Good link, but that's not one of the original authors, assuming you meant of the Marshmallow study.
Edit: I enjoyed the post, but his point turns out to be a relatively narrow one:
The other headline from the replication is that the predictive ability of the marshmallow test disappears with controls. That is, if you account for the children’s socioeconomic status [etc...], the marshmallow test does not provide any further information about that future achievement. It’s no surprise that controls of this nature do this. It simply suggests that the controls are better predictors. The original claim was not that the marshmallow test was the best or only predictor.
Such a defense of the original claim makes sense in an academic context but doesn't touch on why the marshmallow study made it into pop culture in the first place. That was because of what it seemed to suggest about character and self-control. The new study puts quite a different spin on that, as Collins agrees:
What is called into question are the implications that have been drawn from the marshmallow test studies.
The fact that those implications weren't part of Shoda, Mischel, and Peake's original study is good to know, but not the most important thing for non-specialists.
> Such a defense of the original claim makes sense in an academic context but doesn't touch on why the marshmallow study made it into pop culture in the first place.
The Marshmallow Test is something the lay person can understand, and comes with a great real-world demonstration, accurate or not. Other measures require more field-specific knowledge or statistics education to understand.
"The differences between the experiments could also be behind the difference in size of correlation. Each study used different measures of achievement. The marshmallow test in the replication had a maximum wait of only 7 minutes, compared to 15 to 20 minutes in the original (although most of the predictive power in the new study was found to be in the first 20 seconds). The replication created categories for time waited (e.g. 0 to 20 seconds, 20 seconds to 2 minutes, and so on), rather than using time as a continuous variable. It also focused on children with parents who did not have a college education – too many of the children with college-educated parents waited the full seven minutes. The original study drew its sample from the Stanford community."
Edit: I enjoyed the post, but his point turns out to be a relatively narrow one:
The other headline from the replication is that the predictive ability of the marshmallow test disappears with controls. That is, if you account for the children’s socioeconomic status [etc...], the marshmallow test does not provide any further information about that future achievement. It’s no surprise that controls of this nature do this. It simply suggests that the controls are better predictors. The original claim was not that the marshmallow test was the best or only predictor.
Such a defense of the original claim makes sense in an academic context but doesn't touch on why the marshmallow study made it into pop culture in the first place. That was because of what it seemed to suggest about character and self-control. The new study puts quite a different spin on that, as Collins agrees:
What is called into question are the implications that have been drawn from the marshmallow test studies.
The fact that those implications weren't part of Shoda, Mischel, and Peake's original study is good to know, but not the most important thing for non-specialists.