Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

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The article, and especially the headline, are extremely misleading.

The actual result: measures of self-control either weakly or strongly predict positive life outcomes, depending on the measure and how much adjusting was done, e.g.

> [The study] created a new measure of the time each original preschooler waited before taking a bite (or getting the reward) to adjust for variables such as age, gender and experiment conditions.

This study found that the "marshmallow test"—as a single measure—is no more or less predictive than a basket of other measures of self-control the study tested, or any of those other measures of self-control taken alone.

Despite the misleading article and headline, the study itself seems well-designed (e.g. pre-registered), but the conclusion in the headline is utterly wrong as that is not what the study found: self-control matters, can be measured, and those measures weakly or strongly predict positive life outcomes.

Here's an accurate headline: Self-control still predicts positive life outcomes, Marshmallow Test creator finds.

The original headline isn't inaccurate, though it is clumsily worded and neither it nor your proposed headline fully describe the results of the study. The study itself says the following (quoting verbatim). Note that the second point is more or less what the headline says.

- Self-regulation composite (preschool & ages 17-37) predicts capital formation at 46.

- Preschool delay of gratification alone does not predict capital formation at 46.

- The composite is more predictive partly because it consists of many items.

- No evidence of more predictive power for self-regulation reported later in life.

Headline seems accurate to me. The headline:

New Study Disavows Marshmallow Test’s Predictive Powers.

And it does. The marshmellow test as a single measure is referred to as RND. Which is a test which measures gratification wait times and is applied in pre-school. Their hypothesis regarding RND:

hyp2: On its own, RND (measured around age four) will have only a very small correlation with the measures of mid-life capital formation.

And they report a confirmation of this hypothesis.

The other hypothesis refers to RNSRI rank-normalized self-regulatory index - which is 4 different components measured at different ages - each component is RND + 86 other measures! This is reported as having a "modest" impact on outcomes - not "strong" as you say. So your reporting seems the more inaccurate to me.

But this is irrelevant anyway with respect to your claim about the headline, which is only referring to the paper's disavowel of RND.

Further evidence of the headline's accuracy and the paper's disavowel of RND is that they also looked at RNCCQ - which is RNSRI minus the inclusion of the RND test from each of the four components. They found that including RND did not improve RNSRI over RNCCQ in terms of their predictive power.

> This study found that the "marshmallow test"—as a single measure—is no more or less predictive than a basket of other measures of self-control the study tested, or any of those other measures of self-control taken alone.

Are we looking at the same study? I don't see where "no more or less predictive than a basket" comes from, specifically where "no less predictive" comes from.

My reading of the abstract is that, the study found that a measure based on the "marshmallow test" ("preschool delay of gratification", RND in the article body), is not predictive of the outcomes they measured (11 capital formation outcomes).

It also found that a basket of measures of self-control (collected at various ages, RNSRI/RNCCQ in the article body) is predictive of the outcomes, whether you include the preschool measurement or not.

So from skimming the study without even reading the article, it sounds to me like they found that the preschool measure doesn't predict the outcomes they're measuring by itself, and it doesn't contribute predictive power when it's used as part of an index of self-control measured at a variety of ages.

Thank you for the clarification. You've thought about this a lot. If a friend asked you for advice on how to help their struggling teenage son improve his self-control, what do you think you would say?

Yes, but how would you then inanely riff on psychology, which all the cool kids are doing nowadays?

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