The obvious conclusion is that household income is a predictor of both:
- inability to delay gratification, and
- higher academic achievement
This makes sense when you consider that someone growing up in a poor household may have both:
- less reliable/continuous/predictable access to material things, meaning they would rationally seize immediate opportunities rather than taking the risk of a larger future opportunity, and
- less academic support
Now, this new study (OP) goes even further, finding that the correlation itself is weak.
[0] Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J., & Quan, H. (2018). Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes. Psychological Science, 29(7), 1159-1177. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661
Household income is a predictor[0] of a lot of things.
It strongly correlates zip code (almost identical) and from these you can make good predictions of race and even politics. A naive mistake a lot of people often make is thinking that removing explicit race data removes race from your model. It's still there, but now only expresses itself indirectly. This is not just true for things like race or politics, but for a lot of factors, which is why causal statistics is such a different (and harder) ball game.
[0] Predictor means correlates with, not causal. I see some people confusing this in the comments. I've never liked the word because of this result.
In that sense it is very much a causal relationship.
1) Causal relationships are directional. Which then follow your own logic. You can reason that it is directional because you can see that there are many ways to get into rich zipcodes without being rich.
2) You can find many rich people that don't move into wealthy zip codes.
So actually, it is just correlating. If we use Judea's ladder, then it is causal in that sense, but that's the lowest rung and not what we'd call causal in a colloquial (or even statistical) sense other than to be pedantic.
In aggregate, in large data sets, race comes through - especially with a few datapoints. For example, when I worked at a fintech company: with household income and zip code, we could accurately target race with >80% accuracy [0]. Add a few more datapoints, and this would very quickly get closer to 95% accuracy.
That was an _actual_ party-trick[1] demo we did, alongside also de-anonymizing coworkers based on car model, zip code, and bank name.
[0] I worked as a SecEng and were trying to prove that we were(n't) inadvertently targeting race, for compliance reasons. In the end, the business realized the threat and made required changes to prevent this.
[1] We were doing this to make a case for stricter controls and stronger isolation/security measures for storing non-PII data. The business also saw the light on this. Sometimes we'd narrow them down to 30 or 40 people in their zip code, and sometimes (such as a coworker with an old Bentley), it was an instant hit.
(The program involved having children who were in regular contact with the criminal justice system.)
You're overconstraining what I've said. You're perfectly right that zipcodes in Appalachias account for many poor people that are also white. But actually, you're correctly inferring that you can still infer race out of this, because you're inferring that the majority of these zipcodes are also white. Right? White people are also a race. You're correct that zip code is also able to strongly indicate poor white people. In fact, it is also even able to strongly indicate rich black people. Though you might guess not to the same degree as the overall rate is lower, but people do congregate.
Think about it in a different framing: zipcode strongly correlates with people congregating together who are culturally and economically similar.
I think this version should make sense (especially as the locality affects the culture), and that from here you can extrapolate to recognize that people of varying demographics aren't homogeneously distributed among zipcodes of similar economic bins. I part of this is easily explained by a simple fact: when people move, they like to move to where they have friends, family, or other connections.
I’m sure that overworked wealthy people have plenty of vices, i.e. “poor impulse control”. But they have successful careers so those things are coping mechanisms, really. It’s compartmentalized.
In any case my cynicism would just be vindicated if a study just turned out to rationalize (as an emergent property because, duh, there is a population overlap between researchers and this group) the position of the upper-middle class.
or better grabbing-opportunity skills. If you repeat the experiment and the "doubling" of the marshmallow turns into "a teen barging into the room and stealing the marshmallow", who'd be the wiser kid?
Later you decide to eat your marshmallow, but the other kid sees this and demands half. He goes to mom and she makes you share.
Lesson learned: either hide what you have or don't delay gratification.
I feel like this scenario is becoming more common in (US) politics these days (eg student loan forgiveness, housing bubble in 2008). Or it could've anyways been happening and I just didn't notice.
Consistently, those in poverty (living on < $1 per day) do not simply 'try harder' to save and make better financial decisions by being restricting their impulses. Instead they find clever ways to outwit themselves.
One mother in India, intent on accruing $2000 (?) for her daughter's dowry, knew she didn't have the willpower to "just save $200 per year over 10 years", though her annual income was greater than $200.
But she had the foresight to take out a $2000 loan from a bank, immediately move it to a saving account, and pay back the bank. The interest on her loan was almost like an extrinsic-motivation fee.
Most people on this website live in cultures where the value system places prestige upon accruing money, so it's easy for us to do so because the incentives line up. In parts of India that's not so. To simplify a little, their value systems places prestige upon spending money on social events/life cycle rituals, so it's easy for them to spend money on e.g. a funeral but significantly harder to hold onto the money.
This, in Gregory's view (which I symphathise with) has nothing to do with being rich or poor. The rich in Bastar also spend a lot on life cycle rituals, but they outearn their spending.
For the interested, I plan on publishing a review on that book later this month: https://two-wrongs.com/book-review-savage-money.html
I once watched a movie about this called The Wolf of Wall Street
Things that look like failures in long term planning (to people with resource surpluses) can actually be optimal decisions (to people without resource surpluses).
In that case, it was the observation that maximizing currency profit from farming in a society that experiences arbitrary taxation and repeated famine is useless -- if no one has food then no one will sell you any, assuming your saved currency hasn't already been seized.
In contrast, optimizing for familial and social ties were much more reliable ways to see yourself through then-common perils.
If you're poor and don't have a stable living situation, delaying gratification presents risks to you. (ones that people with money and stability don't have to consider)
Sometimes people are dumb, but sometimes they're optimizing for factors others are oblivious to.
> But because these households wobble on the edge of disaster continually, that changes the calculus. These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits.
> [...] Consequently, for the family, money is likely to become useless the moment it is needed most. So while keeping some cash around against an emergency (or simply for market transactions – more on that later) might be a good idea, keeping nearly a year’s worth of expenses to make it through a bad harvest was not practical.
> In contrast, optimizing for familial and social ties were much more reliable ways to see yourself through then-common perils.
Social ties are no more helpful in a famine than currency is. People who can't sell you food can't give you food either. They are insurance against the case that your crop fails, not that everybody's crop fails.
Currency is fine in that scenario. The tendency not to grow the most profitable set of crops is a method of avoiding crop failure, not a method of mitigating it when it happens.
Likely this is related to the marshmallow. I need to eat. I will eat it now. I cannot guarantee the marginal return on more marshmallows. I mean maybe if real life was like "wait one minute and double your money" people would do it, but typically it's like, lock up your cash for weeks, months, years at a time for margins, not for doubling your marshmallow count.
In real life, realized savings or gains of 1 or 2 or 4 percent for a 6 month wait is not worth the RISK of locking up that marshmallow (or T-bond) when having that marshmallow locked up may result in say, no housing.
In that kind of scenario, everyone's savings are constantly wiped out; there's no difference between "wait one minute and double your money" and "wait one minute and all your money disappears".
I would dispute that line of thinking. Wealthier people who are used to getting what they want when they want it would have worse impulse control. Poorer people are used to having to wait already.
Past a certain level of desperation, there can be a hard-to-escape level of nihilism - "why bother saving, something's going to take it and I'm going to be fucked tomorrow no matter how much I do". Whether this is an accurate description of the situation or not is going to depend, but I have met a number of people who think like this even when they've not been that desperate in decades, and it bites them as soon as they stop making so much that it masks the problem.
And in some cases, it can be practically true - there's various systems that are designed with nasty edges where if you have enough resources accrued, you stop being given support, but the thresholds, by design or incident, are far below the point where you might be able to escape the pit, so you can't save your way out of it - you'll suffer a catastrophic penalty for accumulating wealth, and then be worse off.
Once you get past a certain level of instability, you start seeing gains again from saving if you do it, but not necessarily immediately - after all, if you're earning $9 an hour, at perhaps 160hr/month, and you're spending $800/mo on rent, that's $640 ignoring taxes to spend on anything else, so even if you somehow spent _none_ of that on taxes or food or w/e, it'd take more than a month to save one month's rent. So the benefits of saving are slow to accrue, when your income is not much past your expenses, and it can be hard to convince someone who's never had that level of safety and stability that it's worth it when it's going to take a long time to be worth it.
If your income is outsized enough to your expenses, then it can be more obvious much faster, _but only if you've ever had to think about it_ - if you've been externalizing your life expenses to your parents or a trust fund, it's even more foreign to you than the people described above who have concluded saving isn't useful, because you've never had to think about money as a resource in your life, it's just a thing you spend unendingly.
The authors in a book “The Poor Economics” make a similar assertion. It did make a lot of sense to me.
It may sound silly when everything is framed in terms of marshmallows, but it's probably a safe bet that lessons learned in life will carry over to an experiment unless they carefully consider what the experiment is asking of them.
Another way I've seen people reason over things like this is in terms of an MMORPG/ARPG. 'You need to invest in your character to get stronger to beat the next boss. That will pay back in X amount of time, but if the value of the loot drops too much in that time then it's not worth it.'
This does not really prove much, since attitudes to long-term gratification are probably shared within households due to the effect of idiosyncratic cultural factors, which might affect both income and academic achievement. One would need to look for a "natural experiment" where divergence in income was totally exogenous and not due to any shared factor in order to conclusively resolve the issue.
Controversial? There's a major effect in every context. It'd be hard to get less controversial.
What is a functioning adult, and where are those statistics from?
Hard work is only a path to success if you're working on the right things. For example, if I decided to be an Olympic athlete, and worked like the devil, I have zero chance of making the team.
Cyril-f “twin”. https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/no-one-expects-young-men-to-...
You'll be extremely hard pressed to find researchers conducting these twin studies who minimize the role of either genetic or environmental impact on certain aspects in the way you did.
Twin studies don't exclude environmental causes because twins have the same maternal environment.
We know that patience can be improved through training
All it tells you really is whether the person has to grab what joy they can now because their life experience has taught them that promises about tomorrow sometimes do not come. You see that marshmallow, you enjoy it while you can.
And that’s also ignoring the joy of small things. Three marshmallows is as enjoyable as fifty. So now you need to decide if one is enough joy or if you should wait for ten or whatever the reward is.
I remember my mother doing the marshmallow test on me, aged 3. She put two packs of play-doh moulds on the stairs where I could see them - one with three in it, one with five in it.
She told me that if I didn’t touch them, then she would give me the pack with five for my birthday a week later, and the pack with three to a friend. If I did touch them, she would give them both to said friend.
After passing them on the stairs for the umpteenth time, after a few days, I caved, and opened the small pack.
She made good on her threat.
This was 40 years ago, and remains seared into my mind as a learning moment, and I have, since that moment, been absolutely ruled by delayed gratification - I never made that error again.
So, in short, merely administering the test likely influences the outcome, as humans have memories, and children learn from experience.
> - inability to delay gratification, and
> - higher academic achievement
> This makes sense when you consider that someone growing up in a poor household may have both:
> - less reliable/continuous/predictable access to material things, meaning they would rationally seize immediate opportunities rather than taking the risk of a larger future opportunity, and
> - less academic support
While this is all true, there's another factor that no one ever brings in: wealthy people are likely to possess attributes that lead to wealth accumulation like conscientiousness, intelligence, ability to delay gratification, etc. Those traits are quite heritable, so their children are likely to have higher income.
People are allergic to the idea that outcomes have something to do with heritable characteristics. And allergic to the idea that economic success is related to positive personality traits.
There's also a component of giving others the perception that you're capable. Seeming smart, navigating the politics of a school or workplace, fitting in. A lot of this seems like it's obviously learned, and that affluent people will be ahead.
It's just as likely that proximity to these characteristics is sufficient. As heritable as those might be, inheritance of assets is protected by law. What more heritability is needed?
> People are allergic to the idea that outcomes have something to do with heritable characteristics.
Heritable only through learned behaviors, imitating family. Too many playboys squandering grandpa's hard-earned wealth to think otherwise. The right lessons just weren't taught for some. Positive personality traits do relate to economic success, but too few who have those have the parenting skills to transfer those to the next generation. Their genes certainly aren't doing the heavy-lifting.
I'm not sure we can draw that conclusion. Household income is a predictor of higher education -- that is well established -- and higher education as a child could mean you are more likely to have learned lessons on the benefits of waiting vs instant gratification (the principle behind savings and investments).
So higher education _might_ be correlated with delayed gratification, but not household income itself.
Could you please add if you think the prediction goes in the positive or negative direction?
the inverse makes equal 'common sense':
wealth begs complacency and indifference
yes, there may be a correlation but i bet it's insignificant as the factors playing into this are just too numerous.
THIS — the environment definitely changes what is the most rational behavior.
In economics, this is Counterparty Risk — the risk that the other party will fail to fulfill their obligation. E.g., as a vendor it is rational to accept a piece of plastic from a complete stranger without a word, because the issuer of the card is good for the money, and has taken on the problem if the buyer doesn't pay their bill that month.
For kids in affluent stable households, it is rational to expect that they'll get the second cookie in 20 minutes.
For a kid in an unstable household, being told by someone who neither looks nor talks like they do, that they'll get two cookies in 20 minutes, it's often rational to take what you can get NOW.
The marshmallow test measures mainly environmental counterparty risk in everyday events.
Seems when controlling for those factors, the 'marshmallow effect' disappears.
This is good science. Discover an effect. Generate a hypothesis. Keep testing until you find the limits of that hypothesis, and/or hidden variables.
Time to do some GWAS to see if there is indeed a genetic component :)
The entire reason they did the marshmallow study is because most studies on impulse control cannot avoid confounding factors.
Time value money matters if I am offering you money now vs later. E.g. if you are in debt money later effectively involves the interest earned on that money at likely 25% or worst case 900%. If you aren't in debt the alternative is investing at 7% with risk or 2-5% without risk.
Trust is incredibly important. Money now is money now, money later might be money later if they actually fulfill the promise. And this isn't income agnostic as the risk of this varies wildly based on the impact of the money. A "get back on your feet" amount of money today or a slightly larger amount in a year implies a lot more risk than some spending money on either case.
Additionally while genetic markers have sometimes been effective at predicting even those have trouble with the random nature of gene transference.
I believe that any experiment that involves the whole life of someone is doomed and useless.
Um, what exactly are you trying to say?
Controlling for things is mostly bad statistics, although of course all social science is bad statistics.
Confounding variables are bad controls more often than they're good ones, so controlling for them introduces collider bias. Also, finding a result and then controlling for something is a multiple comparison fallacy.
The correct thing to do is to have a theory of causation and then design a study that's capable of detecting it, not the other way round.
Can controlling for household income introduce collider bias?
(Sorry I know the words you're using, and a few years ago I started reading Pearl's book, but I did not finish it and do not have a strong grasp of the concepts.)
It doesn’t even need to generalize. This is just a basic food security thing and is part of the reason why obesity is counter intuitively common among people who suffer from food insecurity.
As an example: my parents bought used Dodge/Plymouth/Chrysler products and my brothers first used Jeep wound up being a hot mess that caused a large blast radius. I purchase the cheapest 'new' vehicle that fits my needs [0] and only bought one used car (as a backup for all the fun accidents my ex-wife got into.)
As another more painful example: My first few years in the workforce alongside student loan debt, then alongside the 2008 crash, on top of my adolescent observations an helping my now-ex-wife through college, caused me to wait way way way to long to start contributing to my future retirement.
Semi-positive counterpoints:
1. I buy stuff that lasts, it takes more research and sometimes more up front but as I get older it saves me more and more money compared to people who live in a more disposable culture. I'm not afraid to shop/wait for deals and I make sure to think about every major purchase I make. I take good care of stuff I own.
2. I've been able to learn how to fix a -lot- of stuff (working at a bike shop helped) and it has both saved me money and save waste in general.
3. I can fit all of my mementos -and- important stuff including work desk (aside from bed/couch/etc) in a portable storage unit if needed.
[0] - Except the WRX, that was a 'my life is in a terrible spot but I survived a year'. OTOH I got a base model with only a couple options and it was <30k before taxes.
> part of the reason why obesity is counter intuitively common among people who suffer from food insecurity.
Bigger elephant in that room is the nutritional content provided to people in that category as well as access to that nutrition.
Correlation, but of course, not causation. We need to be very careful about storytelling, especially when it comes to behavioral studies, where it's easy and intellectually satisfying.
I should have said something like "it's just as plausible that ...".
My main point is that these 3 studies don't provide any evidence that teaching someone willpower will help with other life outcomes.
But that distinction has largely fallen out of the zeitgeist and many people now just take anything ever published in a "scientific journal" as sound.
It represents a huge regression in scientific literacy among the public and sets us up for people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions because so much of what they've incorrectly come to accept as science never really was.
There's nothing essentially non-scientific about the fields; it's just harder to control variables. The entire "hard science" vs "soft science" beef is a little silly when "hard science" isn't equipped to reason about most human concepts. Try not to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. I'd prefer to stop differentiating between the two ends of the spectrum as if they're inherently different.
I also find that people who poo-poo "soft sciences" still have strong beliefs about humans, society, etc, they just don't even bother trying to ground them in evidence.
I imagine it must be really frustrating for people actually trying to learn facts when the famous results are dominated by nonsense like this, power poses, hungry judges, etc.
It's not just in research either. E.g. in the UK they did a regression of missed school vs exam results, noticed that they were correlated and now it's a criminal offence to take your children out of school for holidays, even for a single day.
Nothing like that is happening. This false equivalence originates from several types of people:
1. Journalists that want/need to foment the largest possible catastrophe.
2. Political pundits which want/need to discredit some field.
3. Social scientists playing defense.
A big problem is that "hard science" conclusions often only apply to very specific circumstances, but scientists and the general public then extrapolate to more generic situations. The consequence is that a lot of things that are supposedly based on "hard science" aren't really proven at all, it's just someone making educated guesses.
Psychology intertwines just about every field you can imagine. Anthropology, neurology, biology, chemistry, you name it. They're fundamentally working on a level much, much higher than the hard sciences. So the sheer amount of variables is absurd, but also how they work together.
My local library did not exactly have access to journals either.
I don’t think scientific literacy has ever been high. Society relied on other publications and the government to interpret the information for us. For better or worse.
In the face of all these potential confounders, more statistics and controls seem necessary than, say, in a physics collider experiment on electrons (each electron possessing exactly two characteristics, location and spin, and all such electrons behaving identically regardless of location or time). Yet, even in this setting of simplicity and reproducibility, physicists have still found it necessary to establish a stringent, five-sigma threshold for discovery — 3 sigma anomalies come and go. Such a stringent threshold is unthinkable in psychology due to practical considerations. Ergo, it’s hard for to see how psychology can become a reliable empirical science.
If you make the hypothesis first, 3-sigma is quite enough. Many physics experiments do exactly that, but famous high-energy ones don't.
(That said, not having an hypothesis beforehand was very common in psychology before the 21st century.)
The effect shows up even with randomly generated samples. Because there are floors and ceilings to the data. If you're low, you can only guess so much further down, so you're likely to overestimate your ability. If you're high, you can only guess so much further up, so you're likely to underestimate your ability.
There is a reason why many scientists diplomatically classify social "science" as a soft science. Less diplomatically minded scientists like Feynmann call it pseudoscience.
There’s nothing that could be done in social science that you wouldn’t be skeptical of and want to dislike.
As an aside, I believe one interesting confounder in the marshmallow test is that it tests more (or at least as much) the subject's trust that the eventual reward will actually be given as it does the subject's ability to wait for the reward. So if you live in an unpredictable environment, it's better to just eat it.
I saw a lot more people saving for the future rather than spending it all, which I surprisingly found the other way around in Canada, which is a predictable environment.
I think _everyone_ would take that opportunity if it was presented. Or at least most people.
> The vouchers, each corresponding to a share in the national wealth, were distributed equally among the population, including minors. They could be exchanged for shares in the enterprises to be privatized. Because most people were not well-informed about the nature of the program or were very poor, they were quick to sell their vouchers for money, unprepared or unwilling to invest. [1]
This recent article seems to indicate that it's all just horse feathers and so you can make up any confounder you want to explain it away...
There are finite resources for replication and so those resources must be allocated. High-profile results tend to attract good and skeptical replication attempts. This has always seemed like a pretty good approach to me. But replication takes time, and some people think it's a catastrophe that "bad" results don't immediately get corrected.
When I took a look at a frequently cited paper 'disproving' Dunning-Kreuger, I was surprised by just how god awful the methodology actually was:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Tqm8Jet9mzo6buj9/the-dunnin...
Daniel Kahneman's Wiki page doesnt make him look out to be a fraudster, despite him confidently mentioning studies that never replicated, despite him signing off on fake data from other fraudsters.
Obviously signing off on known-fake data is straight up lying, which must remain in a different category than simply doing a study that doesn't replicate.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26799458/
From a game theoretic point of view it makes sense:
If your internal model of adults suggests, that you should put a gausian prior on the waiting time until they keep their promise, i.e. most adults in you life tend to keep their word, waiting makes sense.
If however your experience tells you to assume a power law as prior, cutting you losses after a time is perfectly rational.
This has a certain beauty, since it would mean that success in life correlates with dependable parents and given the temporal component I actually would assume causality.
As an aside, psychological experiments tend to become famous by being controversial, which in turn probably constitutes a bias against replicatability. There might be a lot of boring psychological experiments with unsurprising results that replicate without issue.
Tricky subject by all accounts
also in my life i notice a big difference in performance from when i had goals/vision for my life vs. going through the motions.
IMO i think you need to have goals/vision/standards for all the important areas in your life (hobbies,partner,career,family,relationships)
"Doing well in life," "delaying gratification," and "long-term goals" are about as far from concretely measurable traits as you can get.
What about a person who always waits to buy games on sale, but has experienced food insecurity and won't pass on free food, even if it's unhealthy? I could go on... there are countless variables when trying to evaluate those traits. What this study is saying is that extrapolating such broad strokes from small indicators is probably not a smart move.
The marshmallow test is not really testing hunger or self control. It tests how willing people are to align with authority/the bigger picture.
The ideal participant isn't someone doing the calculus that 2 > 1. It's someone who recognizes that they are being tested, and cares about that more than any number of marshmallows.
The question isn't "how hungry am I?", but "what does adult attention mean to me?".
And that's why all of this stuff will stop replicating eventually, why new psychotherapies revert to the mean - it doesn't have the same amount of meaning for the test-givers after decades of trials.
I feel you're making the exact same mistake as the original researchers.
The marshmallow test is a proxy, but it's impossible to say what it's a proxy for in any given individual. One kid will wait because they're scared the researcher will be angry if they don't. Another kid will wait because they recently learned what marshmallows are, and they actually really want to eat two. A third will not wait, because they've never seen a marshmallow before and would rather try one first before getting two.
If you can measure this trait by putting marshmallows in front of 4½ olds is a whole other question.
E.g. if we got really used to telling 12 year olds that the marshmallow test finding indicates that the ability to put of immediate rewards for larger later rewards is really important, could you effectively get (slightly older) kids to learn to delay gratification more, such that their performance as small children matters less?
Or (more likely) if you raise a generation with more distracting technology, can you destroy a whole generation's ability to patiently wait for a larger reward?
I suspect the outcomes were fairly different although might both fit under your same category.
Bill Gates could drop out of college and skip school because he had wealthy family that would have supported him if things went poorly. Poor people do not have that option, so when they skip school, they instead get labeled truants and harassed by the state.
By definition, it sounds like these folk were able to delay gratification quite well.
The second part I partially agree with. But establishing a routine like meeting some friend every Thursday evening, that can be good.
What I remember is that they summarize this as "Delayed gratification is the root of civilization."
And while this is pretty early in the history of the world book, I read no further because I doubted I would find anything more insightful in the subsequent hundreds of pages.
...
Years later I tried to find that quote and I could not. I still believe it is a valuable insight though even if I hallucinated it.
Like, I've never liked marshmallows. A second marshmallow would have been uninteresting to me. And even if it were I could totally see a kid going "eh, it's just a marshmallow, I'm going to just eat it now and then go think about something else".
Being able to delay instant gratification for greater rewards is only valuable in cases where you actually care about the reward. Someone who applies it everywhere regardless of interest level is just min-maxing life, and it wouldn't surprise me if obsessively min-maxing even little details doesn't correlate with better outcomes.
Literature, art, human psychology. A good writer, artist, or therapist can make a truly great contribution. But they cannot conduct disciplined experiments and establish truth numerically.
And that is OK.
What is not OK is the cabal of academic psychologists who don’t even know that they’re full of shit because they aren’t trained in any of the numerical / “hard” disciplines. (Hard as in well-defined, not difficult).
Almost the entirety of the lower bracket of employment works this way
“Do customer service for this big tech company and you could get into a corporate role”
Except that the number of people who have every successfully done that is close to 0% of hires
One of the things I love about Reddit is the visibility it has given to the “promises that no one will ever keep” system that runs most retail/service jobs
I'm supposed to sit here and stare at this marshmallow for some indeterminate amount of time, just to get one more marshmallow? Offer me a whole bag and we'll talk. Otherwise, you're wasting my time. My marshmallow would be gone before they could finish explaining the task.
Your proxy tests for self control have no power here.
https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/new-study-disavows-marshmal...
> As the researchers predicted, the study finds only a tiny correlation between marshmallow test times and midlife capital formation. A graduate’s score on the self-regulation index was, however, modestly predictive of their middle-age capital formation, the study finds.
I'd expect a decay of delayed gratification in aggregate. And this will vary from individual to individual dependant on their expectations/(negative realizations - positive realizations) or similar, and negative realizations are supposedly weighted higher than positive by a factor of 3-5. This exacerbates the rapidity of decay.
I'd posit, then, that delayed gratification can predict within a window; that window may be a "critical window" which leads to enhanced success. Failing to obtain that success then predicts regular decrements to delayed gratification metrics.
And delayed gratification isn't beneficial in all scenarios anyways. Sometimes the payoff is in immediate and remorseless action.
Time it takes to earn an extra marshmallow: 20 minutes.
Hourly earned value (assuming you like marshmallows): 12 cents.
Reasons not to like marshmallows: The principal ingredient is gelatin, a protein obtained by boiling skin, tendons, ligaments, and/or bones with water. And they don't really taste that great.
It has always seemed to me that the best strategy in this situation is to eat the marshmallow right away in the hopes that the psychologists will let you out of the room early. A better strategy might be to refuse to stay in the room for 20 minutes.
Does the listener fully comprehend "the rules" as they're being laid out?
The listener is evaluating the trusthworthiness of the speaker?
The listener may evaluate their own skills in pulling off a deception by taking the marshmallow and lie about it. Due to "the rules" laid out by the speaker, does the listener consider they may change "the rules" (influenced by their historical experience with adults)?
Does the listener place any value on a 'marshmallow' at all, maybe a toy, or a type of item previously identified as having high value would lead to different results?
Adjusting for variables in the 'fuzzy' sciences can be difficult due to the innate subjectivity.
There must be a better way of judging the validity of a social experiment using first principles. There’s a huge psychological side that people completely ignore.
The marshmallow test deals with kids so it’s noisy by nature, that there are two mild associations is interesting. It has mild predictive value.
I think there’s a strong desire to have this test shown to be faulty. Perhaps because the test is so easy to do, parents do it on their own kids and don’t like the outcome.
Indeed, there's enough of a desire that you can P-hack into failing results.
If the child has reliable parents they tend to pass the test. The children of reliable parents do better in life, which is obvious.
The test also fails to account for a temperate child that doesn’t actually want more than one in the first place and isn’t playing the researchers game.
Sometimes it feels like much of social psychology exists primarily to sell books and lecture series tickets.
Obviously short attention span. And no filter on his emotions.
(Which is not to say that it's wrong. Unless you're at serious risk of starvation, a marshmallow is only a feeble token reward.)
What if the child was being playful by not following the obvious "correct" path? Wouldn't that point to someone who is social and humorous and happy? Isn't that an advantage?
I don’t like marshmallows. Never have. If I was run through the marshmallow test I would have done whatever it takes to get out of there quickly and not have to eat marshmallows.
Psychology is not a reproducible science strictly speaking for that reason.
Even worse, the replication crisis is only one reason that the public has continued to lose faith in science in the post truth era.
It’s also the disinformation campaigns that set out to attack whatever’s in a groups interest whether it be politics or the environment.
Maybe the coup de grâce will be social media which encapsulates people into bubbles seemingly impenetrable to the truth.
While there are very real issues about reproducibility and motivation, rarely do studies actually claim what pop science puts in the headlines.
Popper has a better approach with the idea that evidence cannot establish a scientific hypothesis, it can only “falsify” it.
It is actually how we write computer programs in the modern era too.
The Scientific realism camp is committed to a literal interpretation of scientific claims about the world, but others like myself consider it confusing the map for the territory.
But that is the realm of philosophy and not science.
While the time scale and wasted effort from the flawed original paper is regrettable, this is the process working in the long run.
This paper's falsification is the process working, irrespective of some claims of 'ethics and morals'
Studies about humans will always be subject to problems, exactly because of ethics and morals, e.g the tuskegee experiments.
But there’s been a huge amount of questionable behavior and there has to be personal responsibility with that. It’s not an overstatement to call this part of one of the biggest failures of science in history, and you can’t just sweep that under the rug as unintentional.
As far as pop science I’m not addressing that but those sins don’t exonerate everything else.
I don’t get what you mean about Popper either, he likely would’ve been all over the reproduceability crisis and calling out integrity as a key issue.
Yes, science is self-correcting and things have definitely started to improve after learning from all of this. But the damage has been done. at the time when we need science, the most it’s been discarded by a significant part of the population.
At about age 4, I ended up literally maxing out the delayed gratification test and being sent home with a ridiculously large bag of M&M's, much to this dismay of my mom.
With that as context, I wonder whether some of the changes/lack of reproducibility are actually measures of decreasing economic mobility and economic agency within the US.
Early studies on ability to delay gratification were done during the favorable economic conditions baby boomers grew up in. More recent studies were done in eras with far less economic mobility.
It's quite likely you'd see a smaller effect today, not because the impact isn't there, but because it's so much harder today to make a significant upward change in your economic status.
Perhaps we could call it "The Marshmallow Trick" now?
If I do pay, do the authors of the paper get my money?
In general, no.
You can control away anything the whole idea of isolation is bunk
No way?
I literally thought that to myself a little over 3 years ago. Yes, literally thought about the marshmallow experiment in the context of my life.
You see, I came within a gnat's eyelash of having the classic widow-maker heart attack -- on the doctor's treadmill. (I didn't. I have no heart damage -- I'm fine, and lucky...) But I did spend a 3 day weekend in the cardiac unit getting a stent put in, and had the opportunity to think about 50 years of life choices. I spent half a century being a 3-sigma gratification delayer. Now, that has had a lot of positive impact on my life, but I also came to the conclusion that it was time that I started eating more marshmallows. (Metaphorically -- literally I eat fewer marshmallows because I am much more careful about my diet...)
So I would not go so far as to say: "Life is short, eat desert first.", but... I will say: "Life is short, don't forget to eat desert in moderation as you go along."
>Although modest bivariate associations were detected with educational attainment (r = .17) and body mass index (r = −.17), almost all regression-adjusted coefficients were nonsignificant. No clear pattern of moderation was detected between delay of gratification and either socioeconomic status or sex. Results indicate that Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.
I guess the question is whether the covariates that were adjusted for in the regression are true confounders and not, say, something caused by ability to delay gratification.
This isn’t a surprise unless you think the delay of gratification is itself the cause of success (seems like a straw man so they can claim to “challenge” the original study)
There is more info from one of the authors here which includes the preregistration document: https://x.com/jess_sperber/status/1818100487964496119
Edit: Also, I think the associations of 0.17 prove the title is false
Its the truth that demolishes all the hand-waving about the marshmallow test - it relies on the subject's trust of the person running the experiment. I wouldn't trust them, why should anyone else?
When evaluated that way - particularly when testing on children - the outcome is painfully predictable.
- Children who have adults in life that they trust have better outcomes.
- Children who do not have adults in their lives who they trust have worse outcomes.
I'd say you got a good deal getting two dollars instead of life long trauma.
I'd also be curious about a citation for his motivation being the MK Ultra experiments, it's news to me that he ever explicitly called those as a motive.
Thank you for the insight.
One extreme example arguably created the Unabomber.[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_st...
It is definitely a good thing.
It is good that the conclusions of a study that was demonstrated to be unsound have been replaced by those of a better study. If some even better study comes along later and replaces this one, that'll be good too. We now know more. It's not fun or convenient, but is generally aligned with the direction science should go.
If people who've made decisions based on their understanding of the results of this study, it's good that they'll no longer labor under a delusion, and can potentially make better decisions.
Good in the sense that hard things which make us incrementally better are good.
But, yes, good to be aware of the possibility of both false positives and false negatives.