How can a marshmallow, an ant, and a grasshopper help us better understand human thinking and behavior?
Subject: Delayed Gratification - The Marshmallow Test
Event: Psychologist Walter Mischel published The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control, 2014
The first and best victory is to conquer self. -Plato
Imagine that I have given you a piece of your favorite candy. As I place the candy in front of you, I explain that you can either eat the candy now or, if you will wait for five minutes without eating it, I will give you a second piece of candy. If you truly did desire two pieces of candy rather than just one, how would you spend the five minutes? How would you exercise enough self-control to delay gratification?
You might recognize this scenario. It is one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time, known as “The Marshmallow Test.” On September 23, 2014, Psychologist Walter Mischel published The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control, a book that goes into detail about the history of Mischel’s famous experiment.
Mischel got the idea for the test when his own daughters were three, four, and five respectively. He noticed that as they matured, they became less impulsive and better able to exercise self-control. Working with Bing Nursery School of Stanford, California, Mischel and his team of researchers began administering their test to children. A child would be presented with a marshmallow and told that he could eat it immediately or wait alone in the room for a few minutes until the researcher returned with a second treat. In the event that the child decided he couldn’t wait the five minutes, he was told to ring a bell, which would signal the experimenter to return.
In follow-up research conducted years later, Mischel determined that the children who were able to wait for the second marshmallow on average had better life outcomes than those who did not wait. The children who were able to delay gratification had higher SAT scores, higher academic achievement, and higher average incomes.
Mischel’s research gives us interesting insights into the workings of the human brain and the differences between immediate and delayed gratification. Mischel describes two brain systems: the “Hot System” and the “Cold System.” The Hot System is the brain’s “Go!” system; it is centered in the brain’s amygdala and is emotional, reflexive, and fast. The Cold System is the brain’s “Know” system; it is centered in the brain’s frontal lobes and hippocampus and is cognitive, reflective, and slow.
The key to exercising self-control and delaying gratification is first to make your thinking more conscious; second, is to cool down hot situations by becoming more cognitively flexible. For example, children who were able to resist the tempting marshmallow were able to use their imagination to picture the marshmallow as a cotton ball rather than a tasty treat, or they were able to distract themselves by singing a song. As Mischel says, “Once you realize that willpower is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”
Mischel’s Marshmallow Test reminds us that the brain’s executive functions can help us manage our desire and increase our willpower: it allows us to plan ahead, control impulses, and pay attention.
In Aesop’s famous fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, we have an allegory for hot and cold thinking. While the Grasshopper frolics and sings on a summer day, the Ant toils to store food for the winter. Refusing to be distracted by the Grasshopper’s desire to chat, the Ant continues his work. When winter arrives, the Ant’s planning pays dividends; he has plenty to eat. The Grasshopper, however, is left with an empty stomach. Walter Mischel sums up the story as follows: “The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us.”
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: How does the Marshmallow Test relate to delayed gratification, and how does passing or failing the test related to long term success?
Challenge - Just Do It: One of the prime challenges of life is to get yourself to do the things that you need to do rather than just the things that you want to do. Do some research on quotations about self-discipline and motivation. What is the one quotation that gives the best advice on how and why to discipline and motivate yourself?
Also on This Day:
September 23, 1899: On this day. Japanese businessman Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the game company Nintendo in Kyoto, Japan. Fusajiro’s first products were hand-made, brightly colored playing cards (2).
-September 23, 1952: Vice-presidential candidate Richard Nixon gave his famous “Checkers” speech in a nationally televised address. Nixon’s goal in the speech was to address critics who claimed that he had taken money from a secret fund set up by a group of millionaires from his home state, California. Nixon appealed to his audience’s sympathies by talking about his humble background, his modest income, and most importantly, his family dog: Checkers. After the speech, letters and telegrams of support for Nixon poured in, and Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for president, decided to keep Nixon the ticket (3).
-September 23, 1961: President John F. Kennedy signs an executive order establishing the Peace Corps. As stated in his inaugural address, one of the missions of his presidency was to reach beyond just the shores of the United States: “To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right (5).”
-September 23, 2005: On this day Bill Gates gave a speech at his alma mater, Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington. He credited the school with sparking his interest in computers. In 1968, when Gates was in 7th grade, the Lakeside School Mothers’ Club raised funds to purchase a Teletype Model 30 computer, a machine that was more advanced than most university computers. He and his classmate Paul Allen, with whom Gates would co-found Microsoft, became obsessed with computing, spending every spare minute programming this machine. As Gates put it:
The experience and insight Paul Allen and I gained here gave us the confidence to start a company based on this wild idea that nobody else agreed with—that computer chips were going to become so powerful that computers and software would become a tool that would be on every desk and in every home. (4)
Sources:
1-Konnikova, Maria. “The Struggles of a Psychologist Studying Self-Control.” The New Yorker 9 Oct. 2014.
2-”History of Nintendo: Where did Nintendo come from?” BBC 12 Jun 2019.
3-Nixon, Richard M. “The Checkers Speech.” The History Place, Great Speeches Collection.
4. Housel, Mogan. The Psychology of Money. Great Britain: Harriman House, 2020: 25.
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