The Marshmallow Test Chapter 1 In Stanford University's Surprise Room

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The Marshmallow Test Chapter 1. In Stanford University’s Surprise Room

Author: Walter Mischel Publisher: New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. Publish Date: 2014-9 Review Date: Status:💥

Annotations

The Marshmallow Test became the tool for studying how people go from a choice to delay gratification to actually managing to wait and resist the temptation.

MAKING THE MARSHMALLOW TEST

PREDICTING THE FUTURE?

It was 1978 and Philip K. Peake, now a senior professor at Smith College, was then my new graduate student at Stanford. Phil, working closely and often around the clock with other students, especially Antonette Zeiss and Bob Zeiss, was instrumental in designing, launching, and pursuing what became the Stanford longitudinal studies of delay of gratification. Beginning in 1982, our team sent out questionnaires to the reachable parents, teachers, and academic advisers of the preschoolers who had participated in the delay research. We asked about all sorts of behaviors and characteristics that might be relevant to impulse control, ranging from the children’s ability to plan and think ahead, to their skills and effectiveness at coping with personal and social problems (for example, how well they got along with their peers), to their academic progress.

More than 550 children who were enrolled in Stanford University’s Bing preschool between 1968 and 1974 were given the Marshmallow Test. We followed a sample of these participants and assessed them on diverse measures about once every decade after the original testing. In 2010, they reached their early to midforties, and in 2014, we are continuing to collect information from them, such as their occupational, marital, physical, financial, and mental health status. The findings surprised us from the start, and they still do.

ADOLESCENCE: COPING AND ACHIEVEMENT

In the first follow-up study, we mailed small bundles of questionnaires to their parents and asked them to “think about your child in comparison to his or her peers, such as classmates and other same-age friends. We would like to get your impression of how your son or daughter compares to those peers.” They were to rate their children on a scale of 1 to 9 (from “Not at all” to “Moderately” to “Extremely”). We also obtained similar ratings from their teachers about the children’s cognitive and social skills at school.

Preschoolers who delayed longer on the Marshmallow Test were rated a dozen years later as adolescents who exhibited more self-control in frustrating situations; yielded less to temptation; were less distractible when trying to concentrate; were more intelligent, self-reliant, and confident; and trusted their own judgment. When under stress they did not go to pieces as much as the low delayers did, and they were less likely to become rattled and disorganized or revert to immature behavior. Likewise, they thought ahead and planned more, and when motivated they were more able to pursue their goals. They were also more attentive and able to use and respond to reason, and they were less likely to be sidetracked by setbacks.

ADULTHOOD

Around age twenty-five to thirty, those who had delayed longer in preschool self-reported that they were more able to pursue and reach long-term goals, used risky drugs less, had reached higher educational levels, and had a significantly lower body mass index. They were also more resilient and adaptive in coping with interpersonal problems and better at maintaining close relationships (discussed in Chapter 12).

But perhaps what we were finding was a fluke, limited to what had been happening at Stanford, in the 1960s and early 1970s in California, at the height of the counterculture and the Vietnam War. In order to test this, my students and I launched a number of other studies with very different cohorts—not from the privileged Stanford campus community, but from very different populations and eras, including the public schools of the South Bronx in New York City decades after the Stanford studies had begun. And we found that things played out in similar ways with children living in extremely different settings and circumstances, which I describe in further detail in Chapter 12.

MIDLIFE BRAIN SCANS

Yuichi Shoda, now a professor at the University of Washington, and I have worked closely together since he started graduate school in psychology at Stanford in 1982. When, beginning in 2009, the Bing school participants reached their midforties, Yuichi and I organized a team of cognitive neuroscientists from several different institutions in the United States to conduct another follow-up study. This team included John Jonides at the University of Michigan, Ian Gotlib at Stanford, and BJ Casey at Weill Cornell Medical College.

We wanted to test for possible differences in the brain scans of people whose lifelong trajectories, beginning with the Marshmallow Test, had been consistently either high or low on self-control measures. We invited a group of our Bing Nursery School alumni, who were now scattered in various parts of the country,

The brain images of these alumni revealed that those who had been more able to resist the marshmallow temptation in preschool and remained consistently high in self-control over the years displayed distinctively different activity in their frontostriatal brain circuitries—which integrate motivational and control processes—than those who hadn’t. In the high delayers, the prefrontal cortex area, which is used for effective problem solving, creative thinking, and control of impulsive behavior, was more active. In contrast, in the low delayers, the ventral striatum was more active, especially when they were trying to control their reactions to emotionally hot, alluring stimuli. This area, located in the deeper, more primitive part of the brain, is linked to desire, pleasure, and addictions.

Discussing these findings with the press, BJ Casey noted that whereas low delayers seemed to be driven by a stronger engine, high delayers had better mental brakes. This study made a key point. Individuals who had lifelong low self-control on our measures did not have difficulty controlling their brains under most conditions of everyday life. Their distinctive impulse control problems in behavior and in their brain activity were evident only when they were faced with very attractive temptations.

Notes

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