The Marshmallow Test is Misunderstood

The Marshmallow Test is a famous experiment that suggests that the ability to delay gratification in early childhood can have long term effects.

But I think the most important lesson to be learned from it is not about the children’s ability to delay gratification; it is about how the experimenters adjusted the situation to challenge that ability.

The lesson to be learned is how to adjust the situations we create in organizations so that we are ensuring that everyone’s needs, both individually and collectively, are satisfied.

Psychologist Walter Mischel and his colleagues conducted the original Marshmallow Experiment.

They demonstrated that personal self-control at the age of about four predicts outcomes in the adult lives of those children.

The kids with less self-control had worse outcomes, while the kids with more self-control had better outcomes as adults.

Some schools go so far as to teach elementary school children about the experiment and put posters on the walls to remind them: “Don't eat the marshmallow!”

In other words the children are being taught to take personal responsibility for their ability to resist temptations that could distract them from obeying the dictates of their school.

The Marshmallow Test Explained

The basic situation in the Marshmallow Test and many follow-ups over the years is that the experimenters present a small child with a marshmallow, pretzels, or even a poker chip and propose that if the child can resist the temptation to eat the item (or whatever would be tempting to do with a poker chip) until the adult returns, then the experimenter would give them another one.

Then the kid was left alone to wait in the presence of their temptation for up to 15 minutes.

The experimenters did not reveal how long the wait time would be and the child was being secretly observed to find out what they would do.

So the logic was simple, eat the one now or eat two later.

The challenge for the kids was whether some unknown length of time of waiting is worth it to double their eating pleasure.

The experimenters found that the kids who “failed,” by eating the marshmallow before the adult returned, tended to have statistically poorer outcomes in their later lives.

Notice that this is a statistical effect, not an unwavering inevitability.

It is also not a causal claim, no one believes that the failure on the marshmallow test caused the poor outcomes.

The argument is that the test result is indicative of something about the kids that would follow them throughout the rest of their lives.

The something else is most often posited to be a better developed set of cognitive processes called executive function.

Those with less developed executive function would fail the test while those with more developed executive function would pass it.

Those differences in executive function would, presumably, remain throughout life thus causing differential life outcomes.

Walter Mischel, the lead experimenter in the original study, was specifically concerned with the methods that children came up with to manage the task they were given.

He wanted to find out how they would cope with a temptation that he knew would be hard to resist.

He deliberately created a challenge for them so that he would be able to observe a range of outcomes.

So now I ask you to reconsider who was responsible for the outcomes of the experiment.

In particular I want you to reconsider who is responsible for the failures.

Were the children responsible for failing to wait long enough to get the second marshmallow?

Marshmallow Test Deconstructed

Would you be surprised if I said that if I were the experimenter I could guarantee 100% success in resisting temptation?

The method is simple: don't present the children with a temptation and they will all succeed in not succumbing to it.

The truly responsible party for the failures was the creator of the situation, not those who happened to lack the skills for resisting the temptations to which they were exposed.

Walter Mischel deliberately created a situation in which he expected to observe failures.

If he did not create a situation that exhibited a mixture of success and failure he would have had to change the situation until he did, because that mix of failure and success was exactly what he wanted to learn about!

Now, let's consider why this experiment was so predictive of later outcomes in life.

Where did the kids spend the majority of their time growing up?

In mainstream schools.

This is a safe assumption because true alternatives (in which learner agency is supported) are few and far between today and they were only more scarce back then.

Given that the school system does not even consider issues of executive function in their conception of what school should provide, then it is even less likely that the children will have had any training that is relevant to the development of the executive function system at school.

We know, thanks to Gallup, that today at least 50% of school children are disengaged.

A majority of them can be expected to fake their way through the content-based tasks that schools make them participate in.

How much transformation of undeveloped executive functions should we expect from disengaged students in a system that does not even pretend to provide any stimulation for engaging in that system?

Stimulating executive functions would require schools to support the agency of their learner, which is not normal in mainstream schools.

Based on my catalytic pedagogy view of the mainstream school system, there is every reason to believe that there would be minimal substantive change in the relative development of executive function across the K-12 years.

Some minimal degree of development would occur due to simple maturation, but accepting the minimum is a tragically squandered opportunity.

Mainstream schools are notoriously unsupportive of the agency of children and the rampant overprotection of children at home has created a situation in which executive function stimulation is too often missing both at home and in school.

In order to improve outcomes in later life kids must be provided with exactly the right amount of temptation to be successful much of the time, but not all of the time.

They need abundant opportunities to make decisions, both good and bad, when the stakes of the decisions they make are low.

They need to be put into situations that stretch their executive functioning.

They need a balance between the level of challenge their environment provides and the level of skill they have to address the challenges they face.

They need to participate in an environment that engages them in making meaningful decisions on a regular basis; in other words they need to exercise their agency. This will guarantee that their executive functions develop rather than stagnate.

This is the basis of most of the work I do on improving education.

Marshmallow Test Posters

And those posters reminding the kids to resist temptation?

Those schools are attempting to abdicate their responsibility for creating classroom situations that match the levels of challenge and skill that each child can handle.

Mainstream school folks who put up “Don’t eat the marshmallow” posters seem to prefer that the children take personal responsibility so those adults can avoid the task of making their school a better fit for the children they are supposed to be serving.

To be fair, the children can share a small portion of responsibility to the degree that they have made active choices that reinforce their commitment to participating in that environment.

But, if they are there against their will, they are not taking any responsibility. In that case the school is 100% responsible for the situation.

This makes the true victims of school situations the ones who are unwillingly subjected to classroom management programs that fail to honor their primary needs.

The personally responsible ones are those who have made valid choices to participate in the school program.

And the personally responsible students can also become victims if outside forces invalidate their choices.

Major adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as the death of a family member or any other significant change in their home life might invalidate their choices.

When circumstance deals a blow to a child, then the school needs to be able to take action to support that child to make a new valid choice for themselves, even if that might mean opting out of instruction for awhile.

The responsibility for the situation of school is, in any case, largely the responsibility of the school, not the children.

So blaming children for their outcomes in that situation is only valid if you can show that they were on board with participating in that situation and made valid on-going choices to participate. That is rarely the case in mainstream schooling.

Beyond the Marshmallow Test

Is delay of gratification all it takes to overcome big societal problems like poverty, school drop-outs, and single teen mothers?

The Brookings Institute has proposed that just three things can enable impoverished teenagers to join the middle class: finish high school, get a job, and do not get pregnant before getting married.

Let’s take a careful look at the situation facing the unemployed teen drop-outs who become parents. Is their situation a consequence of their personal inability to delay gratification, or is someone else responsible?

It is absurd to believe that children are responsible for the society and the mainstream schools they are subjected to.

By the same logic it is absurd to hold unemployed teenage parents wholly responsible for their circumstances.

Those who take the recommendation by the Brookings Institute too seriously will effectively blame the victims for their plight.

Should those folks be ashamed of their poverty, their aversion to school, their unemployment, and their parental status?

Those circumstances (except being a parent) are not sources of pride, but is it necessary for them to be sources of shame?

That sure seems like blaming the victims of the situations that are created by society.

I will readily concede that there is some small degree of personal responsibility involved, but it is trivial compared to the responsibility that the schools and society bear for creating situations in which the primary psychological needs of children and teens are routinely thwarted.

By the time a teen is dropping out and becoming a parent they have lived in a school situation for many years in which they are effectively starved for opportunities to exercise autonomy and build relatedness, key aspects of their agency.

Over those years within a mainstream school situation that takes up most of their waking hours they have been actively denied the opportunity to practice making meaningful decisions; their agency has been suppressed.

Under the influence of the hormones of puberty, which notoriously short circuit executive functions, they discover that sexuality is way to actively meet their primary human needs for autonomy and relatedness.

And lo and behold they tend to mess up that particular decision making process, what a surprise!

Is it really their fault if their early experiences are dominated by impoverished homes and/or psychologically inappropriate schooling?

Is it their fault that the environments the adults created around them failed to stimulate their executive functions, their agency, thus preventing them from developing sufficient skill to moderate their hormonal surges?

Are they to blame for not having been provided with appropriate opportunities to develop the executive functions in their brains?

This is a variation on the hidden curriculum theme of policies interacting with brains to create limitations on what can happen in the situations created by those policies.

To be clear I mean policies in the broad sense of both implicit unstated ways that our behavior is governed, as well as the explicitly stated or written ones.

Just because a curriculum is “hidden” does not mean that “exposing” it will provide access to a solution.

The fact is that the nature of hidden curricula is such that they will always be hidden.

The challenge is to ensure that supports for primary human needs become a pervasive feature of the hidden curricula that we are responsible for.

All humans should have unconscious access to having each of their primary human needs supported.

Right now there is clear evidence that primary needs are not supported for most people in both mainstream schools and in society, with a disproportionate lack for people of color and a variety of other populations.

I am confident that we will not make true progress on the problems of society until we measure the right things to indicate where supports for primary human needs are lacking.

The right things to measure include the satisfaction of the needs themselves, patterns of motivation, and the quality of engagement with the typical activities are done in school or the work place.

With regards to schools we, adults, are the responsible ones, not the children.

It is our job to provide an institution that supports their needs.

The Brookings Institute’s three rules for entering the middle class should not be taken as causal factors in success, they are merely correlations with it.

The causal factors are satisfied needs, autonomous motivations, and agentic engagement.

Satisfied needs and their psychological consequences give every human being the best possible opportunity to accurately understand their situation and take advantage of whatever opportunities they have available to secure a decent future.

Those three rules might be good advice in general, but if teenagers can figure out how to satisfy their needs while breaking those rules, then I am confident that they will still succeed.

The lesson we need to learn from the Marshmallow Test is that manipulating the situation is a powerful way to influence success.

If we want children to succeed in life they need to have their needs supported by the situations that we create for them.

Within the context of that need support there can be all sorts of challenges that they must make decisions about, but when their needs are supported they can learn how important their decisions are.

Facing the challenges by making their own decisions is exactly what they need to develop their executive functions.