Don't Eat the Marshmallow!

An interesting article in The New Yorker of May 18, 2009: "Don't!" by Jonah Lehrer.

The article is about the scientific investigation of self-control. Decades ago, a psychologist named Walter Mischel experimented to see whether there were meaningful differences among four-year-olds' abilities to postpone gratification. He left them alone in a room with instructions not to eat a marshmallow until he returned from an errand outside the room, at which time they could have two marshmallows, not just one. But if they couldn't wait, they could ring a bell, and he would come back in right away and give them just a single marshmallow.

Some of the kids could delay gratification for as long as fifteen minutes, the outer limit imposed by Mischel; others held out for three minutes or just 30 seconds before the bell got rung, and some stuffed a marshmallow into their mouth right away without even ringing the bell. One lad, tested with Oreo cookies rather than marshmallows, opened a cookie and licked out the cream filling before slyly re-assembling the cookie and returning it to the tray.

In short, some of the kids were "high delayers" at the age of four, while others were "low delayers." One might assume the large differences at such a young age to be genetic, but Mischel believes there is a dance between nature (genes) and nurture (upbringing; environmental factors) such that either/or questions about those two poles of behavior causation are meaningless.


My interest in this has to do with my belief that postponing gratification and the practice of self-control are crucial to traditional religious standards of morality.

We Christians pray, "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil." For a four-year-old, temptation is being left alone in a room with a tray of marshmallows they aren't permitted to touch, and evil is stealthily consuming the filling of an Oreo cookie without letting on what one has done.

Whether it's waiting until Christmas morning to open presents or waiting until marriage to have sex, postponing gratification has always been part and parcel of the Christian experience.

Speaking just for myself as a baby boomer, my personal experience has been one of becoming a consistent "high delayer" only later in life. This seems to have been a result of becoming, in midlife, a Christian in more than name only.


Before I was 40, I was not religious. And in many ways I'd say I was a low delayer, though never one who would grab the marshmallow without ringing the bell. Accordingly, I think Mischel and the other researchers mentioned in the article ought to make a careful distinction between low delayers who nonetheless play by the rules, and those who secretly filch Oreo fillings and look innocent when the adult returns.

Another thing: in my experience there seem to be two classes of evildoing. I was never tempted to become a bully. I have always been appalled at snobbery and intolerance. I have had relatively little trouble getting on board with feminism, inclusiveness, and multiculturalism.

Consuming illicit marshmallows (or other banned substances) was more my style. Being in a big hurry about obtaining gratification was something else again ... something that waxed and waned over the course of my formative years, exactly as Mischel's research shows it might. Mischel believes high and low delayers are determined at least in part by the specific contexts in which the behavior is taking place.

Low delayers can use various tricks to make themselves high delayers in a specific context, says Mischel. For example, he successfully trained kids faced with the task of not eating a marshmallow to imagine it as a picture in a frame, or a fluffy cloud. He found the kids that were already high delayers had their own tricks, such as occupying their minds with other pursuits while they waited.


Mischel's original research has been followed up by himself and other experimenters who are interested in, among other things, how the four-year-olds from the late 1960s fared in adulthood. In general, the high-delay children have done better in several areas of life. This result has been confirmed by other research. For instance, Angela Lee Duckworth has found that "the ability to delay gratification — eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week — was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q."

Of the original "marshmallow subjects," the article says, some "failed the marshmallow task as four-year-olds but ended up becoming high-delaying adults. 'This is the group I’m most interested in,' [Mischel] says. 'They have substantially improved their lives'." For this to happen, ad hoc mental tricks are not enough; "the real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice."

It is my belief that religion does precisely that. It starts out giving us tricks to delay gratification in specific circumstances and thus gradually turns waiting and postponing into a way of life.

For instance, Christians have a way of imagining that Jesus walks beside them at all times. Of course, the answer to "What would Jesus do?" is never to steal the filling from an Oreo cookie.

Jesus's counsel would ever be, "Don't eat the marshmallow!" At some point we learn not to partake too soon without always needing to have His voice in our ear, and we have the basis to begin living an "It's not all about you" life.