, more than when it did not. A desire for closure mediated the effect of having an opportunity to achieve a goal on impatience. 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.

Roberts, Annabelle R. and Ayelet Fishbach (in press), “Impatience Over Time,” Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Consumers are often required to wait. They wait in line, for their bus to arrive, or for a package in the mail. Yet, waiting can be emotionally painful. This research explores how the pain of waiting changes over the course of the wait. Across six studies, people felt more impatient closer to the end of the wait, regardless of how long they had already been waiting. Using longitudinal studies that measured impatience for real world events, we first documented an increase in impatience closer to learning the results of the 2020 US presidential election (Study 1), closer to getting the first COVID-19 vaccine (Study 2), and closer to a bus arriving (Study 3). Follow up experiments (Studies 4-5) confirmed that a desire for closure underlies the effect. After waiting the same amount of time for a package delivery, people reported more impatience when the delivery was closer to arriving, and desire for closure mediated this increase in impatience. We conclude that the pain of waiting increases just when the wait is about to end.

Roberts, Annabelle R., Franklin Shaddy, and Ayelet Fishbach (2021), “Love is Patient: People are More Willing to Wait for Things They Like,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150 (7), 1423-1437.

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.

Roberts, Annabelle R., Emma E. Levine, and Ovul Sezer (2021), “Hiding Success,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120 (5), 1261-1286.

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.

Roberts, Annabelle R., and Ayelet Fishbach (2020), “When Wanting Closure Reduces Patients’ Patience,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161, 85-94.

What makes patients impatient? We find that people both make impatient health decisions and experience impatience when waiting for healthcare partially because they are eager to achieve psychological closure on their goals. Across five preregistered studies (N = 1806), we first document an increased preference for a worse health device (Study 1) and more painful treatment (Study 2) when they allow for earlier goal closure, even though they would not provide remedy sooner. We next find that because the desire to achieve closure increases with proximity to a goal, the experience of impatience increases closer to the completion of a medical checkup (Studies 3–5). We discuss the implications of people’s desire to reach goal closure on the pursuit of both health habits and health care.

Levine, Emma E., Annabelle R. Roberts, and Taya R. Cohen (2020), “Difficult Conversations: Navigating the Tension Between Honesty and Benevolence,” Current Opinion in Psychology, 31, 38-43.

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.

Working Papers

Roberts, Annabelle R. and Ayelet Fishbach, “When Impatient People Behave Patiently,” Manuscript in preparation.

When a product is more valuable, consumers are more likely to wait for a superior version of it (vs. receive an inferior version sooner). Yet, despite behaving more patiently, consumers experience less patience waiting for more valuable products. Thus, patient choices and experiences diverge. For example, participants were more likely to wait six months for two mugs (vs. receive one mug that week) when the mugs were of higher quality, even though it was harder to wait for high (vs. low) quality mugs. Consumers’ desire for products, rather than their anticipated experience of waiting, mediated the effect of product value on patient choice. We further explore a boundary condition for the effect. When products were more valuable because they were more needed (e.g., hungrier people value food more), consumers were less likely to wait and experienced less patience. Hence, patient decisions and experiences no longer diverged. We discuss implications for what causes patient consumer behavior and the distinction between feeling and acting patient.

Roberts, Annabelle R., Emma E. Levine, and Jane Risen, “Learning to Distrust: One Untrustworthy Experience Reduces the Expected Value of Trust,” Manuscript in preparation.

Do people learn from a single trust interaction? Using internal meta-analyses to analyze the results of fifteen studies (N = 9,046), we find that the outcome of a single interaction with one partner influences people’s decision to trust a new partner in a subsequent interaction. In particular, people learn more from a single interaction with an untrustworthy partner than a trustworthy partner, regardless of whether they initially trusted or distrusted that partner. That is, people learn more from negative information than positive information, even when the information confirms people’s expectations. We further find that a single trust interaction influences the expected value of trust by changing both the perceived probability that an individual in the relevant population is trustworthy as well as the emotional consequences (i.e., utility) of trust. Although both mechanisms help explain why people learn from a single trust interaction, only population trustworthiness explains why people learn more from negative information than positive information. These findings suggest that people rely on negative past experiences to guide trust decisions with new individuals, leading people to learn to distrust.

Roberts, Annabelle R., Emma E. Levine, and Justin Landy, “Disclosing Shortcomings in Morality, Sociability, and Competence: Differing Effects on Trust,” Manuscript in preparation.

What information should people share about themselves with others? Previous research finds that sharing personal information, even negative information, about oneself with others can improve interpersonal relationships. However, this body of research has failed to consider the role of disclosure domain. Across six studies (N = 2,306), we find that disclosing morality flaws (e.g., dishonest, unfair) reduces trust compared to disclosing competence (e.g., unintelligent, incapable) or sociability flaws (e.g., cold, introverted) in a variety of professional and social settings. People both feel less affective trust towards individuals who share a morality flaw, compared to other types of flaws, and are less likely to choose to trust them (Studies 1 and 2). We explore the underlying mechanism and find that people who share shortcomings in morality are perceived as having more harmful intentions towards others, which leads others to trust them less (Studies 3 and 4). We also compare disclosing shortcomings to refusing to disclose. Although disclosing shortcomings in both competence and sociability increase trust (relative to refusing to disclose), disclosing shortcomings in morality does not (Studies 5 and 6). These results challenge prior research about the benefits of self-disclosure and provide new insights into the consequences of sharing personal information with others.