July 30, 2014

The Freshness of 40-Year-Old Marshmallows: Self-Control & Success

marshmallow testBenjamin Franklin instinctively knew the power of marshmallows in explaining success.  Yes, marshmallows.  A 40-year-old marshmallow experiment by Walter Mischel of Stanford University brought Franklin’s words to life: “Educate your children to self-control…and you have done much to abolish misery from their future.”  Mischel’s now famous 1970’s marshmallow experiment testing the self-control of 4-year-old children and his 1989 follow-up analysis of those same kids will get a fresh airing when his new book titled The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control is released on September 23, 2014.

Mischel’s original test (see video for a reenactment of the marshmallow test provided below) on delaying self-gratification was seminal for recognizing the role of innate or natural self-control in determining a child’s level of success not only in school but in their future career, health and even relationships.  As Mischel wrote in the abstract of his 1989 study: “Those 4-year-old children who delayed gratification longer in certain laboratory situations developed into more cognitively and socially competent adolescents, achieving higher scholastic performance and coping better with frustration and stress.  Experiments in the same research program also identified specific cognitive and attentional processes that allow effective self-regulation early in the course of development.  The experimental results, in turn, specified the particular types of preschool delay situations diagnostic for predicting aspects of cognitive and social competence later in life.”  Ever since Mischel’s test and subsequent analyses, some parents, teachers and scholars have focused upon developing character traits such as determination and grit to help with self-control.  The importance of character development has been popularized in the last couple of years by Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk on grit and Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed.

A 2012 study from the University of Rochester by Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard Aslin, however, has found that another factor plays an important role in a child’s demonstrated level of self-control: the “reliability” or trustworthiness of their environment.  In the Rochester experiment, Kidd, Palmeri and Aslin found that only 1 out of 14 children waited to eat their marshmallow in an “unreliable environment” (where the researcher broke 2 promises) while 9 out of 14 children successfully waited in a “reliable environment” (where the researcher kept all promises).  In short, a person’s level of self-control is a result of a combination of nature with nurture.  While research has demonstrated that the development of self-control occurs (or not) mostly at home, teachers can help their students learn it through a well-organized, predictable and compassionate classroom.  In other words, teachers can structure a classroom so that it creates a reliable and trustworthy environment; an environment that can help children develop the “cognitive and social competences” needed to succeed in life and “abolish,” in the words of Franklin, some unnecessary “misery in their future.”

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Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).

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