One Netflix Episode Now or Two Later?
So you’re a McGill Psychology student. By the time you’ll be reading your name on a diploma and standing with a (well-earned) mortarboard on top of your head, you will have undoubtedly read about the Marshmallow Test just about as often as you will have heard your professor experiencing technical difficulties in Stewart Bio. If so, you can skip ahead. But for those who lacked the willpower to get out of bed and attend classes for the past two or three years, and has therefore never heard of it, here is a quick recap.
The study was conducted at first in the 1960’s by Walter Mischel, professor at Stanford University, and it aimed to study the ability of five years old children to exercise delayed gratification, by being instructed they could either eat a marshmallow right away or eat two marshmallows later on, if only they could wait. Although not initially meant as a test in itself, it has now become the ultimate willpower assessment in psychology. Indeed, Mischel’s long-term follow-up study has shown not only better SATs and BMI scores, but also highest rates of success among children who had displayed self-control in the original experiment. So what does that tell us about children who “fail” the test? Are they doomed for life? The interpretation of the results is crucial, since a pass or fail “grading scheme” inevitably implies that self-discipline is a fixed trait and that choosing that first marshmallow has a deterministic significance on your adult life. Does that marshmallow represent your destiny? Many criticisms have been brought forward about the implications of passing or failing the Marshmallow Test, and whether the results should be cause for actual concern. Reconsiderations of its basic ability to assess impulse control in children are numerous in both the scientific literature and mass media.
Inevitably, you will ask yourself where do YOU stand. Would you have waited for the two marshmallows? On my part, it takes me less than two seconds to come up with daily — who am I kidding, hourly examples of me opting for instant gratification. Watching Netflix rather than writing this blog post earlier this week, for instance. To anyone who can relate, Mischel recently published a book entitled The Marshmallow Test : Mastering Self-control. Good thing it’s still available on Amazon. My education needs me to read it, take notes, and learn to say no to the Netflix.
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