Stanford marshmallow experiment

The Stanford marshmallow experiment is a study of self-control. It was conducted at a preschool at Stanford University by Walter Mischel during the early 1960s. It has become famous as a study of willpower and how people learn to delay gratification, as well as the likely life outcomes of people with willpower.

Mischel wanted to understand how people learn to delay immediate gratification. He wondered if it was a cognitive skill that people could develop, or if it was hardwired in individuals.

Brief History

Mischel was born in Vienna in 1930. His family moved to the United States in 1938. He attended New York University, and then earned his master's degree in clinical psychology from the College of the City of New York. He earned his doctorate degree in clinical psychology in 1956 from Ohio State University. He joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1962 and remained there until 1983.

Mischel had wanted to apply his scientific knowledge to helping people. As a postgraduate student in clinical psychology, he worked with disadvantaged teenagers. He noticed one day that the students were paying close attention to him. He soon realized why: One had set fire to the back of Mischel's jacket. Mischel concluded clinical psychology was not offering him a way to help them, and decided to go into research.

As a parent, Mischel was curious about the changes he saw in his daughters. They were three, four, and five years old, and he noted they evolved. Impulsive behavior was replaced by more considered actions. During the early 1960s at Stanford, Mischel and his graduate students created a study of how children developed self-control. He used youngsters at the university's Bing Nursery School, which his own children attended.

The test involved presenting children with a choice. They could have one reward of their choice—often a miniature marshmallow, but sometimes a mint or pretzel stick—and eat it right away, or choose to wait for two goodies. The children were left alone with the treats for up to twenty minutes. They could ring a bell on the table at any time to call the researcher back so they could obtain the single marshmallow, or they could wait until the adult returned, and be rewarded with the double treat.

Mischel wanted to see what the children did to delay gratification. He knew that preschool-aged children could amuse themselves in many ways to avoid thinking about a temptation. He also wanted to see how they made their choice. Some stared at the treats. Others looked elsewhere. He found that many children who waited were very proud of their accomplishments. Some children who earned two marshmallows did not even eat them because they wanted to show the rewards to their parents.

Mischel found that children could learn to delay gratification. Researchers offered suggestions to help them. For example, children were told to pretend it was really a picture by imagining a frame around it. They were able to wait about twice as long using this technique.

Overview

The children who waited were characterized as high delay, while those who consumed the single treat were low delay. Mischel and his students checked on some of the students thirty years later. Many of the high-delay subjects were doing better in many ways. They had higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. They felt good about themselves and pursued meaningful goals. However, of the more than five hundred subjects studied, he was only able to find SAT scores for ninety-four students. The researcher checked on the subjects again fifty years after the study, when they had reached middle age. When medical science provided greater opportunities to collect data, he conducted brain scans. These revealed that high-delay and low-delay subjects differed in the areas of the brain linked to addiction and obesity.

Some researchers have criticized the marshmallow test and its findings. Some have said the sample was not diverse, and it was too small to provide answers about a larger population. Some researchers believe that the marshmallow test measures trust in authority and not willpower. A 2012 study at the University of Rochester, for example, found that children who were confident they would get their rewards could wait up to four times longer than children who suspected they might be denied the treat. Researchers wondered if the experiment instead was dependent upon a child's confidence in the situation and subjects were simply rationally assessing the odds. Mischel countered that the children in his experiments were never in doubt about the reward. The person making the offer was familiar to them, and the treats were visible the whole time.

National Public Radio (NPR) reported on a study published in 2017 that tested populations outside the United States. It looked at Cameroonian and German children. Nso children in Cameroon live in primitive conditions and assume authority for younger siblings. They were offered small doughnuts as incentive. Almost 70 percent were able to wait ten minutes for two doughnuts. About 30 percent of the German children successfully waited for rewards. Researchers noted the German children displayed more emotion, and generally negative emotions such as crying and fidgeting. Most of the Cameroonian children sat quietly, and 10 percent fell asleep. Nso parents teach children almost from birth that they should not express negative emotions. The parents expect obedience, and young children learn self-control.

In 2018, researchers Tyler W. Watts, Greg J. Duncan, and Haonan Quan replicated and extended the marshmallow study but were unable to replicate results in terms of the associations between delay time and later measures of behavioral outcomes that Mischel and other researchers reported in 1990.

Mischel published a book to help parents apply knowledge gained from the marshmallow test to child-rearing. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control was published in 2014. He believed that parents could help their children learn self-control through strategies he developed. He described it in terms of hot and cool: Techniques can help an individual cool the hot element, which is the distracting item or idea.

Mischel himself used strategies he learned running the marshmallow study. He was a long-time smoker who had attempted to quit multiple times. He failed repeatedly. One day in the late 1960s, he was in Stanford's medical school when he saw a man with metastasized lung cancer. The patient was bald, and small green x marks were tattooed on his body to guide the radiation treatments he was receiving. Mischel immediately realized he had to stop smoking for good. He found he craved a cigarette about every three minutes. When he felt the craving, he pictured the cancer-ravaged patient. By doing this, he changed the value of the cigarette—smoking was no longer a reward, it was something he found revolting. The image cooled the craving. Mischel died in September 2018, of pancreatic cancer, at the age of eighty-eight.

Bibliography

Carey, Benedict. "Walter Mischel, 88, Psychologist Famed for Marshmallow Test, Dies." The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/obituaries/walter-mischel-dead.html. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

Doucleff, Michaeleen. "Want to Teach Your Kids Self-Control? Ask a Cameroonian Farmer." NPR, 3 July 2017, www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/07/03/534743719/want-to-teach-your-kids-self-control-ask-a-cameroonian-farmer. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

Gold, Natalie. "The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-Control and How to Master It, by Walter Mischel." Times Higher Education, 18 Sept. 2014, www.timeshighereducation.com/books/the-marshmallow-test-understanding-self-control-and-how-to-master-it-by-walter-mischel/2015716.article. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

Hadad, Chuck. "What the 'Marshmallow Test' Can Teach You about Your Kids." CNN, 10 July 2015, www.cnn.com/2014/12/22/us/marshmallow-test/index.html. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

"In Honor of . . . Walter Mischel, PhD." Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences, fabbs.org/our‗scientists/walter-mischel-phd/. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

Konnikova, Maria. "The Struggles of a Psychologist Studying Self-Control." New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2014, www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/struggles-psychologist-studying-self-control. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

Urist, Jacoba. "What the Marshmallow Test Really Teaches about Self-Control." Atlantic, 24 Sept. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/what-the-marshmallow-test-really-teaches-about-self-control/380673/. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J., and Quan, H. "Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes." Psychological Science, vol. 29, no. 7, 2018, pp. 1159–1177, doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

Williams, Zoe. "The Marshmallow Test Review—If You Can Resist, You Will Go Far." The Guardian, 8 Oct. 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/08/the-marshmallow-test-understanding-self-control-and-how-to-master-it-walter-mischel-review. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.