[jti107]

anedotally this has held up in my social group. the people that i grew up with and went to school with...the ones that could delay instant gratification and had long term goals ended up doing pretty well in life. the ones that didnt have any plans and just went with the flow did poorly and just getting by.

also in my life i notice a big difference in performance from when i had goals/vision for my life vs. going through the motions.

IMO i think you need to have goals/vision/standards for all the important areas in your life (hobbies,partner,career,family,relationships)

[digging]

Did you perform the marshmallow test on your friend as children? If not, I don't even know if you're really talking about the same thing, to be honest. The original study is such a weird and specific phenomenon to which a heroic effort of extrapolation was applied.

"Doing well in life," "delaying gratification," and "long-term goals" are about as far from concretely measurable traits as you can get.

What about a person who always waits to buy games on sale, but has experienced food insecurity and won't pass on free food, even if it's unhealthy? I could go on... there are countless variables when trying to evaluate those traits. What this study is saying is that extrapolating such broad strokes from small indicators is probably not a smart move.

[sdwr]

Life can be a lot like a hologram, where the little things show the whole picture.

The marshmallow test is not really testing hunger or self control. It tests how willing people are to align with authority/the bigger picture.

The ideal participant isn't someone doing the calculus that 2 > 1. It's someone who recognizes that they are being tested, and cares about that more than any number of marshmallows.

The question isn't "how hungry am I?", but "what does adult attention mean to me?".

And that's why all of this stuff will stop replicating eventually, why new psychotherapies revert to the mean - it doesn't have the same amount of meaning for the test-givers after decades of trials.

[digging]

> The marshmallow test is not really testing hunger or self control. It tests how willing people are to align with authority/the bigger picture.

I feel you're making the exact same mistake as the original researchers.

The marshmallow test is a proxy, but it's impossible to say what it's a proxy for in any given individual. One kid will wait because they're scared the researcher will be angry if they don't. Another kid will wait because they recently learned what marshmallows are, and they actually really want to eat two. A third will not wait, because they've never seen a marshmallow before and would rather try one first before getting two.

[BurningFrog]

That this personality trait, if it exists, is important for success is pretty obviously true.

If you can measure this trait by putting marshmallows in front of 4½ olds is a whole other question.

[abeppu]

... and I guess another question is, how stable is this trait?

E.g. if we got really used to telling 12 year olds that the marshmallow test finding indicates that the ability to put of immediate rewards for larger later rewards is really important, could you effectively get (slightly older) kids to learn to delay gratification more, such that their performance as small children matters less?

Or (more likely) if you raise a generation with more distracting technology, can you destroy a whole generation's ability to patiently wait for a larger reward?

[fragmede]

let's ask China

[haliskerbas]

Could go either way in my social group. Some folks hit ivy and then ended up at mediocre tech jobs anyway, others hit ivy and struggling to find work. Others went with the flow and still made it to the same mediocre tech jobs. And the ones who failed through school and barely made it through community college have successful small businesses because they were charting their own path the whole time.

[kenjackson]

But what were they doing when they failed school? I feel like there are the Bill Gates, skipping school kids. And the ones I went to school with who just smoked, drank and hung out at the park.

I suspect the outcomes were fairly different although might both fit under your same category.

[mrguyorama]

>Bill Gates, skipping school kids

Bill Gates could drop out of college and skip school because he had wealthy family that would have supported him if things went poorly. Poor people do not have that option, so when they skip school, they instead get labeled truants and harassed by the state.

[charlie0]

> And the ones who failed through school and barely made it through community college have successful small businesses because they were charting their own path the whole time.

By definition, it sounds like these folk were able to delay gratification quite well.

[haliskerbas]

Maybe it depends on how you look at it? If gratification is "working on my side project instead of finishing homework due tomorrow" then it wasn't delayed much, they were gratified the whole dang time!

[circlefavshape]

IMO you do not. I know many people "doing pretty well in life" who are opportunistic rather than goal-driven, and having goals for your partner/family/relationships sounds to me like a recipe for disaster

[im3w1l]

In regards to the first part of your post, being opportunistic and goal-driven are not necessarily opposites. A person who is both has a plan that they follow by default, but the flexibility to turn on a dime if a better choice opens up.

The second part I partially agree with. But establishing a routine like meeting some friend every Thursday evening, that can be good.

[fragmede]

lets have kids and raise them well is a pretty common shared goal for parents/family

[nerdponx]

That's why these bunk psychology studies are so insidious. It might in fact be a real effect! But maybe not at the level of babies and marshmallows.

[readthenotes1]

Many years ago, I recall reading in _Columbia History of the World_ that the ability to live in cities, that is civilization, began when people preserved their seed corn so that they could have multiple harvests during the growing seasons.

What I remember is that they summarize this as "Delayed gratification is the root of civilization."

And while this is pretty early in the history of the world book, I read no further because I doubted I would find anything more insightful in the subsequent hundreds of pages.

...

Years later I tried to find that quote and I could not. I still believe it is a valuable insight though even if I hallucinated it.

[digging]

Why don't squirrels live in cities then?

[fragmede]

they do, along with a large number of rats and other vermin

[digging]

...Fair play.

[wonnage]

the confirmation bias is biasing

[lolinder]

Agreed. For me the real question isn't whether being capable of delaying instant gratification leads to better outcomes, it's if the marshmallow test accurately measures susceptibility to pursuing instant gratification in the cases that matter.

Like, I've never liked marshmallows. A second marshmallow would have been uninteresting to me. And even if it were I could totally see a kid going "eh, it's just a marshmallow, I'm going to just eat it now and then go think about something else".

Being able to delay instant gratification for greater rewards is only valuable in cases where you actually care about the reward. Someone who applies it everywhere regardless of interest level is just min-maxing life, and it wouldn't surprise me if obsessively min-maxing even little details doesn't correlate with better outcomes.