Can A Marshmellow Predict Your Future?

Can a Marshmallow predict your future?

Originally published in July 2006 - LDN

I am sure you remember the grasshopper and ant story. The grasshopper played in the sun and enjoyed the moment. The little ant worked everyday, taking a few moments out of his schedule to enjoy the sun but spent the rest of the day storing up food and preparing for the future. In short the grasshopper died and the ant went on to live another day. That story is thousands of years old, but it is relevant today.

In a recent article by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, Mr. Brooks described the classic experiments of psychologist Walter Mischel. In his study, Mischel left four year olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. He told them that if they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If however, they did not ring the bell and waited for him to return, he would give them two marshmallows they could eat.

In the videos of the experiment you can see the children desperately trying to exercise self control so they could wait and get two marshmallows. Some broke down within a minute and others held out for fifteen minutes.

The children who waited went on to get higher SAT scores, go to better colleges and on average had better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell the earliest became bullies. They received poor teacher evaluations and were more likely to have drug problems by the age of 32. In short, those children who could not exhibit self-control have been statistically proven to succumb to “teen pregnancy, drugs, gambling, truancy and crime.”

Why should you concern yourself about a marshmallow experiment conducted almost 35 years ago? It is important because politicians and education experts spend billions of our taxpayer dollars on structural solutions to fix public education. They mandate certain class sizes, create standardized tests and add layer upon layer of bureaucracy all in the hope of the holy grail of education – higher test scores. They do all of this while ignoring the single best indicator of education success – the ability to delay instant gratification.

Take for example, the latest great new hope for education in Georgia, passed this year by our legislature – mandated class sizes. Common intuition holds that the smaller the class the better the education. While this has been proven to be true in the very early grades, no study has shown that the same holds true in middle and upper grades. There are no conclusive studies that prove taking a class of 10th grade history students from a class size of 34 to 28 has any impact. Some studies show that a class size of 12-15 could have a positive impact. However, this class size is unrealistic and would be an incredible inefficient use of resources. The cost to implement this change would be prohibitive.

Large, mandated structural reforms allow politicians to boast that they have helped solve the problem, but in reality local school districts are forced to spend money to achieve this goal and take precious recourses away from those areas that have been proven to work. J. Alvin Wilbanks, Gwinnett schools superintendent, stated “that this is an election year and they are trying to get votes.” In short the politicians are putting politics before students.

Mr. Brooks states that if you are a policy maker and not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you are dancing around the issue. The problem is that this issue is not well suited to be solved via the political process.

How can a politician speak the truth and blame his constituency for the problem. It is our failure as parents to instill the discipline of delayed gratification in our children. For a politician to make that claim he or she would lose votes. It is better to spend taxpayers’ money to impose impersonal, structural reforms than to hold us accountable for failing to instill this important principle in our children.

The good news is that Mischel did not stop at quantifying and documenting this problem. He determined that it is possible to teach kids that it pays to work towards the future instead of living for instant gratification. These skills can be taught. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self control get better at it over time. These tests will inject personal accountability into our educational process.

Remember the story of the grasshopper and the ant. If a politician proposes a grasshopper solution – no real sacrifice, no personal accountability; run away. He is selling you a bill of goods. Like the ant, a real education solution requires a genuine long-term commitment to take time today to prepare for tomorrow.