The marshmallow experiment was created by Stanford
professor Walter Mischel in the 1960s and though it may appear simplistic, it
has changed the way that educators and psychologists view life success. Here’s
how it works: a preschool is given a single marshmallow and told that they are
free to eat it right away OR if they can wait for a little while they will be
given a second marshmallow. What’s a 3-to-5 year old to do?
Evaluating the literature, Drake Bennett of Business Week
recently wrote: “Tracking the kids over time, Mischel found that the ability to
hold out in this seemingly trivial exercise had real and profound consequences.
As they matured and became adults, the kids who had shown the ability to wait
got better grades, were healthier, enjoyed greater professional success, and
proved better at staying in relationships – even decades after they took the
test. They were, in short, better at life . . . . The lesson is that it’s not
just intelligence that matters, but self-control and patience and being able to
tame one’s impulses – from the desire to eat the marshmallow to the desire to
blow off an exam or have an affair.”
The new research, out of the
University of Rochester, threatens to roast Mischel’s work. In a creative
series of experiments they found that the ability to delay gratification wasn’t
simply an innate ability. Instead, it’s greatly influenced by the stability of
one’s environment. Explained lead researcher Celeste Kidd, as quoted in a
University of Rochester press release this fall:
"Our results definitely temper the popular
perception that marshmallow-like tasks are very powerful diagnostics for
self-control capacity.” Celeste Kidd is a doctoral candidate in brain and
cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and co-authored the study
with Richard Aslin and Holly Palmeri.
Added co-author Aslin: "We know that to some extent,
temperament is clearly inherited, because infants differ in their behaviors
from birth. But this experiment provides robust evidence that young children's
action are also based on rational decisions about their environment."
In challenging the age-old marshmallow test, Kidd and her
colleagues prepped the preschoolers by cleverly creating two unique
environment, one reliable, one unreliable. Here’s how they did it: the
preschoolers were given a drawing task and a set of old, used crayons, and
worn-out stickers. One group (the unreliable group) was told that, in a
moment, an adult would return with a batch of new crayons. But when the adult
returned, they apologized and said they had no fresh crayons for them. A bit
later, these same students were told that an adult would soon return with a new
batch of stickers. Same result – when the adult returned, they apologized for
having none. By contrast, in the reliable group, the adult returned with
fresh crayons and shiny new stickers, as they had promised.
What happened?
The researchers were shocked at the results, which were
so strong that they abandoned a larger field test. The results were that
definitive. The preschoolers in the unreliable group waited an average of 3
minutes before eating the single marshmallow; the preschoolers in the reliable
group waited an average of 12 minutes (nine out of the 14 kids in the reliable
condition held out the full 15 minutes for a second marshmallow, while only one
of the 14 in the unreliable condition did).
Bottom line: the researchers maintain that preschoolers,
young as they are, are fully capable of making rational decisions. So a
person’s innate ability to delay gratification (linked, per 40 years of
research, to life success) may be uprooted by an unstable environment. One can
imagine a child who grows up in an unsettled household. While they may possess
an innate ability to delay gratification, they might also grab that first
marshmallow . . . while they can.
* Lead researcher Kidd cautions parents: “Don't do the
marshmallow test on your kitchen table and conclude something about your child.
It especially would not work with a parent, because your child has all sorts of
strong expectations about what a person who loves them very much is likely to
do." Kidd’s remarks were contained in the University of Rochester press
release.
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