The myth of marshmallows

FT.com

September 6, 2013 7:37 pm

Delaying gratification is hard – and becomes even harder if the desired object could be whipped away at any moment, writes Martha Gill. In 1972, in an experiment at Stanford University, 600 children were each handed a marshmallow and told that if they could go 15 minutes without eating it, they would then get two.

A matter of self-control and logic

Those who waited went on to have greater success in life, and the test became an oft-cited classic (the Shrink and the Sage discussed it in the FT Weekend Magazine, August 24/25). If your child eats the first marshmallow, parents are told, you are in line for disappointment.

But perhaps we were too hasty. Researchers at the University of Rochester in the US looked again at the marshmallow experiment and found that if the adult conducting the test seems untrustworthy, even patient kids will not risk waiting for the second marshmallow. Refusing to delay gratification, it seems, can sometimes be the rational choice.

In the new version, before handing out the marshmallows one of two adults talked to the children. One promised art supplies which then never came. The other – more reliable – promised and then produced the supplies. This turned out to have a significant impact on the results. Over half the children who met the “reliable” adult managed to wait for the second marshmallow, but only one of 14 children in the “unreliable” group lasted the full 15 minutes.

“Kids are surprisingly capable of delaying gratification when they’re given evidence that doing so will pay off,” says Celeste Kidd, lead author of the study. “On the flip side, we also demonstrated that kids sensibly decide to indulge in an immediately available treat when the circumstance suggests waiting won’t get you anything better.”

More broadly, the authors suggest, living in an environment where adults are flaky may affect your ability to wait. Self-control is situational – the children were struggling not with appetite but with logic (is the second marshmallow really worth the wait?). But it is not just children: another recent study showed that it could be true for grown-ups too.

An online test conducted at the University of Colorado found that adults are less willing to wait for delayed rewards from someone untrustworthy, preferring a smaller, immediate pay-off. The authors wrote: “The struggles of certain populations, such as addicts, criminals and youth, might reflect their reduced ability to trust that rewards will be delivered.”

Says Kidd: “Together, the studies suggest that both little and grown-up humans consider the uncertainty involved in their current contexts – and that they use that information to make quite sensible decisions.”

The overturning of such a well-known study offers an interesting message, not only for parents but also for company leaders and politicians: U-turns, backtracking and sudden changes in rules come at a cost. And if your charges are eating their marshmallows too quickly, you might want to stop shaking your head over their lack of self-control and try being more reliable.