Friend of mine did a lot of reading in anthropology because he was a Green Beret, and was puzzled by the differences he found working in Southeast Asia and Africa vs. the predominantly North European culture he grew up in. What he concluded was that the vastly different societies stemmed from one thing, and one thing only: The necessity to prepare and plan for long winters. In the tropics, the feckless can merely move a few miles, and find more abundant food sources. In the north? You fail to plan and prepare, you’re going to freeze to death after eating your kids, especially in the agrarian cultures. In Africa and many of the Asian cultures he worked in, you would go and say “Hey, let’s work on building this X so life can be better in a year…”, and the locals would look at him as though they thought him mad. Their horizon for “future benefit” is nearly instantaneous, while the long-term is something that will take care of itself. The enervating effects of hot weather, rain, and disease were also features he identified as problematic–The landscape is lush, food is easy to find, but the inability to build anything that lasts leads to a passive lassitude about things like building and maintaining roads.

So, TL;DR–This is interesting, but I’m not sure that it really tells us much about things of significance. Children who can wait ten minutes for a second treat may not grow up into adults who can plan and actually execute, when working towards long-term goals. It’s the patience of the hunter compared to the patience of a farmer…

Patience tends to predict life-success better than IQ. But there’s massive overlap usually.