Radiolab - Mischel’s Marshmallows

Episode Date: March 9, 2009

How are your New Year's resolutions holding out? This might at least help you feel better about them.

I should quite You're listening to Radio Lab The podcast from New York Public Radio, Public Radio, WNYC and NPR. Hey, I'm Chad Aboumrod. And I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab, the podcast.

And let me just throw something out here to set up what is going to be an awesome podcast. New Year's resolutions, okay? Yes. Now, I know that's a few months out of date, but that's exactly my point. And by now, most of us are the same old schmucks that we were last year. We've completely forgotten about all the promises we made to ourselves.

We've slipped back into old patterns. How are you doing out of curiosity? I didn't make any, so I don't have any problem with them at all. But had I made them, in previous years I did, I would have long since failed. Long since failed. Now, do you ever wonder why with things like New Year's resolutions, which require willpower? Why none of us are any good? Well, I'm not sure.

None of us. I know people. I'm married to a person who seems to be able to make a resolution and fiercely indeterminately stick to it. See, there you go. See, some of us can do it. Some of us can't. Because I was born under a dark star. There you go, there you go.

See, the real question is, are some of us just doomed because we're born under a dark star to not have willpower while others do have it? Or is it something that can be taught? Do you ever wonder about that? Yeah. Hello, test, test, test, test, test. So you're monitoring the sound. Well, I want to introduce you to somebody. His name's Walter.

Walter. He's a psychologist. At Columbia University, the psychology department. And if you've ever asked yourself questions about willpower, like, what is it exactly? How does it work? If I don't have it, can I get it? Well, he has done a remarkable study. So are we ready to go?

And the marshmallow study? The marshmallow study. At the start of the study, how did you come up with the idea? Well, I had three little girls who at that, that, time. We're talking now late 60s. We're going from being these sweet sometimes and yappy often, you know, little creatures. How old were they at that point? Well, they ranged in age from two to five. And what I was, what any parent immediately knows is that when kids start going into the fourth year of life, a lot happens to them. Like he noticed that one of his daughters who had just hit four,

Suddenly she could delay gratification. Almost all of a sudden, if he told her, look, I know you want that, I don't know, pack a bubble gum. But don't whine, don't complain. When we get home, I'll give you something better. Suddenly, she could wait. This was in the late 1960s, and there was almost no work on, quote, willpower, self-control, or self-regulation. It just wasn't a topic. So he thought he would jump in.

Here's what he did. To test this hypothesis, that something happens to kids around the age of four. He went to a nursery school. A big nursery school at Stanford University. Gathered up a bunch of kids of different ages, and one by one, he put them in a room. A small room off the playroom. He'd bring the kids in, sit them in a chair, and then he would give them a choice, which had to do with marshmallows. Yummy.

What kid doesn't love marshmallows? And he would say to them, here's your choice. You can either have one marshmallow now, or if you wait, you can have... Two. Two marshmallows. Later. Now, that creates a lot of dilemmas. Yeah, it does.

Especially, because, you know, the researchers would leave the room to give the kids a chance to think. And right there on the table, in front of the child, we're the marshmallows. Calling them. There are no distractions in the room. There are no pictures. There are no toys. The child's left to stare at the marshmallows. So it's basically an isolation chamber.

Pure agony. I can show you a video of what they're doing, and you can see it. Can we watch? Sure. Let's turn it on. He walked over to a TV and pulled up a video with the marshmallow experiment, and I must tell you, it is some of the greatest video ever shot, particularly because the round he showed us,

the researchers had replaced the marshmallows with something even more enticing. Oreo cookies. So what you're seeing over here is a tortured-looking, adorable little girl, wearing a blue sweatshirt. About five years old, pig tails. Kind of sniffing at it. She puts her face right up to the cookies. She's weighing.

Do I want this badly enough? That's exactly what she's doing. She picks up the cookie, puts it down. She's weighing and reevaluating her choice. She knows she can have this one now, but if she waits, she can have more, but... I've had it. She gives in after just a few minutes. Okay, now we have a sort of a doughy face boy and a yellow t-shirt who's kicking

because he's so antsy. This kid's strategy is not to confront the cookie directly, but to kick the table that holds the cookie. Kick it, kick it, kick it. It's a very male response. But remarkably, he holds out. Way longer than the first girl. And of course, there were the cheaters.

Here we see a guy looking at the two cookies. He's taken one, which is against the rules. He's licking the inside. He's licking out the cream. Replacing the licked cookie and putting it back on the tray. Anyhow, we watch kid after kid after kid being tortured by the gravitational pull of Oreo cookies. Some, to avoid the pull, went under the table. Some turned their backs and started singing a song.

All in all, Mitchell and his team tested 500 kids in that initial study, and they found that, yes, four-year-olds are dramatically better than younger kids at resisting temptations. So something does happen at around four years old. But within that, and here's where the plot thickens. There was a huge range. Some kids gave up after a minute. Others could last 20 minutes, and most fell somewhere in the middle, where they could resist the cookie for about...

Seven minutes, eight minutes. That's the average. all depending on age and what the goodies are and so on. Now, in and of itself, there's nothing too surprising here. He basically confirmed his hypothesis. But what is amazing, truly amazing, is what happens next. I just was sitting around the kitchen table with my kids about five, six years after the studies began. And he was talking with his kids, and he knew that they still went to school,

this is now five or six years later, with some of those kids from the initial study. So he's asking him. You know, how is Jenny doing? and how's, you know, how's Cessley doing? This was just totally informal. And his kids told him, well, Cessley's doing fine. Jenny, not so good. And it began to realize a weird pattern.

The kids, like Cessley, who, you remembered, had been good at waiting for the marshmallow back in the study, well, they... ...seemed to be the ones who were doing better. They were doing better at school. And suddenly, on a very small end, you know, a very small sample, it looked like there were differences here. Could there be a relationship between the number of seconds these kids waited when they were four and how they're doing when they're 10 and 11 and 12? So what we did, beginning when these kids were 15 years old, 14 to 17 years old, was the first follow-up way. So he tracked down as many of those original kids as he could find.

Just for starters, he looked at their SAT scores. Now, keep in mind, this is 10 years later in some students. A stupid little test that a kid takes when they're four that has to do with resisting a marshmallow and how many seconds they can resist should not, I repeat, not have anything to do with how they do on their SAT scores, which is one of the most important tests they're ever going to take. But... We found remarkable correlations between the actual SAT scores and seconds of the late time. In other words, the kids who waited the longest when they were four staring at the Oreos

did better on the SATs than the kids who just gave up immediately? Yes. How much better? Significantly. The differences are so big. That's Joan Aller, science writer, often a guest on the show, who's also reporting about these follow-up studies. You know, the difference between a kid who can wait one minute for the marshmallow

and a kid who can wait 20 minutes, the difference from the SAT scores is 210 points. No way. Yeah, this isn't, you know, fiddling at the margins. This is a profound difference. well above what one would expect by chance. And as they dug into the data, it turned out it went way beyond SATs. The kids who waited back when they were four, now in their late teens,

parents reported they were better behaved. And on the flip side, the kids who hadn't been able to wait back in that initial study, they were more likely now to be suspended from school, to be classified as problem kids, to be, you know, the kind of kids who... They're most likely to wind up as the bullies. The results were so odd and strong that Michelin is. team decided to keep following those kids, up through their teens, into their 20s and 30s and beyond. So this is now roughly 40 years because they're about 44, 45 at this point.

We're still in touch with over 250. And they've expanded the kind of data that they're keeping track of, everything from... How well they're able to stick to goals at work, how far they go in school. Even their health. For example, body mass index. A huge amount of data. They really want to, like, amass, an FBI file, so to speak. The more data they collect, the worse it gets.

The kids who could wait back when they were four now in their 40s have better jobs. They've gone farther in their education. They're even skinnier. Yeah, yeah. Than the kids who couldn't wait. Now, think about this. How much willpower you exhibit as a four-year-old in something so insignificant as trying to resist the pull of a marshmallow could predict this frightening amount about your life? There's no question that there was something predictive about it and that it wasn't a fluke.

Here's what I'm wondering. If I have a four-year-old, and I informally give them this test, and they fail, should I be worried? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. You know me. I've got such a bias against these kind of rigid, predictive variables when it comes to the brain. Yeah.

But I think these experiments have to give you pause. Because one interpretation of Mitchell's work, and it's one we unfortunately cannot rule out, is that maybe self-control is hardwired. You either have it by the age of four or you don't. And if you don't have it, statistically, you're screwed. But there's another way to interpret this. Thankfully, if willpower gets its start when you're four, which is a big if, but let's just assume for the moment it does.

Then you've got to ask, what exactly happens at age four that separates the willful from the rest of us? So what you're seeing over here is a tortured-looking, adorable little girl. Walter Mishwood would say, go back to those videos and really look at the, If you do, much of what you'll see has very little to do with nature. She's looking at it, she's withdrawing from it and she's holding a breath. The first thing you notice, he says, is that every kid is in agony. Even the good kids, they are not models of strength. They are suffering too, because Oreo cookies, man, they're good.

Second, the very simple difference between the good kids and the bad kids seems to be that the good kids just found ways to distract themselves. They had strategies. She's holding her breath. Like this girl. to herself and stopping it. Shushing. That seemed to work.

Or? Kicking the table. That's actually a good strategy, he says. We're making up a tune. You know, kids composing new songs. Just turning around in the chair. Okay, we're back to girl number one now. She has her back completely turned to the cookies.

Some kids actually pretended the marshmallow was a cloud. I mean, the kinds of things one sees are extraordinary. Or the cookie was a UFO. They turned this hot stimulus into, as Mitchell puts it, a cold stimulus. And that might be all that separated the kids who could wait. from the kids who caved. The best kids simply had a better bag of tricks. And if that's all we're talking about, tricks,

well, you can teach a trick. You know, I think one of my favorite twist on his experiment that he did was he found that you could take kids who had troubled delaying gratification, so kids who had really had a tough time waiting for the marshmallow, and you simply say to them, put a picture frame around the marshmallow, pretend it's a picture and not a delicious piece of candy. All of a sudden, you gave kids this little trick,

and you could turn low delayers into much higher delays. Oh, so he could help these kids? Absolutely. You can teach just so that simple suggestion. Why don't you just pretend this is a picture frame? He's got these bar graphs and it's dramatic. All of a sudden, the low delays are performing just like behind the layers. Really?

And is there any evidence that if you teach these kids, these low de lairs, and you give them these tools, that you can send their life in the right direction in some way? There's no evidence of that yet. You know, he hasn't shown that simply teaching kids how to draw a picture frame around a marshmallow leads to a ballooning. SAT scores, and that's where I think even Mitchell admits that it remains unclear how valuable these tricks are. Because you can teach, obviously, a kid, a trick to deal with a marshmallow in a lab setting. But that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be able to go home. And, you know, you can't go around drawing picture frames all day long.

But that's kind of the crux of it, no? I mean, you kind of have to know that these tricks are useful. Yeah. Otherwise, you're just picking your interpretation. You could say, oh, it's learned tricks or it's hardwired. Yeah. So, so I think the answer, to that remains completely unknown. They're just beginning to fly all these subjects out, you know, do a couple days' worth of brain scans. I mean, this is a big, big project. No one quite knows what they'll find. I mean, I think it's highly likely to be like most things in life are turning out to be, which is, yes, the wiring makes a difference, and yes, the experience makes a difference, and the wiring and the experience are interacting and changing each other.

So, Jad, I, who have never been able to withhold my fierce desire to eat all the chicken when seven pieces of chicken is served to three people, I will eat four pieces of chicken. And yet, somehow I have gone through most of my life holding a job. Doing quite well. So, you know, I think before people take Mr. Mitchell's views too close to heart, remember, there are outliers, there are people who have grabbed the marshmallow early and yet who have somehow thrived. That's right.

I want them to know that. Anyhow, Radio Lab is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation. I'm Chad, I'm Humrod. And I'm Robert Kulwich. See you later.