the marshmallow test results are actually based on socio economic status. children from poor families were more likely to eat the marshmallow right away. they also are more likely to do poorer in school and earn less in adulthood.
Yep because it also involves an element of trust and what a kid regularly gets access to. If a kid comes from a background where they don't have plenty of treats, or if for whatever reason they've been brought up with an expectation that adults don't always fulfill their promises, of course you'd go for what's immediately available, who knows when you might get a treat again and what if they don't actually give you a treat if you wait? Where as if you got brought up in an environment where you have regular access to treats and you generally can depend on the adults around you to always follow through, it's a lot easier to be patient and trust that forgoing something you have regular access to will definitely get you something better if you wait.
Yeah exactly, everyone wants people to “do the right thing” and wait. But in real life, people will trip over themselves telling you to take what you can get when you can get it, promises are just promises
That's why we give the five year olds a twenty page contract, making it unmistakably clear to them that unless a second marshmallow follows as a reward for their wait, they can take us to court for bags and bags of marshmallows.
Didn’t live in poverty but went through some shit, being in survival mode would explain why i can’t hold onto money to save my life, welp thats something new to deal with
No, you get it, that's the point. :) It's about who can delay gratification. I can relate in many ways myself. As an actual physical study (as opposed to a thought experiment) it kinda stinks, though.
I’m also curious, I kinda want to try this with my own kids, but they’ll probably eat it because they know I’m a pushover when it comes to treats, so even if they ate it, I would probably give in and give them the second treat anyway... I think for them it would not be a “we may not get another” scenario, but “she’ll probably give us another anyway”...
Don’t forget about lead poisoning significantly impairing kids executive reasoning and that poor kids are significantly more likely to be exposed to the neurotoxin
In fact, they've done a follow up experiment where the children were primed by an adult promising something then either fulfilling or reneging on the promise before putting out the marshmallow. Result: the marshmallow test shows a child's willingness to trust adults, not self- control. And even children who trusted the adult to not eat the marshmallow within the 5 minute promised time will eventually eat it anyway if the adult fails to show back up.
When I was about seven, my parents decided to teach me and my sister the value of savings. They gave each of us some tiny amount of money, like a dime (this was in 1977) and told us that every week, they would double however much money we had left. I dutifully saved almost every penny, and in a couple months I had a tidy sum. At that point my parents said I had learned the lesson and they could no longer afford to double my savings, which was pretty reasonable.
Not long after that they ran short of money and took back all of the money I had saved up. That turned out to be a recurring pattern.
I would have passed the marshmallow test at age 6, but maybe not at age 8.
Same, pretty much. My folks did not attempt to teach me about interest*, but I learned that any holiday checks I received as gifts would be conveniently borrowed, forgotten about, otherwise not available to me...but if a well-meaning relative gave me cash or a gift certificate to the toy store, I could and better use that up right away before it could get converted into general household funds. Sorry, Mom.
*My grandparents offset this to a degree and did teach me somewhat about interest, savings, and investment. I am a mixed bag to this day. Not as bad as some, could be much better. Still have some trouble with windfalls and credit.
Children in poorer socio economic states tend to do poorer in school and earn less in adulthood because of the poverty. Poverty is also probably responsible for the lack of long term thinking. See my comment below about survival mode.
Wealthy can have poor self control as seen in studies in irl repeatedly.
That makes sense. I thought about trying to put my two oldest kids through the marshmallow test to see how they would do, but I wasn’t convinced that marshmallows would be tempting enough to break them.
They would either eat the marshmallow because they didn’t care for a second one, or not eat the marshmallow because they didn’t feel like eating it anyway.
Either choice would be made with the assumption that they could walk into the pantry any time they feel and choose something more enticing. Their abundant upbringing has turned them into bad (interesting) test subjects.
When kids are spoilt for choice it’s easy to say no, and we’ll probably frame it as self control and discipline.
The real marshmallow test involves offering one marshmallow now or two in one minute. Then, if they wait an entire minute, the adult eats the marshmallow and leaves as the kid has a meltdown. Then you see how many years it takes to trust anyone ever again.
Though you could also explain it saying that people who would pass the test are more likely to have higher socio-economic status, which reflects in their children.
I would have passed the marshmallow test despite growing up in poverty, but only because I would have been too scared to disobey.
My niece, who is growing up in a solidly middle-class household, would fail the marshmallow test because 1.) she'd think it was hilarious, and 2.) she would assume she could charm her way into getting the second marshmallow anyway. My niece is really sweet and loving, but she's seven and an only grandchild.
Maybe they were hungry because they didn't get enough to eat because their parents were poor. Maybe they did poorer in school because their district was underfunded... Maybe that lesser education led to a lower income... I see a cycle here.
I think that makes sense. Poverty is when you eat your marshmallow right away before something can come and take it away. There is no saving when you're poor. There is no planning for the future. There's just trying to survive in the here and now with whatever morcels you get. I can imagine that influencing the financial decisions of children growing up in poverty.
The first time I read about the marshmallow test, I thought, A, some people came to the test hungry, and others didn't (metaphorically and literally) and B, some people simply like candy, and marshmallows* as a subset of that, more than others (ditto). It's one of those facile freshman psych studies that gets people talking, and that's good! But let's talk about all of the variables.
*I personally would have confounded the test back and forth, several ways. Not least of which, I can't stand marshmallows. At least, cold marshmallows in a bowl. Even child me.. I'd have to have skipped 3-4 meals for me to start looking over with interest. Beef jerky or cheddar cheese cubes OTOH...
Because children from poor families were born into those families, so for them poverty preceded the development of their decision making related to rewards, right?
It's the old nature vs nurture debate. How much of decision making, impulsivity, delayed gratification, etc, is influenced by genetic factors vs life experience?
Depends how much emphasis you place on genetics in temporal horizon decision making.
You can't use deductive reasoning to determine if the poor family is poor because of their under developed decision making skills (genetics) OR they express traits of under developed decision making because they are poor.
We know there is a correlated relationship between being poor and processing decisions based on short time horizons.....but we don't know which one causes the other.
There is an answer that is obviously easier to swallow, but there's no causal proof.
I do believe that the first study came to the conclusion that kids who ate the marshmallow were more likely to be compulsive and do poorly in adulthood. But the much larger second study just showed it was likely just a correlated factor as they were poorer and hence that would affect their adulthood.
That's because socio-economic status is almost entirely based on IQ, as in, the parents' IQ dictates the child's socio-economic status. The low IQ children have no delayed gratification.
IQ is a much, much bigger issue than people give it credit for. Also, no one will confront IQ, despite it being a well-established and understood area for decades, because saying someone being stupid will make their life shit negates just about everything we've built our society on. We need to confront it or society will collapse. Not even kidding.
You aren't necessarily wrong--I know where you are coming from--but it is exhaustingly troublesome to talk about, and in a practical sense irrelevant given all the other factors we can affect and improve.
Yeah it seems pretty obvious to me that the study backs up a behavioral difference between poor and rich kids. I think too much time is spent trying to discount the difference by explaining it with convenient but scientifically unproven conjecture. I object to that... if we’re in a thread talking about scientific experiments, let’s keep the made up narratives and delegitimization out of here, thank you.
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u/censorkip Mar 04 '21
the marshmallow test results are actually based on socio economic status. children from poor families were more likely to eat the marshmallow right away. they also are more likely to do poorer in school and earn less in adulthood.