The Holy Grail of Social Science is predictability. The S.A.T. scores, I.Q. tests, Gallup Polls, we hear about them all the time, and distrust them much of the time.
Politicians want definite, accurate predictions about the behavior of voters.
Marketers drool at the very concept of a totally predictable consumer population, and do their best to create it by cunning psychology and research about T.V. watching and demographics.
It is refreshing to learn about an amazingly accurate method of predicting success that required material that costs less than a dollar. This may be the reason it isn’t widely used today, in spite of its success. It was the marshmallow test applied to four year olds in the 1960's.
The word emotion is based on the same root as the word motion. All emotions lead to an impulse to act.
There is no more fundamental psychological skill than that of resisting impulse. The ability to inhibit an automatic reaction is basic to success in any field of human activity.
Maybe you should read that sentence again. It is a very important fact in the toolkit of life. The marshmallow test has shown that clearly.
The psychologist Walter Mischel thought of the test and gave it to a group of four year olds at a preschool on the campus of Stanford University in the 1960's.
The four year olds were given a choice. They could have the marshmallow in front of them immediately, or if they waited until the tester came back from an errand in fifteen minutes they could have two.
The children given this choice were tracked through their school careers until they graduated from high school. The results showed how fundamental is the ability to restrain the emotions and so delay impulse. Those who did it had quite different futures from those who didn't.
The ones who restrained themselves for the endless fifteen minutes used several different methods to sustain their determination. Some covered their eyes so they wouldn't see the tempting marshmallow on the table. Some rested their heads on their hands, talked to themselves about something else, or even tried to go to sleep. These got the promised two marshmallows reward.
The others yielded to impulse almost as soon as the tester had left the room on his errand. They snatched the marshmallow and downed it.
The diagnostic value of how the children dealt with this opportunity to benefit by delaying impulse became clear as they were tracked through their school careers.
Twelve to fourteen years later the social and emotional differences between the grabbers and those who could delay gratification was astonishing.
Those who controlled their impulse at age four were now, as teenagers, more competent socially, more effective as individuals, more self assertive, and much better able to cope with the frustrations of being an adolescent in a modern society.
They dealt with stress better. They willingly accepted challenges without caving in at the first signs of difficulty. They were markedly more self-reliant than the grabbers, and much more trustworthy and dependable. They took the initiative and confidently became involved in new projects.
More than a decade after the experiment they were still able to delay instant gratification, to their great advantage.
The others were the ones with tendencies to social problems, to overreaction under stress, to frustration manifesting as aggression and jealousy. They still couldn't delay instant gratification.
And surprisingly, those who could delay their impulses turned out to be better students too. They could reason better, and convey their thoughts better, could concentrate better, and followed through on assignments.
The grabbers had average SAT verbal scores of 524 and math scores of 528. The others had averages of 610 and 652 respectively; a 210 point difference in the total score.
This delay of gratification test at the age of four was twice as good a predictor of the SAT scores as the IQ test at age four.
Lack of impulse control in childhood was also a better predictor of later delinquency than IQ.
Mindful parenting up to the age of seven is the basis of the child's success in life. A TV set babysitter doesn't do it. It encourages instant gratification. The Jesuits used to say "Give us a child until he is seven and you can have him afterwards." They knew something that most parents don't know.
The ability to control impulse is thus shown to be more important to success than IQ, and may even explain the superiority of the Oriental students in our school systems. The Chinese and Japanese think in terms of generations. We don't. Check out this amazingly simple predictor yourself. That’s your homework. Give yourself one piece of chocolate if you don’t do it, and two, if in a week’s time you have data on it from observations.
