Forget the marshmallow test; this could be the real secret to kids’ future success
Enlarge / For decades, Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test" was viewed as a key predictor for children's future success, but reality is a bit more nuanced. (credit: Igniter Media)
Kindergarten children whose teachers rate them as being highly inattentive tend to earn less in their 30s than classmates who are rated highly "pro-social," according to a recent paper in JAMA Psychiatry. In fact, inattention could prove to be a better predictor of future educational and occupational success than the famous "marshmallow test" designed to assess a child's ability to delay gratification. And a single teacher's assessment may be sufficient to identify at-risk children, the authors claim.
The marshmallow test was a landmark behavioral study conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s and 1970s. He brought in some 600 children between the ages of four and six-all from Stanford University's Bing Nursery School-and gave each of them a marshmallow in a private room. Mischel told the children they could eat the marshmallow right away, or they could wait 15 minutes. If they chose the latter, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Then Mischel would leave the room, and a hidden video camera would record the children's behavior.
You can find videos of different versions of the marshmallow test all over YouTube. They're hugely entertaining. As with Mischel's original study, some kids eat the marshmallow immediately, cramming it into their mouths with unabashed delight. Others try to find a handy distraction: covering their eyes or kicking the desk. Some children poke at the marshmallow with their fingers, sniff it, lick it, or take tiny nibbles around the edges. My personal favorite is a little girl who participated in a recreation of the study with children in Colombia by motivational speaker Joachim de Posada. She carefully ate just the inside of the marshmallow, leaving the exterior intact, in hopes of fooling the researchers into thinking she had resisted temptation. ("I predict she will be successful, but we will have to watch her," Posada joked.)
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