4B: Marshmallows Are Confusing

I have never spoken about marshmallows this much in my life, but I want to ask: Which side of the story do you believe?  

Does the marshmallow test really predict a child's future success?

Take a look at the two young girls above. They appear to be roughly the same age, but one is delaying her gratification by waiting to eat the marshmallow. They other is happily feeding her desires (and her stomach) by eating the marshmallow immediately. Does this mean that the young lady on the left will have above average SAT scores and a well-paying job some day while the girl on the right struggles with self-control for the rest of her life?

 

After reading the New Yorker article, "DON'T! The secret of self-control", I was convinced that the answer to the previous question was yes. As I have explained in an earlier blog post, Dr. Walter Mischel's experiment performed upon a large group of four year-olds seemed to prove that those who could wait 15 minutes to eat a marshmallow had more success later in life than those who could not. However, another article was brought to my attention shortly after reading the first. It was called "Just Let Them Eat The Marshmallow", written by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. This piece was also written in response to Mischel's marshmallow test as well as the previously mentioned New Yorker article. Bronson and Merryman bluntly state their opinion that, "Judging a kid's ability to delay gratification by whether they eat a marshmallow or not is a ridiculous way of predicting their future achievement."

 

 

Upon reading the second article, I began to doubt the experiment. The authors gave multiple reasons as to why the test was not reputable including: "It’s the easiest test in the world to fool. Parents can just promise their kid a pony if they don’t eat any marshmallows or cookies during the evaluation session." and "While 550 kids participated in the experiment, Mischel only tracked down SAT scores for 94 kids. The vast majority of those kids did not participate in the original, classic marshmallow task. Instead, their marshmallow was covered from view, or they were given a pretend scenario to distract themselves with. In these other conditions, if a kid could hold out for 15 minutes, it meant their SAT scores were much lower, not higher."
 

That second argument against the test's validity was truly shocking. The original results were so inaccurate that the actual results were exactly the opposite! Mishel did not track down the same kids from his original study. Those that he followed were in the control group that was given a distraction so that they would avoid eating the marshmallow. This means that we really have no way of knowing how the majority of the original children really turned out later in life. However, there was an attempt to replicate the experiment by the University of Connecticut’s Inge Marie-Eigst: "They tracked down 34 kids who’d done the classic task [except with cookies]...they did give the now-18-year-old teens a full IQ workup, and they also ran the teens through tests of 'executive function,' which is the brain’s system that governs self-control. Eigsti’s team found that how long they could avoid eating the cookie, when they were 4 year-olds, had zero correlation to IQ or self-control at age 18."

There is evidence vouching for both tests' conclusions, and we may never know what the direct correlation between a child's ability to wait for a marshmallow and his or her future success is. However, we cannot deny the fact that learning to maintain good self-control is a great skill to have in one's repertoire. The rest is up to interpretation. What do you think?

Pictures in this post borrowed from:
http://www.time4change.com/2010/04/30/can-you-say-no-to-something-today-to-get-what-you-want-tomorrow/
http://erinbow.com/blog/2012/02/
http://www.deviantart.com/?offset=10&view_mode=2&order=9&q=by%3AKuroiAkemi
http://tusb.stanford.edu/2010/01/why_bad_grades_happen_to_good.html