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Episode 41: The Marshmallow Test
35 Plays2 years ago
Is self-control at age 4 a predictor of lifelong success? Rolf & Joe look at new studies that replicate and extend Mischel's marshmallow experiments, discussing why some kids can wait longer for a bigger treat and what the test itself means.
Links:
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
The Atlantic: Why Rich Kids are so Good at the Marshmallow Test
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Topic
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to Cog Nation. I'm your host, Joe Hardy, together with my co-host with the Comost, Ralph Nelson. Hello. Dr. Ralph Nelson. Yeah.
What is the Marshmallow Test?
00:00:21
Speaker
So this week we're going to be talking about the marshmallow test. This is something that maybe some of you have heard about before. And we're going to get into some of the
00:00:32
Speaker
science behind the marshmallow test, but also some of the criticism, more recent criticism of the research. Before we get into it though, I wanna just say a few words about, you know, responding to the podcast, ways you can get in touch with us. First way to get in touch with us is Cog Nation Podcast, all one word, at gmail.com, cognationpodcast.gmail.com.
00:00:59
Speaker
We check that email periodically and you can send us ideas for the show. If you want to be on the show or if you know someone who'd like to have on the show, that would be great. You can also tweet at us at nation cog as our podcast is our Twitter handle. And please rate and review the show if you like it. And if you don't, please don't.
Marshmallow Test in Popular Discourse
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah. So the topic for this episode is the marshmallow test. And we can talk a bit about exactly what that is. But the reason why I wanted to get into this particular topic was the marshmallow test has become topical again in the sort of
00:01:44
Speaker
popular discourse, if you will. So I've heard a few different references to this recently on other podcasts and in the media. In hearing those, I had
00:01:55
Speaker
noticed that there was some reference to potential issues with the original research. And I wondered whether or not this was one of those things that would fall victim to the replication crisis in psychology. A lot of things have failed to replicate. A lot of research that is canonical in the psychological literature has failed to be replicated by other researchers. And I wondered if this was that type of a situation and assumed that it was based on what I'd heard.
00:02:24
Speaker
I mean, to relate this back to a previous episode, I don't remember the episode number, but we talked about willpower and some of Roy Baumeister's work on willpower.
Willpower and the Marshmallow Test
00:02:34
Speaker
That was another thing that, I guess it's not entirely clear, but might be subject to reinterpretation. So the idea that, you know, that you just have a reserve of willpower that gets used up and then you can, if you use it in some way, then there's just less of it later.
00:02:50
Speaker
The concept here, so in the marshmallow test, we're talking about delay of self-gratification. So another sort of skill that we might expect gets people ahead in the world, the ability to set aside a smaller reward now for a larger reward later. We're taking a look at a couple recent papers, including one by Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan,
00:03:17
Speaker
Haunan Kuan, who had a large study that gave some reinterpretations to this. So the name of the study is called Revisiting the Marshmallow Test, a conceptual replication investigating links between early delay of gratification and later outcomes. And we'll put a link to that on the show notes, too.
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
Linking Delay of Gratification to Success
00:03:39
Speaker
It's probably worth running through the exact procedure and some of the early results as well. The original paper that we're going to be referencing here has showed up Michelle and Peake from 1990, predicting adolescent cognitive and self-regulatory competencies from preschool delay gratification.
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think probably the best thing is to start with the exact condition itself. So the general idea of these experiments is you take a small child, average age in this study was about four and a half years old. So preschool age child, and you tell them that they can have a marshmallow now if they want it, or if they wait a set amount of time. In the first study, it's not clear whether they actually tell them that it's 15 minutes or not.
00:04:28
Speaker
In the follow-up study, they did tell them that it was a certain amount of time. But it wasn't clear for me from the reading this paper whether they exactly told them. But anyway, the point was they told them that if you wait until I come back, you can have two marshmallows.
00:04:43
Speaker
And they actually had different rewards that they used in different studies, but the sort of canonical reward was marshmallows. People always think of marshmallows, but yeah, just in case you hate marshmallows and think kids just don't want them, they did offer, I think it was like M&Ms or pretzels or something like that too. So it was really what the kid wanted to eat.
00:05:04
Speaker
Right, within some parameters.
Study Follow-Up and Results
00:05:07
Speaker
And while the adult me is not super excited about marshmallows and wouldn't care about two marshmallows versus one, I think the four and a half year old me probably would have. So it seems to work out, that particular reward does seem to work pretty well for most kids. So the idea is that if you can wait until the researcher comes back, you get two marshmallows. But at any time before then, you can ring a bell and you can eat the one marshmallow.
00:05:33
Speaker
That's the general idea is you can either have one marshmallow now or wait and get two marshmallows later. And does this sort of general ability represent something more useful?
00:05:46
Speaker
And this has been interpreted in all kinds of different ways and the interpretation is some of the interesting things here, because, you know, a lot gets put on this test as with a lot of these sort of ability tests that happen when you give them to children. But what's interesting and particularly about this research
00:06:03
Speaker
is that there was this sort of heroic arc to the research itself, which is that it happened over decades. So, you know, they had data from when the child was four and a half with this, how long basically they're measuring, how long will the child wait until they ring that bell? Do they make it the full 15 minutes or do they ring the bell at a certain time and how much time passes before they're giving in and eating the one marshmallow?
00:06:32
Speaker
And is that delay time to gratification, is that delay time related to other things, other abilities, other outcomes. And they relate it to not just abilities now when the child is four and a half, but actually abilities when the child is older. So in this case, I believe it was 15 and 18, two follow-ups.
00:06:57
Speaker
So in other words, does my ability to wait for two marshmallows at four and a half predict anything about what I'm going to be like at 15 years old or 18 years old? Yeah. So this is OK. So the so and the results are fairly strong, too, in this 1990 paper. It's a pretty significant performance difference.
00:07:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the big idea here was, you know, in particular, we can focus that use different conditions. And they found that really, one of the conditions was particularly what they call diagnostic. The different conditions were, you can either have the tell the child to use certain tricks, like, you know, think about something else, or
00:07:45
Speaker
reimagine what this marshmallow is or use these different cognitive tricks to delay that gratification. And that works a little bit. So they describe one of them as like fun thinking. So think about something else, think about something fun. And that works pretty well. But the one that really works, the trick that really works is if you just put the marshmallow off to the side where the child can't see it, then suddenly
00:08:12
Speaker
most children are able to do the task now to completion. So in other words, if you give the child cognitive tricks or you take the marshmallow and put it in a way that's not visible, then it's no longer predictive of anything because basically all the children can do the task pretty well. So all the variants kind of gets
00:08:35
Speaker
removed from the task. So all the results are mostly talking about and everything that we're going to talk about from the rest of this is mostly around the situation where the marshmallow is visible and they haven't been given any advice or tricks. And I guess it's important to say at this point that in that particular condition we're talking about a sample size of 43 children. So it's only 43 kids, small sample size. I think all of those were attendees of Stanford kindergarten too.
00:09:05
Speaker
Right. Exactly. Exactly. And that's part of the one of the big critics. Those are two of the big criticisms of this early work, which is that it's a small number of children and they're quite homogeneous in their backgrounds because they're all children of Stanford, like postdoc or high SES, but at least a high education for sure. Yeah. So there's, there's that sort of how representative is the sample of the larger population. Um,
00:09:33
Speaker
And that's a topic.
Public Perception and Media Misinterpretations
00:09:35
Speaker
But yeah, so the outcome measure, sort of the things that they found to be highly correlated when a child is 15 or 18 with how well they did in preschool delay time, one of the things that they noticed was highly correlated were adolescent coping skills as measured by a questionnaire that their parents did. So their parents actually answered questions about their children. And they found that, for example, there was a very high correlation between
00:10:03
Speaker
question like how likely is your child to exhibit self-control in frustrating situations? How likely is your child to yield to temptation? And how intelligent is your child? All of those questions correlate highly with performance on this delay task, you know, 10 years before or 13 years before.
00:10:27
Speaker
So in some ways, it seems to be something that sticks with them. Apart from any intelligence gains or anything, they still seem to be able to employ these strategies and are able to delay gratification. So it's a persistent thing from age 4 to age 15, 18 at least.
00:10:48
Speaker
Right, so there's that relationship. And then the other measure they looked at was SAT scores, and there's some methodological problems with the way they collected this data, but assuming that it's, let's just take that, put that to one side for the moment, because I think it's probably not that important here.
00:11:08
Speaker
The point is that the SAT scores were highly correlated with this as well, with a particularly high correlation with the quantitative SAT scores and the ability to delay gratification as a four and a half year old. So this is all very interesting. And there was also some really interesting videos that showed the difference in
00:11:35
Speaker
What you know different children how they reacted how they handled the situation. Do you mean those original old marshmallow videos? Yeah with the little kids you can see them getting frustrated
00:11:46
Speaker
Exactly. You can kind of see them squirming. And then you can see certain children, like you can, they're using their own, they're spontaneously using different strategies. Like maybe one child will cover their eyes. Another child will talk to themselves, tell themselves a story, that sort of thing. And so it was one of those things that shows up in psych one courses, you know, quite often. And the basic takeaway is that like,
00:12:16
Speaker
the way it's presented in Psych 1 courses and the way it has previously been presented in the media a lot was self-control is really important for success in life. And the more self-control you have,
00:12:30
Speaker
and the more you're able to delay your gratification, the more success you're gonna have in life. That's sort of the very reductive takeaway, right? Right, and I think it's probably an early example of this thin slicing, right, that you can extrapolate from one situation a lot about future success or anything about their future self, you know, from all these other examples from Malcolm Gladwell and other people, you know,
00:12:56
Speaker
looking at a yearbook photo or something like that can predict something of the future with very little information. So I think it's appealing in that way. It doesn't take much to test this self-control and then imagine or thinking of it as having this huge influence on your later life, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think what we want to do here is sort of problematize this a little bit.
00:13:24
Speaker
I think there's several interesting things here, but one of the things that I was interested in looking at the 2018 paper from Watts and colleagues was that I was just curious if this result was replicable because so frequently in the literature, these big headline results. We just keep seeing that lately where all of these long-standing results just don't seem to hold up at all.
00:13:49
Speaker
Exactly. And then something about how to really understand or think about, if it does hold up, how should we think about this? Is this really just that some kids are just born with the ability to control themselves? What is the relationship there? What is that causal relationship? Can we say anything about the causal relationship between
00:14:12
Speaker
these abilities and where they come from. Because the motivation behind Watt's paper was that there are a lot of interventions that have been developed over the years in response to this marshmallow test.
00:14:31
Speaker
paper basically saying, look, self-control is super important in
Socioeconomic Factors in Delay of Gratification
00:14:35
Speaker
kids. It's going to lead to success. If we can develop this ability in kids, they're going to do better later in life. And if it's not the case that the ability to do this particular type of task is the causal thing that leads to that success, but it's rather if you take out other causal related factors, you might find that actually improving that ability doesn't help you that much.
00:15:00
Speaker
It's an interesting, sort of disappointing thing to kind of realize that you can't just say, you know, focus smaller interventions on doing things that are like the marshmallow test, helping that kind of self-control. But just doing that alone doesn't seem to have the same sort of effect.
00:15:22
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, right. I mean, we're not going to address the causal thing here directly because it wasn't studied experimentally, but that was the motivation behind the Watts paper. And then I think it's interesting because jumping ahead a little bit, I like to problematize the problematization of, because I think people overreacted some ways to this follow-up study as well.
00:15:47
Speaker
I agree, too, and I was surprised at some of the popular press simplifications of this. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. We have to describe the basic findings of this. Yeah, absolutely. Take away. So, yeah, go ahead. You want to take a crack? Okay, so.
00:16:04
Speaker
I'll start with the headline, too. I mean, the idea is that these effects still persist, although they're measured to be smaller in this study. They used a whole lot more subjects, so they conducted the experiment a lot more thoroughly. It was about 900 subjects as opposed to, you know, what, you said 40 or so for the original Michigan. Yeah, in that one particular condition, yeah.
00:16:29
Speaker
They also got a much more diverse group of people for the study so that you can look at different factors that might go into it. And one of the bottom lines is that they find a big difference between college educated and non-college educated. So if the mother is college educated or not college educated, and they find a big difference between, is it a direct socioeconomic status indicator?
00:16:57
Speaker
One of the first things they certainly find is that delay of gratification is longer when the mother has a college degree.
00:17:11
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. They looked at, as you say, a much broader range of backgrounds in terms of where these families are coming from and their socioeconomic status. And they do find this strong relationship between children of mothers who do not have college degrees and those that do.
00:17:37
Speaker
The average wait time in children who were from mothers who do not have college degrees is about four minutes. And the average wait time in children of mothers who do have college degrees, it was about 5.38 minutes. So quite a bit more. And that's even important to realize that
00:18:06
Speaker
There was a seven minute cap on this particular study. So the original work by Michigan and the cap was 15 minutes. There was less of a ceiling effect. There's quite a ceiling effect in this particular study because they only waited seven minutes and a lot of kids could wait seven minutes.
00:18:25
Speaker
In fact, 45% of even the children of mothers who did not have college degrees did wait the full seven minutes. It's important to realize that, I think.
00:18:37
Speaker
68% of the children with mothers with college degrees waited the full seven minutes. So a lot of the kids waited the full time. So you're really looking at the analysis here of these correlations is really just analyzing that data for kids who didn't wait the full seven minutes, because that's where the variance is or the variability, which is I think an important thing. But critically, what they did find, especially in children
00:19:06
Speaker
of mothers who are not college educated. Most of the analysis that I think we should focus on here is for the children of mothers who did not receive college degrees because that's where the variance is. Yeah, and that's interesting. I think, like you say, it looks to be like ceiling effects as though the children of degreed mothers were mostly close to seven minutes if they were waiting, right?
00:19:29
Speaker
Yeah. The average was 5.38 minutes and then 68% of them waited the full seven minutes. So yeah, I mean, it's.
00:19:40
Speaker
And so they get different things that affect the score for kids with non-degreed mothers. And a whole bunch of things seem to factor into it, especially things like language stimulation, how much they're getting at home, the responsivity of their parents, how much academic stimulation they get, how old the mother is at birth,
00:20:06
Speaker
non-degreed mothers are about five years younger than the degreed mothers. In terms of structurally how they thought about this, they sort of did a couple things. One, they wanted to look at what was the correlation between performance on different tests and the ability to
00:20:33
Speaker
wait a certain amount of time as a young child. So how does that relate to performance on tasks a little bit later, like when a child is in first grade and then much later when a child is like 15 years old? And that's the main result, right? That's the main, if you want to say, replication, the replication effect that
00:21:01
Speaker
it is the case that for the, what they call the achievement composite, which is basically measures of letter word identification, applied problems in math and picture vocabulary. So these are like standardized tests kind of measures, things that like this SATs, I don't think they actually use the SATs in this study, but similar kind of cognitive assessment type tests.
00:21:28
Speaker
that there was a correlation that was significant between the ability to delay gratification in this particular test and later achievement. So kids who waited longer had
00:21:42
Speaker
had better scores on academic achievement tests, or really they're not, I mean, they're cognitive tests related to things like math and vocabulary. So that's the main effect, right? That in the kids where there was variance, in the kids were, in other words, in the children of mothers who were
Family Influence on Test Outcomes
00:22:05
Speaker
non-college educated, that they did replicate the main effects of the original SHODA at all work. There's a positive relationship between
00:22:18
Speaker
performance at 15 years old on these cognitive tests and the marshmallow test. So the marshmallow test is predictive in that way. So that's the main, that's the big, big takeaway, right? In the sense of like, they didn't, there was not a failure to replicate. This study, you know, despite somewhat what the headlines might have suggested,
00:22:41
Speaker
This study, in fact, replicated the main results of Shoda et al. in a much larger sample that was more diverse, and it was more carefully done. And crucially showed some of these factors that may be responsible for this ability to delay gratification.
00:23:05
Speaker
I think, I mean, this is sort of like a basic, you know, think of correlation does not imply causation that because they're doing well on or because they're able to delay gratification at age four and they later have better scores, it could indicate that delay of gratification is directly responsible for this.
00:23:32
Speaker
or it could indicate that there's some other variable that's responsible for both of these things. In other words, is it the case that higher income kids, so kids who are born into more privilege, are better at the delayed gratification task and also higher achievers in high school, but the main factor at play is, or the causal factor here is income or
00:24:00
Speaker
parenting style or things like that, resources available. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's the meat of their analysis is they looked at a variety of different covariates, if you will, other things that were happening in the child's life at that time of when they were doing the marshmallow test and looked at both the correlation between
00:24:28
Speaker
those things and performance on the marshmallow test. And looked at, if you control, if you put these variables in a model and you control for them, does the effect of the marshmallow test
00:24:47
Speaker
is it still significant? Is there still a significant relationship between your ability to delay gratification on the marshmallow test at four and a half and then subsequent achievement scores at 15? And the answer is
00:25:02
Speaker
Basically, no. I mean, if you control for these factors, then it takes away most of the effect, not entirely. There still is some residual effect in some conditions. But for the most part, a lot of the variability is removed when you control for things like family income, mother's age at birth,
00:25:24
Speaker
the learning materials in the household, language stimulation in the household, physical environment, academic stimulation, all of these factors, if you control for them and put them in a model, actually the effect of the predictive value of the marshmallow test goes way, way down.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, what you're what you're really saying is that these factors are ones that can contribute to an increased score on the marshmallow test, right?
00:25:54
Speaker
Exactly. I think the point is that a more experimental approach would be to say, if you can do something that trains this underlying ability of self-control, then the child gets better at the marshmallow test, and then they also achieve more. That would be
00:26:16
Speaker
more causal in its nature. But what this is all saying is that all of these things are related. So your ability, your scores on all these different cognitive tests, scores on behavioral tests, and scores on things about your environment that you grew up in.
00:26:34
Speaker
all of those things are related to both the marshmallow test itself and also future achievement. So it's not the case that you can say that it's so simple to say that, oh, well, kids that have good self-control achieve more. It's much, it's just more, I mean, well, you can say that because that is a true statement, but as measured by this marshmallow test, but you can't say that
00:27:03
Speaker
It's, you can't take it in a reductive sense that it's really just this, that it's this ability, this single ability of self-control that causes them to achieve more later. That's the thing that they're really problematizing
Comparative Traits and Criticisms
00:27:18
Speaker
here. It's like, it's not the case that just being good at self-control will make you a high achiever. And therefore, if you can improve your ability to control yourself, then you'll be a higher achiever.
00:27:30
Speaker
And this relates to other kinds of popular concepts, too. Well, I mean, we talked about willpower, but also something like grit that Angela Duckworth talks about, that the idea that grit is more important than raw intelligence and sort of sticking to it is an important thing. So a natural conclusion might be that you want to train grit or improve your grit. But if it works like delay of gratification, it may not be that just
00:27:59
Speaker
just increasing your grit is the thing that's going to be responsible. There may be other underlying factors, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so, I mean, I think, you know, then you look at some of the, you know, as we're talking about some of the popular press behind this and as I say, you know, we wanted to problematize a little bit and kind of deconstruct a little bit this result, but I think some of the conclusions
00:28:29
Speaker
in the popular press where maybe simplifying this in a way that I think is perhaps not helpful. But it's also interesting. I think part of why this particular test is discussed a lot popularly is that it's so intuitive.
00:28:48
Speaker
It's like, oh, I can see that the child who is able to wait and delay their gratification, that child's going to be able to go to graduate school because they understand that if they go to graduate school and wait five years, that they'll be able to do more in their career later, stuff like that. It's a very simplified, reductive thing. There's so many cases in which being able to delay gratification in life, you don't even have to list examples. It's just the way the life works.
00:29:18
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:29:21
Speaker
There was an article in The Atlantic that we looked at called, Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test by Monevska. And in that article it says, the marshmallow test isn't the only experimental study that has recently failed to hold up to some under closer scrutiny. Some scholars and journalists have gone so far as to suggest that psychology is in the midst of a replication crisis.
00:29:48
Speaker
In the case of this new study specifically, the failure to confirm old assumptions pointed to an important truth. The circumstances matter more in shaping a child's life than Michelle and his colleagues seem to appreciate. Now, I want to say a few things about that because first of all, I think we agree that they basically did replicate the study. This is not a failure to replicate.
00:30:12
Speaker
What it seems like, so I mean, they show a slightly smaller effect. They use different methods. So they wait seven minutes instead of 15 minutes. But they do show, I think it's pretty clear that they do show an effect of the marshmallow test. Yeah, the marshmallow test is predictive. And they go so far as they get into like, some of the covariates. And if you control for some of these covariates, then yes, the effect
00:30:38
Speaker
is reduced or or nearly eliminated under in certain circumstances eliminated but that doesn't mean that the effect isn't there it just means that it's there's a lot of co-linearity there's a lot of other things that are that are varying along with the marshall test everything else equal yeah that's the sin slicing stuff all you knew then you could make some predictions based on it yeah so it's not a failure so i think it's just it's a fundamentally just a misrepresentation to say that it's
00:31:04
Speaker
not that it's not a replication I think it is in fact a replication which is surprising actually to me that it was successfully replicated because it was such a
00:31:13
Speaker
I mean, I wonder the extent to which the story makes sense to people and people might be more willing to accept that. I think kids with less money are more likely to face food insecurity and therefore take the thing that is in front of them rather than wait for a reward that may never come. Right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and I think there's there's a lot of
00:31:39
Speaker
sort of, yeah, there's a strong temptation to jump to that reductive conclusion as well, right? So it's like, and this is sort of exactly what this Atlanta article, Atlantic article talks about, you know, talking about this is like, it suggests other possible explanations for why poor kids would be less motivated to wait for the second marshmallow. For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees. There might be food in the pantry today, but there may not be tomorrow. So there is a risk that comes with waiting.
00:32:09
Speaker
And even if their parents promise to buy more of a certain food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity. Meanwhile, for kids whose households are headed by parents who have better educated and earn more money, it's typically easier to delay gratification. Experience tends to tell them that adults have the resources and financial stability to keep the pantry well stocked.
00:32:32
Speaker
Right. And I mean, I guess the question is, how much does the kid trust that they're going to come back and give that second marshmallow? And there was a study a couple of years ago that looked into exactly that, that switched out the experiment or the experiment would sometimes be unreliable in coming back and fulfilling their promise and sometimes more reliable.
00:32:57
Speaker
And when the experimenter kept to their word and said they were going to come back at the same time, they actually did, then kids were more likely to delay gratification. So you have to make an inference from that to conclude that poor people are less likely to trust that they're going to get more food, that that's the direct cause. But it does make a story. Yeah, I mean, the story, I mean, it makes a lot of sense.
00:33:25
Speaker
you know, I think that, you know, there's nothing actually in any of this research that reads on that explanation directly. In other words, you can't make a direct statement about anything that from what we've just talked about, that that's why it happens, right? But it's a just so story. But it's a compelling, it's a compelling, just so story. I mean, it makes a lot of intuitive sense.
00:33:53
Speaker
And it kind of speaks to my grand theory of cognitive testing.
Cognitive Tests and Societal Structures
00:34:00
Speaker
We're getting into grand theories already? Yeah. Well, you know this one, Rolf, right? I've told you this one several times, right? Like my grand theory of cognitive testing and achievement testing. Oh, let's hear it. OK. So the idea that I've had for now, sometimes, since we did this work a while ago on cognitive training and cognitive testing,
00:34:22
Speaker
was that, all right, so what you find broadly is that almost any achievement test, any test of cognitive ability, any test of, it holds for the marshmallow test as we see right here, almost any test that you do at an early age will be predictive of later success in life, where success means like, for example, getting into college, making a lot of money,
00:34:52
Speaker
in a socioeconomic sense, success. There's a whole variety of different assessment tools that can be used in children that will predict these things later on. And also, you know, predict things, you know, at the same moment in time as well. So like, if I give you a memory test, I can, I can get a pretty good prediction of how well you're getting paid at this time as a professional. Which ones are relevant and which ones aren't?
00:35:21
Speaker
Well, this is the, this is the point that I'm trying to make relevant to some degree or like to some small bit, they're all kind of contributing. They're all, but they're all kind of contributing. And, but then it speaks to the, it gets back to the question of G, right? The general intelligence, right? Because what you see is all these things are correlated.
00:35:40
Speaker
So you want them there to be some underlying core factor that holds these all together, that explains why they're so correlated, why it's correlated your memory score and your vocabulary score and your income are all so highly correlated. Why is that? And why is that correlated to how long you can wait to eat a marshmallow before you get a second one? And my sort of overarching meta theory of why that is, is that it's all about
00:36:11
Speaker
as the test taker, how much do you understand what the test is about? That was my original theory. And I've actually, I think I've updated it based on this problematizing that we've been doing here on this work. So what am I mean? So it's like the classic test of fluid intelligence that's supposed to be the most predictive
00:36:39
Speaker
the most content free. So the idea that it's not about what you specifically know, but it's about this ability to think. You're going to say Raven. Yeah, exactly. Progressive matrix test. So it's this very abstract test. So you have to basically predict the fourth element based on the first three. There's a pattern there. And you have to say what the pattern is.
00:37:02
Speaker
there's a construct there. You have to basically buy into the construct of what the answer is. It's not really truly a right answer in the sort of like classic physics, math. Right. Exactly. You have to intuit in some sense, like what the test maker wants you to say. You have to empathize in some way.
00:37:23
Speaker
And who can empathize with the test maker, someone who's like the person who made the test, someone who grew up in a similar environment, someone who was raised in a certain way, who was spoken to in a certain way. And it's the professor at Stanford in psychology, right? Who wrote the test. The kids who know that and grew up with that, they're going to do better on the test. And that plays out over and over and over and over again in every situation.
00:37:50
Speaker
The more that your default mode is not talking to default mode network, you're talking about just like your standard way of operating in the world and being in the world is more in line with what the expectations of that environment are.
00:38:07
Speaker
So you go work for a tech company and it's all run by tech bros and you know how they kind of act. You're going to get along more. You're going to get ahead more, right? That that plays out again and again and again and replicates and extends these inequalities that we have in our.
00:38:24
Speaker
education system and our professional systems and throughout. And the thing that I want to add to this based on the work here is it's not just that you can empathize with the test maker, but that you actually want to buy into it. You're motivated to buy into the system. There's a system there.
00:38:44
Speaker
your interest in buying into that, it probably depends on a lot of things like, do you trust that test? Do you trust the person who's giving you this test? Do you really think they're going to bring you a second marshmallow or not? If you have reason to disbelieve that they're going to do that based on your own experience, you're going to buy into the whole system a lot less. I guess what I'm suggesting is that
00:39:09
Speaker
What I'm specifically critiquing is people who say, well, look, actually inequality is good. People who are smart and can delay gratification can get ahead. And that's the way it should be, right? They're just better people. So they do better. That's the meta narrative behind the marshmallow test. There's actually a whole system called structural racism.
00:39:34
Speaker
et cetera, structural inequality that supports that at every level from the moment you're taking the test to the moment you're interviewing for the job to your quarterly performance review all the way through. It's all related to these factors of
00:39:54
Speaker
just the system, right? Like the way that our society is structured and the way it works. Knowing how it works and also having a motivation to succeed in that system. Yeah, feeling invested in the system, feeling like the system is working for you, believing in it in that way.
00:40:13
Speaker
is going to relate to how you do on the marshmallow test and how you do at your job later on, you know, in terms of that. So that's, that's my sort of meta theory of, of the case. I don't think so. In other words, I don't know that you can make a better test because what it depends what you're trying to do. What are you trying to do? Cause like we want to say, Oh, this person is smart and that person's not smart. This person has good self control. That person doesn't have self control. I think that is just like fundamentally the wrong framing, I guess is what I'm saying.
00:40:43
Speaker
Well, I mean, one of the things your questions point to is just the experimental setup, too, that could you change it so that you're measuring self-control in a better way across all people? Maybe you're missing out on a better way to measure self-control in kids who come into this as though it seems like a weird situation that they're not familiar with.
00:41:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it is. I guess part of the question is, do you think there's a an underlying construct of self control that's stable over time? Yeah, well, I think that's a good point, Ralph, because I don't want to mean I don't I don't mean to say here, I don't want to be nihilistic either. Right. And that's not what I'm meaning either. Because I do believe there is something like
00:41:25
Speaker
know, an ability to like, for example, working memory, you know, the ability to like, hold more ideas in your mind at the same time. And there's something like attentional control ability that and these are, and there's something like the ability to delay gratification, and these are all
00:41:43
Speaker
Some people argue whether delay of gratification is a cognitive ability. Some of this work suggests that it actually is more cognitive than not. I do think those are real things that are trainable that you can get better at, and they are changeable, but they're also stable, generally speaking, because they're continuously reinforced.
00:42:06
Speaker
Would you say that it's fair to say that this article that we spent our time talking on indicates that both of them exist, that when we factor things out,
00:42:18
Speaker
We factor certain things out. There's still an effect. However, there is an effect of lots of other things on there. I mean, we could say that we could say that delay of gratification does have an effect. And that's part of this. But we could also say that, you know, poverty has an effect on academic performance, and it's not necessarily mediated through delay of gratification. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Things like this all have an effect.
00:42:47
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it's important to think about it that these analyses are symmetric. You could look at it and say there is an effect of the layer of gratification on future performance. Or you could say that if you control for all these other variables, that effect is reduced. Or you could say, well, look, all these other variables also predict future performance. And all these variables also predict marshmallow test success.
00:43:18
Speaker
Yeah, like, I mean, so for example, the mother's socio economic status. Yeah, the home environment. I mean, the total home environment has a large effect and having lots of books available. All of the and that's one thing they measured in this study, too. You know, looking at the enrichment of the home environment that seems to have a huge effect on the acquisition, maybe the acquisition of these kinds of skills.
00:43:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I think it's a complex system. The reductive case leads people to a lot of problems in their thinking, and it leads people to draw a lot of wrong conclusions about what to do in the world and how to make things better.
Practical Implications for Interventions
00:44:08
Speaker
Um, at the same time, there's a real thing there. Like if you're, if a kid is better at the marshmallow test, statistically, I mean, it's a, it's not still not explaining a huge amount of variance, but like statistically they're, they're a little more likely to do better in school later, et cetera, et cetera. Who would argue with the idea that having a little self-control is, is helpful for, you know, having a better career or making more money, right?
00:44:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, to your point, there's so many cases in which delay of gratification in particular is important and useful in the world. Yeah. I mean, I think that pretty much covers it. I don't know, Ralph, what do you think? Is there anything else to mention here?
00:44:50
Speaker
So just to sort of go over the idea that they find these differences in more in the mothers who did not have a college degree. They don't find so many differences among others who do have a college degree. Maybe they hit the ceiling or something.
00:45:06
Speaker
I think this is interesting. To me, it suggests that most of this is going on possibly at the low end, like kids who are the most impoverished have the least resources available to them. And what they really need is just to get up to speed, not necessarily live in a mansion and have that. In other words, that it
00:45:33
Speaker
after a certain base level of this, then they would be equivalent to other kids in delay of gratification. Right. Well, I think that's a good point. And I mean, on the other side of that is just that most of the effect of future achievement is found in the second study for kids. Most of the variance is due to kids who grab the first marshmallow within 20 seconds. That's right.
00:46:01
Speaker
So it's really like, we were talking about most of this effect is for those kids who are just super not doing this task at all. They're just going straight for the first marshmallow. Once you're at least trying to like wait, you're already doing a lot better. So we don't need to be training Jedi masters. We just need to be getting kids that can hold off that first impulse. It's like that initial impulse control, right?
00:46:25
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, there's this question of like, how much of that is a cognitive thing versus how much of that is like, well, look, I mean, those kids who are just like, no, I just do not believe that this person is going to bring me a second marshmallow. Just not buying into this at all, right? Like you could, that explanation makes a lot of sense when you think about the 22nd case. I mean, there are probably not that many kids who couldn't
00:46:52
Speaker
really control themselves for 20 seconds. If they thought that it was useful and valuable. That prospect of getting those two marshals actually is like, what am I doing in this weird situation? Well, yeah, exactly. What's really going on here? I, and we can't, uh, we can't distinguish between those, those possibilities, uh, in this study at all. Right. And maybe they're not actually different things. That's my whole point. Maybe these are not actually different explanations. Maybe they're part and parcel of the same,
00:47:21
Speaker
the system. All right. If I enter it, it's the system. But yeah, I mean, I think the interesting, the topic of intervention is interesting and that sort of where, um, these guys started their exploration. Well, it sounds to me like that the best interventions are ones that, I mean, thinking about poverty as a root issue and, and doing training just on, um, delay of gratification may not be the way to go. Right. Any other, any other points to hit here?
00:47:50
Speaker
No, I mean, I think this stuff is fascinating. I love this stuff. Yeah, no, it's super cool. It's like the intersection of a lot of things that we've worked on in the past in terms of trying to practically help people get better at different abilities. And how do you think about how these constructs relate? What is intelligence? What is general intelligence? All this stuff. Where do they come from?
00:48:14
Speaker
Where do they come from? Exactly. Exactly. Why don't we wrap it up there? Thanks for listening and mention again our contacts cognationpodcastatgmail.com and at nationcog or at JL Hardy PhD on Twitter and love to hear from you. So thank you. All right. Thanks.