The 'marshmallow experiment,' which claimed that children's self-control determines their future, failed to be replicated; 'economic and social environment' has a greater impact than self-control
By
Researchers who were skeptical of the ' Marshmallow Experiment ,' which found that childhood self-control is associated with long-term success in life, have replicated the experiment on a larger scale. After taking into account the child's race, parent's educational background, and family income, it has been shown that 'social and economic environment' is more important than self-control for children's long-term success.
Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes - Tyler W. Watts, Greg J. Duncan, Haonan Quan, 2018
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661
The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure? - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmallow-test/561779/
◆What is the marshmallow experiment?
The Marshmallow Experiment was conducted by Stanford University psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and aimed to measure the relationship between children's self-control and future social achievement using marshmallows.
The marshmallow experiment conducted at Stanford University involved 186 four-year-old children, who were taken into a room with only one marshmallow, a desk, and a chair. The experimenter told the children, 'If you can hold off eating the marshmallow for 15 minutes until I return, I'll give you another marshmallow,' and then left the room, observing the children's behavior afterwards. As a result, only about one-third of the children were able to hold off until the experimenter returned and get the second marshmallow, and a follow-up survey revealed that the group that did not eat the marshmallow were evaluated as excellent in later life. It was also found that the total scores of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) differed by 210 points between the children who ate the marshmallow and those who did not finish the marshmallow.
by
The marshmallow experiment garnered a lot of attention, and subsequent research has shown that people born into poverty may achieve success through hard work and self-control, but at the expense of their health.
The 'Marshmallow Test' that measures self-control levels shows patterns that are harmful to health - GIGAZINE
◆ Results of recreating the marshmallow experiment
However, a study published on May 25, 2018, called the results of the marshmallow experiment 'limited.'
Taylor Watts of New York University and Greg Duncan and Huanan Khan of the University of California, Irvine, found the results of the marshmallow experiment suspicious, so they expanded the study to more than 900 participants, with the children representing the US population in terms of race, ethnicity, and parental education. They also controlled for certain factors, such as the children's family income.
As a result, the latest research shows that the original marshmallow experiment, which suggested that 'self-control produces better results,' has limited results. In Watts's study, it was shown that whether or not a child gets a second marshmallow depends in large part on the child's social and economic background, and that social and economic background, not self-control, is the key to children's long-term success.
The marshmallow experiment is not the only problem in the scientific community that has been hit by the ' reproducibility crisis, ' which is the inability to reproduce the results of past scientific research. The latest research results, in addition to showing that the original experimental results cannot be reproduced, have revealed a critical fact: 'The environment surrounding children is more important to their future lives than the researchers who conducted the original marshmallow experiment had thought.'
By Aaron Burden
Watts also focused his analysis on mothers who had not completed college education by the time their children were born, allowing him to study a broader sample of participants than the original study, which was limited to the Stanford community.
In this study, when the mother had a degree, the children who were able to get the second marshmallow did not show any difference in both SAT scores and later reports by the mother compared to the children who did not get the second marshmallow. And even for children whose mothers did not have a degree, there was no difference between the children who got the second marshmallow and those who did not. What was important was the family's annual income and environment at the time the child was 3 years old, and the level of self-control did not outweigh the economic and social disadvantages.
This study also shows that children from poor families have less security for the future than children from wealthy families, so they are less motivated to get the second marshmallow. Children from poor families are always at risk of having food today, but not tomorrow, so the promise to buy it for them may be broken for financial reasons.
On the other hand, children with well-educated and wealthy parents know from experience that adults have the resources and financial stability to own food, so they can postpone gratification more easily.
In 2013, Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and his colleagues showed how poverty leads people to seek short-term rewards rather than long-term ones. This research is consistent with previous studies showing that having enough resources changes how people think.
Related Posts:
in Science, , Posted by darkhorse_log