The Rewards We Pick in Childhood Might Make Us More Successful As Adults

If you were given the choice between having one marshmallow right now and having two marshmallows if you wait 10 minutes which would you choose? Be careful. Your choice could impact your future success!

Second part of the question. How do you think kids today would perform on this task compared to 50 years ago? Would they choose the instant reward, or chose to wait for a greater prize?

The ability to wait for a bigger reward is called delayed gratification. The popular belief is that newer generations are less able to wait for rewards. “When I was little I could have waited all day for that marshmallow but kids today with their newfangled technology and whatnot can’t wait a second.” Right? Actually, we’re wrong. Recent research suggests our ability to delay gratification is improving with each generation.

Let’s go back a few years to the start of our story. It’s the 1960s and we are at Stanford University where Walter Mischel developed “the marshmallow test”. Mischel took 3 to 5-year-old kids who were the children of employees at Stanford University and placed two plates in front of them. On one plate there was a small reward (like one marshmallow or one cookie) and on the second plate there was a larger reward (like two marshmallows or two cookies). Mischel next told these kids that he had to leave the room “to do some work”. They were told if they could wait until he came back they could have the plate with the bigger prize. But if they weren’t able to wait until he came back they could have the smaller prize at any time. Then the researcher would leave the room and record how long kids would wait to eat the marshmallow, up to 10 minutes.

They tracked these kids over time and what they found was that this marshmallow test was a powerful predictor of future success, at least amongst the white children of well-educated parents. Those who held out longer for the bigger prize tended to do better in school, they had higher SAT scores, they had higher self-esteem, better coping skills, and were less likely to abuse drugs as adults.

In contrast, children who weren’t able to defer gratification and hold out for the bigger reward were more likely to be overweight or obese 30 years later, and were generally in worse health as adults.

The marshmallow test has been replicated many times over the years with the same results. At least for white middle-class kids, the longer you are able to delay gratification when you are young the more successful you are as an adult.

In 2018 Stephanie Carlson and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota were interested in whether this effect had changed over time. They looked at the original 1960 data (from kids who are now in their 50s), data collected in the 1980s at Columbia University (from kids who are now in their 40s), and a cohort of children studied in the 2000s at the University of Washington (who are now in their late teens to early 20s) to see how performance changed over time.

The results were not what you would expect. The length of time kids are able to hold out for the big reward has slowly increased over the years. Children tested in the 2000s waited on average two minutes longer than children did in the 1960s, and one minute longer than children in the 1980s. Children were getting better over time at delaying gratification!

Carlson and her colleagues attribute some of this improvement across generations to changes in educational practices. For example in the 1960s only about 15% of 3 and 4-year-olds in the United States attended preschool, but by the year 2000 more than half the children that age attended preschools. As well, both formal education and information education (such as television programs and games for kids) have increasingly emphasized social skill development and self-control over the years. We are being taught more and more about the importance of being able to wait for better rewards.

So, we are getting better at delaying gratification and waiting for the bigger reward. Does this mean we are raising a group of kids who will be more socially adept and more successful? We will have to wait and see, but the research to date certainly suggests this might be the case. Today’s Millennials who seem hesitant to commit to long-term jobs or big houses might be cleverer than us older generations. Maybe they know that a bigger reward might be still to come!

An interesting caveat to this research; there have been some studies conducted more recently that suggest that this “marshmallow effect” or the long-term benefit of being able to delay gratification in early childhood only applies to Caucasian middle-class families. This effect doesn’t seem to generalize to lower income families.