1988: The children, now teenagers, who were better able to delay gratification in preschool show greater academic, emotional and social competence, including higher SAT scores.
1999: Mischel proposes a framework for willpower: a rational “know” system promotes self-control, and an emotional “go” system undermines it.
2005: At age seven children begin to understand being “of two minds,” called the Ulysses conflict. The Greek hero's conflicting desires led him to strap himself to his ship's mast so he could hear the Sirens’ song without succumbing to it.
2009: Failing to delay gratification at age four increases the risk of being overweight at age 11.
2011: The differences in Mischel's original subjects’ ability to resist temptation remain evident four decades later.
2012: A child's ability to exert self-control is also influenced by environment, a new study shows.
This article was originally published with the title A Marshmallow in the Hand.
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9 Comments
Add CommentI think belief in one's own ability to control others may also play a part. If the child has faith in their ability to get the adult to deliver up what is promised, then they will also be more likely to wait for the promised reward. Since believing in one's ability to control the external world is a key part in trying to change things, it seems reasonable that this would have a big influence on how successful one is in life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI just want to ask, how in world did they do this with pigeons? Did they have a pigeon-whisperer or something?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot to mention, low ability to trust a wait for another marshmallow could = bad schools, bad parenting, poor nutrition, and a number of other factors. Meaning will power may have no direct causation for success. It was simply showing that these students were poorly taught, malnourished and facing hard odds.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere we can see the left at work. From a single study we have the tentative opinion expressed :
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"these differences may be the result of more than just innate self-control"
and immediately we have it from nicholasjh1 that it's nothing to do with innate characteristics.
Even the conclusion that non-innate factors made the difference is not necessarily justified: it may be that the kids just had the (innate?) ability to intuit that they were in an unpredictable environment, where practicing self-control is unlikely to produce results. I think TTLG is making a similar point.
But Phalaris, you are willfully overlooking the data given that those who chose not to wait did poorly in life. Those were just examples of what may have been the reasons for success/failure. The real point I was trying to make though is how easily correlation can be construed as causation when scientist start making assumptions like this and spinning stories about why they got a specific correlation. There was a strong correlation in this test and now psychologist have been using it for years to try an prove something that may not exist because they never controlled for confounding factors such as education / nutrition / and balance in home life. Poor science is my point. I would agree that TTLG's idea is another possibility, and in fact having grown up with many blacks and whites in Detroit (I am white) I found that I was constantly receiving the message that I would succeed and having people agree to my requests and assume that I would do well on the assignments. This was not automatically true of my peers who were not white. It has a real effect on people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid the authors of the original study actually claim that the observed impulse control was innate?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would appreciate a reference for the pigeon study.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDue to the massive bigotry inherent in almost everything done in the 1960s I'd have to say that the study is meaningless and a new zero sum starting point study should be done where no assumptions are made and everything is considered possible as a reason. Then gather real empirical evidence and follow where it points.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe first question I would ask is "was there already any relationship between the child and the adult?" If there was none then the child had no reason to trust that the adult would give them the second marshmallow.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSecondly, small children have no concept of time, to them 15 minutes may as well be 3 minutes, so telling them to wait for 15 minutes before they get to eat the lolly is like telling someone in a dark room with no time piece that they can be released in two days.
This whole test was done so that only the richest, and therefore the best educated kids were going to succeed. It was done so that some rich scientist could get richer on more government funding to prove nothing useful.