Hacker News Reader

Comment by spekcular | Hacker News Reader

The marshmallow effect replicated (IIRC), and is probably correct, unlike the power posing stuff. That behavior in a single trial in childhood moderately predicts success in adulthood seems like an interesting fact about humans.

View on HN

What's the applicable result to this? Put children who eat marshmellows too quickly in special "delayed gratification" classes? Is the result such that all children who eat marshmellows too quickly should give up, as their success is predetermined, or is it the impact is barely statistically significant?

If I were the parent of a child who ate the marshmellow too quickly, I would do nothing different, as the whole thing is meaningless and doesn't change anything. It's more like, "Oh, OK, my son is 4% less likely to be in the top 20% of the income distribution (according to this barely coherent theory)." Why do we spend so much money, time, and effort discussing and researching this?

What? If you found your child was lacking in a valuable life skill, you wouldn't try to teach that skill?

What is the skill they should teach ? To always eat lunch before doing a psych experiment? To like sugar, or marshmallows in particular, just slightly less? That high self-control in extremely low-reward situations is good?

Teaching a child to do basic budgeting with pocket money is likely to have a vastly higher impact than slight delayed gratification with candy.

But that's precisely what is so ridiculous. Eating marshmallows slowly is not a valuable life skill.

See hgsgm's comment. Just because the test predicts outcomes doesn't mean what it's testing is causing the outcomes.

Uh, same person.

Lots of research doesn’t have an immediate practical application. That’s okay. It can still be interesting, and it may prove practical down the road.

The experiment is part of a larger research program to study delayed gratification. It was never intended to help parents raise their children. Asking for immediate applications is an odd standard for basic science research. (Unless you reject the value of basic science research entirely.)

Further, the result in a recent replication [1] was a correlation of .28 between the time to ring the bell (to get the marshmallow) and academic achievement. That's not exactly the trivial "4% less likely" effect in your caricature.

(You may also wish to double check your spelling of "marshmallow.")

[1]: https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/the-marshmallow-test-hel...

> correlation of .28 ... That's not exactly the trivial "4% less likely" effect in your caricature.

You clearly don't know how to interpret correlation. A correlation of .28 is virtually uninformative. https://www.academia.edu/39797871/Fooled_by_Correlation_Comm...

Sure it's replicated. It disappears when you control for affluence of parents.

I.e. it's a covert test if parents are rich.

I know it's super taboo to consider especially in the current climate but is it possible that people who have high self control are more likely to become rich because of their ability to delay gratification and that therefore those genes will be passed on to their children?

Biology will select against this. All primate females seem to be much more attracted by bold males taking risks, and more prone to use sex to appease dominant males showing violent episodes. The opposite argument could be equally valid.

The only thing that children of rich parents share is to have rich parents. One of the parents being over the mean in the "beautiful" trait, is also very common.

If I understand correctly, you're asserting that that's causal--that being born into affluence causes children to develop in a way that leads to them "passing" the marshmallow test.

Do you have evidence to exclude other possible interpretations, such as the possibility that children resisting the temptation of a marshmallow and their parents being rich are actually the effects of some other underlying single cause?

> If I understand correctly, you're asserting that that's causal--that being born into affluence causes children to develop in a way that leads to them "passing" the marshmallow test.

Stop and think.

If you are rich that marshmallow is probably very bland or you've eaten very well today. So maybe two makes more sense.

If you aren't, that marshmallow is super tasty and you probably didn't eat well today. Plus do you believe that grownup when your mom was lying. Someone might come and eat it.

Then some time passes. Rich kids grow up and are more successful. Delayed gratification is key to success!

https://behavioralscientist.org/try-to-resist-misinterpretin...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com