ISET would like to heartily congratulate resident faculty members Norberto Pignatti and Karine Torosyan on the publication of a new article, “Patience, Cognitive Abilities, and Cognitive Effort: Survey and Experimental Evidence From a Developing Country” in American Behavioral Scientist [NOTE: those unable to access the published version can find the latest version of the working paper here].

In the piece, the authors examine the relationship between patience and various measures of cognitive ability, as taken from a sample of 107 participants drawn from the adult population in Tbilisi. The paper sheds light on the relationship between cognition and patience by documenting that the correlation between cognitive abilities and delay discounting is weaker for the same group of individuals if the choices are incentivized. The authors speculate that higher cognitive effort, which induces higher involvement of the cognitive system, moderates the relationship between patience and cognition.