July 1st, 2022
Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel’s famous and oft-referenced “marshmallow experiment” (1960’s –1990) appeared to confirm a very valuable and common sense intuition about the nature and development of an essential aspect of what we understand as ‘moral character’. However, a recent reexamination of the “marshmallow experiment” in 2018 by researchers at NYU and Stanford, indicates that the original conclusions drawn by Mischel (accepted since then as practically ‘gospel’ by psychologists and popular culture alike), may be an example of the “post hoc ergo prompter hoc” (or “assuming the cause”) logical fallacy— which involves concluding that when one event precedes another, the first event must have caused the second event.
In the original (Mischel) experiment, children were given one marshmallow and then given the opportunity to either eat it right away, or ‘delay gratification’ by waiting to eat it for a short time and getting two marshmallows as a reward. A follow-up study of the test subjects as adults found that those who were able to delay gratification as children (as revealed by this test) were overwhelmingly more successful (levels of ‘success’ being determined by income and education, among other things) than those who were not. The study concluded that the formative development of an ability to delay gratification during childhood plays a highly influential role in determining financial/ educational success as an adult. Childhood ability to delay gratification causes greater success as an adult, and lack of this ability results in the opposite.
The more recent repeat studies however , have largely discredited Mischel’s initial conclusions by revealing an important hitherto undisclosed factor. Running the same test, and controlling for the subject’s environmental-family backgrounds, the experimenters discovered that the children who lacked the capacity for delayed gratification came from homes/families that were poor and uneducated, and those who had a great capacity for delayed gratification came from more affluent environments. Rather than lack of delayed gratification causing children to become poor and uneducated, being poor and uneducated causes lack of delayed gratification in children!
The reason for this, the experimenters conjecture, is that people raised in environments of material scarcity and domestic instability learn to prefer opportunities for short-term concrete results over long-term abstract possibilities. They become conditioned to take advantage of immediate gains because future prospects very often don’t pan-out. In contrast, People reared in materially affluent environments feel that they can afford to pass-up immediate gains in favor of possible future prospects because they aren’t worried about the dangers of scarcity and instability. The perceived mental discipline (the capacity to delay gratification for the sake of better opportunities) that they seem to display is actually just nonchalance about opportunities that they’ve learned to take for granted.
Moreover, subsequent qualifications and critiques of Mischel’s conclusions reveal the limitations of cultural bias in western conceptions of motivation, moral psychology, and values. As evolutionary anthropologist Dorsa Amir notes:
“Mischel’s pioneering studies at Stanford in California and later at Columbia University in New York had a profound impact on both professional and popular understandings of patience, its origins, and its role in our lives. People reasoned from these studies of the 1970s and ’80s that there must be some deep individual characteristic, some personality feature, that set kids up for higher achievements throughout life. But what if that wasn’t the right conclusion to draw from these studies? What if patience, and maybe other personality features too, are more a product of where we are than who we are?”
Our geography and cultural conditioning configure our worldviews. Our environmental landscapes shape our mindscapes. And these, in turn, determine the horizon of our psychic possibilities. Amir’s research has shown that the cultural assumptions underwriting our western conception of volition, agency and mental health aren’t shared by other cultures and have resulted in vastly different ideas about what discipline, inner fortitude, and delayed gratification even are—let alone what might cause them. The test subjects in experiments like Mischel’s were drawn almost exclusively from “WEIRD” demographic constituencies –white, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic—whose worldviews are formed by these kinds of psycho-social environments. When Amir conducted marshmallow-type experiments among members of the remote Amazonian Shuar community, in contrast, they shared neither the kind of self-directed ego-identity, strong sense of personal volition, or the environmental factors that influenced western subjects. Lacking these traits, and psychologically conditioned by a primal environment characterized by instability and scarcity, Shuar children developed much different attitudes toward the value of delayed gratification than western children.
“In WEIRD societies with more resources (remember that the R in WEIRD stands for rich) kids might feel that they can better afford strategies such as patience and risk-seeking. If they get unlucky and pull out a green marble and didn’t win any candy, that’s okay; it didn’t cost them that much. But for Shuar kids in the rainforest with less resources, the loss of that candy is a much bigger deal. They’d rather avoid the risk.”
Thus, a time-honored and firmly entrenched tenet of the western psychological community is now, upon deeper reflection and more rigorous scrutiny, being challenged…I’m not sure to what extent this new revelation has made an impact in the psychological community, but it was certainly illuminating for me on one level: I always wondered why, when I was relatively young, broke, and financially unstable, I tended to be less, rather than more, frugal and prudent about my personal finances (when you’d think that, being less well-off, I’d be much more financially disciplined) but after I became older and relatively wealthier I became more frugal and prudent about my spending (despite the fact that I had much more leeway to spend money than when I was young and poor but carefree with my meager savings). Following the logic of these new experimental findings, it makes sense now. Acting from a mentality of relative scarcity when I was younger, I favored taking advantage of immediate opportunities for expensive pleasures whenever I had them, knowing that I likely might not have the chance again. When became older and more financially stable, I was operating from a position of affluence— knowing that short-term opportunities for expensive fun could be safely postponed until a later date. ….My younger self would have been more comfortable among the Shuar but, as I’ve grown older and WEIRDer, I’ve apparently become more acclimated to a sober, disciplined, and frugal western bourgeoisie mentality….at least by someone’s standards….
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