Social Trust, a Key Factor for Self-Control
How trust impacts your decision-making ability.
Delaying gratification requires an individual to give up an immediate tangible reward for a future one. In most experiments and situations, we can trust that future reward’s existence. But that assumes a certain amount of trust between the person sacrificing and whoever awards them.
Several experiments reviewed the mediating effect of trust on self-control. Researchers wanted to know if social trust mattered and, if so, how significant the impact was.
Following the Rules
Prompted by encounters early in his life, Walter Mischel sought to understand the role trust plays in our ability to exercise self-control. His team recruited a group of Boston children to participate in a few activities and a simple game. The activities tested the children’s levels of self-control, while the game tested their trustworthiness.
Mischel suspected that students scoring low on self-control would also be the quickest to lie. To test this theory, they created an arcade-style game.
The game was easy to understand, point a ray gun at the target, press a button, score points based on your shot, and earn a prize based on those points. Simple enough for even the youngest children. Only, things weren’t quite as they seemed. The scoring was utterly random. No matter how well they seemed to do, their score would increase at an arbitrary rate.
Children were left alone during the experiment and were expected to report their scores honestly. However, the only way to earn the best prize was to lie.
Those who had scored low on self-control were the quickest to lie about their score. And the ones who scored high on self-control but still lied took much longer to do so.
The results were clear for Mischel and his colleagues; a lack of self-control matched their incentive to lie about results and thus earn a larger reward.
Looks matter
The role of interpersonal trust relegates choices between immediate and delayed gratification.
If someone cannot trust delayed outcomes, their only rational choice is to take short-term gains.
We trust others based on prior observations and relevant information about their character. You could think of this as a trust score, a number that varies from person to person and task to task. For instance, a child whose parent routinely bribes them with candy and fails to payout will likely cause that child to distrust their parents.
In the past, the main factor of self-control was the ability to delay gratification. If individuals weighed trade-offs, they’d always side with long-term benefits. Now, we know trust plays a factor. If you can’t trust your sacrifice, what’s the point?
In a 2013 study, researchers put this assumption to the test. They wanted to know if folks would use trust as a mediating factor in typical self-control tests.
Subjects were tasked with determining whether they’d accept a delayed reward or prefer an immediate one from fictional characters created for the study. These characters had modified biographies that made them seem more or less trustworthy. Each biography contained an image of the characters’ faces in untrustworthy, neutral, and trustworthy poses.
[Trustworthy Image]
Individuals chose to delay rewards with characters who appeared trustworthy at higher rates than those who appeared untrustworthy. While these results may seem obvious, the research in this area is incredibly sparse. These results open up possibilities for new interventions for populations with a chronic “lack of self-control.”
Social trust is a determining factor in our ability to delay gratification. And this may be true even when Empathy for your Future Self around New Years’.
An Untrustworthy Authority
In a follow-up to the 1970’s Marshmallow Test, students tested their self-control, but this time they interacted with an untrustworthy experimenter.
For each child, the researcher presented a small sticker as a prize for participating in the study. If the child could resist playing with it, they’d receive several more rewards for good behavior.
However, half of the kids who resisted received an unpleasant surprise. The researcher told them there were no stickers left.
The other group received 5 to 7 stickers preselected by their caretakers. After being denied their stickers, each child participated in the original marshmallow test. If they could resist the treat for 15 minutes, they’d receive twice as many treats.
On average, the students who received all their stickers waited almost four times as long as their counterparts. Again, social trust is a significant factor in decision-making. Self-control, while important, is only one side of a multifaceted story of delaying gratification.
What resonates with me is how we try to motivate children in school. I can’t count all the times I told children they’d this or that tidbit of information years later. I still think that’s true, you need general education to thrive, but that statement assumes social trust. My students have relatives who went through school and are no better off for it. Worse, those rewards are decades away. Even after college, it can be a few years, maybe decades, before a degree will pay off.
If we want to motivate young adults, asking them to focus on the future is wrong. Adults with fully developed executive functions struggle to create a five-year plan. Why should we ask children to do so?
To provide purpose and bolster self-control, we must guarantee a certain level of trust, whether that’s the trust we give ourselves or those around us.
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