Waiting to win – Perspectives on the Stanford marshmallow experiment
Should we train our kids how to wait? The answer may be more complex than we think
The Stanford marshmallow experiment, published in a 1970 paper by Professor Walter Mischel reappears time and again in podcasts, posts, and social media. It’s one that may sound familiar.
Kids at Bing nursery school at Stanford were asked to choose between a smaller reward – a marshmallow, or two if they waited. The child was left in the room for 15 minutes, and if they did not eat the marshmallow, they got another or a pretzel stick.
It was an exercise in delayed gratification, built more around the amount of time kids waited and how the rewards were presented.
The studies after the experiment were what caught public attention. Since then, the act of waiting has been associated with success.
1990. Shoda, Mischel and Peake conducted a related study between delayed gratification in children and their SAT scores. They found that preschoolers’ wait times had a significant and positive correlation with their SATs.
Other studies, many of them conducted with Mischel discussed relationships between delayed gratification and self-worth, self-regulation, and even BMI. The researchers were interested in the relationship between kids’ ability to wait and other life outcomes. Mischel’s work from 1970 is at the center of an expanding amount of research around waiting and winning.
2012. A study with a 30-year lag on the children at Bing nursery showed a significant relationship with the ability to delay gratification at age four and Body Mass Index (BMI) 30 years later.
So, does the ability to wait for something predict how good a child’s life would be in the future? And, if it does, should we explicitly teach our kids how to win at the waiting game?
The answer may lean more on socioemotional factors and the role of culture on kids’ outcomes in adulthood.
A replication of Mischel’s 1970 study was done in 2018 on the basis that Mischel’s initial research had limitations: The children were all from the Stanford community, and the studies that came after were even smaller samples from this group. The 2018 study was based on a dataset that was a more diverse, though not nationally-representative sample of kids with more detailed demographic data.
The results showed that the gains from waiting were highly sensitive when controlling for family background, cognitive ability, and home environment, and suggested that delayed gratification may be an oversimplification of the habits of self-control in kids.
Worth mentioning here is the role of family and the home, where conversations and culture play a direct impact on how kids grow to see the world. Delayed gratification may represent just a small part of self-control, a behavior that is framed and anchored within layers of home culture.
In 2020, Mischel along with other researchers published a paper examining delayed gratification and financial outcomes – capital formation variables such as net worth, income, and debt, among others. This study was a continuation of the famous 1970 paper, surveying the same children from 1970, now in their late 40s. They concluded that at preschool, delayed gratification alone does not predict for mid-life capital formation.
Takeaways
If delayed gratification has an impact on children’s later lives, it may be worth considering the act of waiting as part of a broader set of behaviors around self-control. These behaviors are influenced by how children see the and interact with the world. Here, the role played by families, home experiences, community interactions, and culture come broadly into play. A notable suggestion would be that the development of wider habits around self-control and self-management within the context of culture are what move kids forward.
References
Benjamin, Daniel J, David Laibson, Walter Mischel, Philip K Peake, Yuichi Shoda, Alexandra Steiny Wellsjo, and Nicole L Wilson. 2020. “Predicting Mid-Life Capital Formation with Pre-School Delay of Gratification and Life-Course Measures of Self-Regulation.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 179:743–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2019.08.016.
Mischel, Walter, and Ebbe B Ebbesen. 1970. “Attention in Delay of Gratification.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 16 (2): 329–37. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0029815.
Schlam, Tanya R, Nicole L Wilson, Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Ozlem Ayduk. 2013. “Preschoolers’ Delay of Gratification Predicts Their Body Mass 30 Years Later.” The Journal of Pediatrics 162 (1): 90–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2012.06.049.
Shoda, Yuichi, Walter Mischel, and Philip K Peake. 1990. “Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competencies From Preschool Delay of Gratification: Identifying Diagnostic Conditions.” Developmental Psychology 26 (6): 978–86. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.26.6.978.
Watts, Tyler W, Greg J Duncan, and Haonan Quan. 2018. “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes.” Psychological Science 29 (7): 1159–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661.
