Delayed gratification and the quest to bridge the person-situation debate | David Epstein

Thanks to YouTube, a particular scientific experiment went viral. And it's known as the marshmallow test. The marshmallow test was actually a series of experiments started in the 1960s in which nursery school children are placed in a room, and an experimenter puts a marshmallow in front of the child and says, "You can eat this now, but I'm going to leave. And if you wait and I come back and this marshmallow is still here, then you get two marshmallows."

So this was essentially a test of delayed gratification. And you can go on YouTube and watch people doing these kinds of experiments on their own children. And you'll see sometimes some kids will touch it or sniff it, or they'll take a lick. Others will turn their head, or sing, or kick their legs. Sometimes a boy starts hitting himself in the face. The kids who start by touching and sniffing the marshmallow usually will have eaten it by the time the experimenter comes back.

Some of those who distract themselves will not have eaten it by the time the experimenter comes back. The tantalizing find of this study was that the amount of time the kid waited, or if they waited the whole time, predicted much later in life outcomes, from how well they did in school to how likely they were to be addicted to drugs and all sorts of other things. And so that's sort of what parents have taken away from it.

So when you see them doing experiments on their own kids on YouTube, it's sort of with this idea that you're getting a crystal ball on your kid's future. But actually, there are some problems with that. The first problem is that a replication of this study much more recently found that most of that effect, that predictiveness, disappeared. And as one of the study's authors, Yuichi Shoda, has repeatedly said, "We took the wrong things from this study in the first place."

Even in the original, there was a ton of variation between what kids did and how their lives turned out. And what was more interesting to Shoda was the fact that you could teach very simple strategies to help kids delay gratification. So, if one kid was struggling, you could have them think about the marshmallow as a puffy cloud instead of a piece of food, and they would suddenly have a much better time at delaying their gratification.

And Shoda himself has been one of the researchers who has helped build a bridge in what's called the person-situation debate in psychology. This is basically, are people who they are? Are they stable and the things that they do are just part of their internal makeup? Or, are the things they do really affected by the situation they're in? And the answer is probably some of both.

And what Shoda's work gets into is called if-then signatures. So it could be that we have some stable traits, but they change depending on the context. So, we're consistently inconsistent. For example, if David is at a giant party, then he is an introvert—true. If he's with his small team at work, then he's an extrovert—also true. So I'm inconsistent, but consistently so. And these if-then signatures may be part of bridging that person-situation debate.

And so maybe it's not so surprising that when you change the situation in a way to make the kid think of the marshmallow as not a marshmallow, suddenly they could delay gratification in a way that they couldn't before. What we should think about as we think about the marshmallow test is not this predictive crystal ball, which turns out probably not to be there anyway. But really, the lesson is how quickly you can change someone's apparent personality trait by altering the context or the way they think.