Delayed Gratification: What It Is and Why It is Overrated
What would you feel if a respectable scientist told you that he can predict your chances of succeeding in life based on your actions when you were five years old? Whether you believe it or not, your fate cannot be determined by how you were able to resist temptations at a young age. But for a while, it was believed by many that the ability to wait for a better reward at a young age precisely determines whether a person would excel in their life, and this was based on the famous Stanford Marshmallow experiment in the 1970s. As promising as it may seem, social scientists came to determine that the assumptions of the study do not depict an accurate generalization of society. Years after the original paper was released, an article from the University of Rochester discovered that a person’s conditions affect how long one would delay gratification. Based on the following ideas, I believe that delayed gratification is not the best predictor to determine a person’s likelihood to achieve success because other factors play a much bigger part to succeed in life, namely financial and societal circumstances.
The original Marshmallow experiment was made known to the public during the late 1980s through the article Delay of Gratification in Children by Walter Mischel, and it found a relationship between a person’s capability to delay gratification during their early years and their success as adults. To prove this, Mischel assigned four to six-year-old children in a designated room and placed a piece of marshmallow in front of them. The kids were given a choice to either eat the single marshmallow at the moment, or they could wait for up to 20 minutes and get another piece of marshmallow. The researcher recorded their decisions, and he compared it to the participants’ SAT scores, educational attainment, and Body Mass Index years after the Marshmallow experiment. Results show that the longer the children were able to delay their gratification, the more likely they were to achieve better SAT scores and fewer behavioral issues. Because of this, Mischel concluded that the ability to delay gratification of a person is positively correlated to the level of success to be achieved as an adult, and this assumption reformed perceptions towards success for almost four decades.
Unsurprisingly, the results of the original Marshmallow experiment brought up notions about how people would have greater chances of success if we could encourage them to be more persevering. The study revealed that children who were able to hold off on eating the marshmallow were better able to “cope with frustration and resist the temptation at statistically significant levels” (Mischel). These results prompted the researcher to highlight in The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control that based on the study’s results, current “public policy and educational implications had to be considered”. It led to the idea that if society could teach kids to be more persevering and to have better control, they would have higher chances to achieve success in life. However, this conclusion also brings up the idea that those who cannot delay their gratification are ill-fated in the future, and that notion poses a troubling generalization for society.
The deductions made in the Marshmallow experiment received criticism throughout the years because Mischel failed to consider external factors that might affect a person’s ability to delay gratification. A big reason why the results of the study cannot be oversimplified to the targeted population is that the participants of the study were all students from Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School, which was a predominantly middle- and upper-class occupied school. We can see how this is problematic when we look at today, and we see that higher-income households only make up 19% of the United States population (Elkins). If we were to apply the results of the study today, the results will fail to account for the remaining 81% of the American population. Because of this faulty generalization, critics came to question if it makes sense that a child that grew up in poverty to delay their gratification when they are used to unsteadiness in their lives. For that reason, there was an impending necessity to recreate the marshmallow experiment with different conditions.
After nearly thirty years since Mischel’s findings were published, the University of Rochester’s Celeste Kidd published The Marshmallow Study Revisited in which she disproved the conclusions made in the original Marshmallow experiment. The researcher recreated the study with the intent to prove that delayed gratification is “influenced as much by the environment as by innate ability” (Kidd). In her version of the experiment, she manipulated the child’s environment so that subjects were in either reliable or unreliable conditions. Results show that there is a huge difference in mean waiting time between the two groups: children who were in reliable conditions are four times more likely to delay their gratification compared to those that were in unreliable conditions. The results of the study show a significant difference between those who were in reliable conditions and those who weren’t, which strengthens the belief that the environment plays a big role in a person’s journey to success. These astounding outcomes began to reveal how a person’s innate ability to delay gratification is just a part of a bigger picture, and the discussion opened up existing issues in our society regarding social inequality.
In light of the new study’s findings, we begin to discover how the delay of gratification is less of a skill that helps to increase chances of success, but rather more of an outcome based on how people were raised.
After discovering the significant effects of manipulating conditions, Kidd shows how the “rational choice” for a child may differ depending on what environment they are in. She explains that if the child is used to getting things taken away from them, then it would make sense for them to grab the current opportunity rather than wait for another, while those who grew up in stable conditions would feel comfortable enough to delay their satisfaction for a while. This insight changes how we should perceive the idea of delayed gratification in the real world because not everybody is privileged enough to grow up in reliable environments. For that reason, it is believed that the growth environment and intelligence of a person is a more substantial factor to success compared to delayed gratification.
The implications of the latest marshmallow test paper have led me to conclude that delayed gratification should not be the main factor to be used when predicting our chances of succeeding. It is no doubt that persistence is an essential life skill, but we need to see that our environment contributes more to achieving success. I, myself, have always been a persisting child, but patience can only bring you so much when you live in a country where more than a fifth of the population is in poverty (Adame), quality healthcare is only accessible to the high-income class (Folger), and lucrative job opportunities are multiple boat-rides away from home. However, moving to the United States gave me a chance to have a stable living environment and receive many benefits, that would help me pave my way to high-paying jobs. Taking the difference of opportunities into account, we can see how the societal situation I am in takes a bigger role in my opportunities to succeed compared to my ability to delay gratification, and other immigrants would most likely agree.
People who experienced living in both reliable and unreliable conditions would understand first-hand how a person’s environment plays a much bigger role than the ability to delay gratification. According to the article The Most Common Reasons Why People Immigrate to the US, the main reason why people choose to live in the States is (1) to have better work opportunities, (2) to have better living conditions, (3) to escape their troubled country, and (4) to get the best education (Golchin). As we can see, these reasons are mostly concerned with improving the environment that they are in. Once they are in a place with better stability, immigrants achieve success remarkably compared to their previous status, as proven by the Economic Policy Institute which shows that immigrants are strongly represented in high-wage jobs. (Costa, Favid, and Shierholz) The fact that immigrants are excelling in the United States where living conditions are comfortable goes to show how detrimental a person’s environment is to success.
It is no question that the ability to delay gratification is an essential skill for a person to thrive in life. But since impulse control is just an outcome of our current environment, I am convinced that delayed gratification should not be a prime factor in determining later achievement. The original Marshmallow experiment allowed us to see the importance of delayed gratification to excel in life. But as researchers began to go in-depth on persistence, we came to know that delayed gratification is more of an outcome of a person’s condition rather than a skill to be taught. Because of this, the path to excellence is not found by forcing and developing patience, but rather by being in a trusting environment where patience comes naturally, along with other success-linked attributes. If the learning environments of today were to base their teaching practices on this idea, then it would be no surprise if the generations to come would yield more successful people than today.
Works Cited
Adame, Diane. Top 10 Facts about Poverty in the Philippines. 19 August 2018.
Costa, Daniel, Cooper Favid, and Heidi Shierholz. Facts About Immigration and the U.S. Economy. 12 August 2014.
Folger, Jean. Can You Trust the Philippines Healthcare System? 26 June 2020.
Golchin, Ali. The Most Common Reasons Why People Immigrate to US. 9 May 2015.
Elkins, Kathleen. “19% Of Americans Are Considered ‘Upper Class’ — Here’s How Much They Earn”. CNBC, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/14/how-many-americans-are-considered-upper-class.html.
Rastogi, Vasundara. Minimum Wages in ASEAN: How Are They Calculated? 14 January 2020.
Watts, Tyler, Greg Duncan, and Haonan Quan. “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes.” Psychological Science (2018): 1159–1177.
