What the Wolf of Wall Street can teach us about the Marshmallow Test
It isn’t the experiment itself that bothers me.
On the contrary, I find it fascinating. But all the moralizing self-help claptrap that invariably goes along with any discussion of the Test? There is just something about that which drives me crazy.
But I didn’t understand why, exactly, until a couple of months ago, when I watched Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street for the third time.
Stay with me.
By now, surely, we have all heard of the Marshmallow Test, the experiment in child psychology first conducted by Dr. Walter Mischel at Stanford University in 1970. It has popped up on my screens or in my conversations with distressing regularity over the past year or so, a favorite topic of self-righteous investors, obsessive-compulsive helicopter parents, MBA students, and, apparently, myself.
For those of you who need a brief refresher, here’s how the Test works. You sit little Jimmy down at a table and place a marshmallow in front of him. You explain that you are leaving the room, but that if he patiently waits until you return, without eating it, he will get another — you know, for being “good” — and so will have two marshmallows rather than just one.
What a perfect analogy for success in the modern world! To get ahead, to be successful, all you need to do is master self-control.
Stay sober! Resist temptation! Invest in the future!
Or, at least, this is how Mischel interprets the results of his research, which appears to correlate the ability to delay scarfing marshmallows as a child with future successes in life. The inside cover of The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control goes so far as to claim that the “Marshmallow Test proved that the ability to delay gratification is critical to living a successful and fulfilling life.”
Did it? I’m not so sure.
Now don’t get me wrong. I respect science in general and Dr. Mischel in particular. And I learned a few things about self-control reading his book that I’d like to try out sometime.
But surely this isn’t the only way to interpret the broader implications of the Marshmallow Test.
Shouldn’t it worry us, for example, that the supposed moral of the Test is the exact opposite of the moral of “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”?
Of course it is true that sometimes sowing seeds and awaiting future dividends is the smart move. But at other times, a sure thing right now is better than hypothetical riches later, which might vanish, leaving you with nothing.
Who knows? Perhaps eating the first marshmallow right now will give you the energy you need to go out and get the second one. For much of human history, people who chose to wait patiently for their second marshmallow starved to death.
The only way to determine the optimal strategy for the Marshmallow Test is in retrospect, when the adult either returns with Jimmy’s second marshmallow, or he doesn’t. And therein lies the trick: the only reason waiting would be the better choice (and therefore worthy of all that moralizing self-help claptrap) is if the adult returns, as he promised, with the second marshmallow.
It is reasonable to ask just how common this sort of certainty is in our world.
How often have wars interrupted the best-laid plans? How often has the stock market crashed? How often have workers’ promised pensions vanished overnight?
Which brings us to The Wolf of Wall Street.
Specifically, to the infamous “humming” scene, when Matthew McConaughey takes Leonardo DiCaprio out for lunch on his first day on the job.
This scene has much to recommend it. Not only does it articulate the problem with brokers, bankers, and capitalism much better (and faster) than Karl Marx ever could, it also manages to include a sermon on the virtues of gratuitous masturbation, a topic which Marx, despite his many thousands of pages, somehow neglects to address.
Certainly, we could learn a great deal from this McConaughey: our greatest American philosopher on the great American preoccupation of success.
Appropriately enough, the scene itself is an inverted or monstrous version of the Marshmallow Test. McConaughey starts it off by humming deeply, snorting cocaine, and telling the waiter to bring Absolut martinis back to their table every couple of minutes until either he or DiCaprio “passes the f**k out.”
This is the Marshmallow Test, alright, but one where the children (natural psychopaths, all) are in charge.
There is no delay of gratification here, only the glorification and worship of it. McConaughey explains that cocaine and hookers are the only reason anyone would want to be a stockbroker; that he jerks off “at least twice a day,” not because he wants to (although he does, naturally) but because he needs to. Much of the scene revolves around the idea that excess is synonymous with success.
Or, as McConaughey puts it: “Pop off to the bathroom, work one out anytime you can, and when you get really good at it, you’ll be f**king stroking it and you’ll be thinking about money.”
This attitude is simultaneously shocking and appealing to DiCaprio, who at this point of the film represents the quaint middle-class perspective of the film’s ideal audience. All those who live in the suburbs of a decaying America, patiently waiting for the day when their good behavior and hard work will finally be rewarded, and they can retire, or go on vacation, or buy that new car.
This is the genius of the scene. How is it that McConaughey, this self-indulgent grasshopper, can be so successful, even though he gives in to every temptation? It isn’t supposed to be like this!
Well. Do you know what a fugazi is?
Again, let us let McConaughey explain: “[A fugazi] is a wazzy, it’s a woozy, it’s fairy dust, it doesn’t exist, it’s never landed, it is no matter, it’s not on the elemental chart, it’s not f**king real.”
So you see? This grasshopper has developed the ability to hijack the ant’s instinct for self-control with nothing more than a promise. McConaughey goes on to explain in greater detail:
“If you got a client who bought stock at 8, and it now sits at 16, he’s all f**king happy, he wants to cash-in, liquidate, take his f**king money and run home, you don’t let him do that. Cause that would make it real. No, what do you do? You get another brilliant idea, a special idea. Another situation, another stock, to reinvest his earnings, and then some. And he will, every single time, cause they are f**king addicted. And then you just keep doing this, again, and again, and again. Meanwhile, he thinks he’s getting sh*t-rich. Which he is, on paper. But you and me, the brokers, we are taking home cold hard cash via commission motherf**ker.”
Here McConaughey employs the logic of the Marshmallow Test (i.e. waiting for two is better than enjoying one now). But rather than using it to enrich his clients, he uses it to fool them, to paralyze them, to move money from their pockets to his own. To leave them patiently waiting, while eating every marshmallow placed in front of him, as fast as he can.
And here at last we arrive at the heart of the problem.
The necessity of delaying gratification is a frequent experience in the lives of the un-wealthy, whether they like it or not. We might as well turn it into a virtue. Sure. But let’s not confuse things.
What is the opposite of self-control? The control of others. What is the opposite of the ability to delay gratification? The ability to obtain gratification.
That is to say, power.
This is the way it has always been. In the medieval period, Christian ideology kept the peasants at work in the fields, continually putting off their present desires for the promise of eternal gratification in the afterlife. In the meantime, the aristocrats got fat off of their hardship and suffering. Our civilization is not so very different.
Perhaps there will be no Second Coming of the Marshmallow. No second Earth to consume. No second chance for us.
Perhaps the people who sell promises for profit have sold more than can ever be kept.
In any case, we should always suspect ideologies of delay.
And so, The Wolf of Wall Street can, in the end, teach us a great deal about the Marshmallow Test. Not least of which is this: that the most successful people of all, the people in power, aren’t patiently waiting for their second marshmallow. They are eating your marshmallow right now.
That’s what power is.
