🪵 Stockpiling Marshmallows (Or Not), Part One
Every ten years or so, or when Malcolm Gladwell launches a new book, a formerly obscure social science study surges into the mainstream, fated to live as a citation in every business book across the land until it becomes intolerable.1
One that turned stale over time, especially when referenced with a straight face sans caveats, is The Stanford marshmallow experiment, conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1970s at Bing preschool, often mentioned by its nickname, “The Marshmallow Test.”
Have you heard of it? How could you not?
More consequentially, can childhood self-restraint predict whether you’ll be rolling in dough or Doh as an adult?
Google Trends, which started tracking popular searches in 2004, shows spikes in searches for “marshmallow test” in 2009, perhaps after Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker piece, “Don’t!” and again in 2014, when Mischel published his book, The Marshmallow Test: Why Self-Control Is the Engine of Success. It has remained close to mind in public consciousness since.
At first, we took it as gospel: If you put a marshmallow in front of a four- or five-year-old and tell them not to eat it while you’re gone, but that you’ll give them two when you return, their level of self-restraint predicts their future success (or not).
Patience is a virtue. Self-control is essential. And who could disagree? The kids who gobble up that tempting single marshmallow must lack discipline, while the ones who don’t are rewarded with a one-hundred percent return on their time-for-treats investment.
What would you have done when you were five years old?
When I was eight, I started saving birthday money I received each year, asking my mom to bank it instead of spending it; essentially, stockpiling the marshmallows.
All I knew was that money seemed to be a central factor in our lives—in everyone’s lives—and perhaps I should have more than less. I didn’t want toys; I wanted security, evidenced by the comfort of a steadily growing savings account. Squirrels stay busy by scurrying to bury acorns for Winter months; this became my way of managing stress and fear of lack, too.
At nine years old, I started selling candy bars in the neighborhood and hosted a “carnival” in the backyard for an admission fee; at ten, I started a family newspaper charging subscribers for postage to break-even; and at eleven, I launched a babysitting business, the latter two remained side hustles that sustained me through most of high school. I saved it all. Now, looking back, I only wish I could remember what I eventually cashed it all in for.
Does this make me holier-than-thou? Absolutely not; any proclivity I had to save (and the inbound gifts with which to do so) were results of privilege and disposition, nature and nurture. See also: Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s 2023 book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.2
Was my patience a predictor of success as a business owner? Depends when you review the balance sheet. Like so many American hyper-capitalist, individualist “truisms” that fall apart under scrutiny, there’s more to resisting marshmallows than meet the eye.
As we’ve talked about previously, some now skeptically question the entire field of social science. “Replication crises” abound, as hit pieces are issued entire careers; turns out one book on The (Honest)Truth About Dishonesty ironically proved to be lying about its research by fudging the numbers, or “making the data do gymnastics,” as the saying goes.3
Thankfully people much smarter than me started poking holes in these cloyingly sweet and overly simplistic takeaways. From our far more socially aware perch of 2025, fifty years later, it is clear that several now-obvious controls were missing from the original experiment: the Marshmallow Test failed to account for a child’s stress, the reliability of their parents, or their level of financial security.
If a child does not believe resources are secure or that the authority figures in their life are trustworthy, they will eat what is in front of them when it is available. If the child is secure and has reliable adults in their lives, they will more readily believe what a researcher tells them, equipped to patiently await their return in exchange for even greater reward.
In “Everything you know about the Marshmallow Test is wrong,” behavioral scientist writes:
“The now-standard interpretation of why some kids couldn’t wait is to blame personal shortcomings: like impulsivity, self-control, or severe time discounting. But the [follow-up] study shows that the kids’ ability to wait depended on whether or not they thought their patience would actually pay off. The rules that people follow depend on what was consistently reinforced during their developmental stages; suddenly saying, ‘you can trust me this time!’ won’t magically make someone forget all the years that adults have made false promises.
Patience isn’t just a personality trait: it’s a response to environmental regularities. Constantly updating our mental model of how the world works would be far less efficient and lead to many more costly errors.”
In November 2020, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization published another follow-up study after surveying 113 participants of the 1967–1973 Bing pre-school studies, now in their late forties.
They determined that no, delayed gratification as a preschooler does not reliably inform much as an adult, let alone serve as a predictor for economic success (one can also read Rolling in Doh to learn this 😭).
Dee Gill at UCLA’s Anderson Review summarizes the results as follows:
“Following the Bing children into their 40s, the new study finds that kids who quickly gave in to the marshmallow temptation are generally no more or less financially secure, educated or physically healthy than their more patient peers. The amount of time the child waited to eat the treat failed to forecast roughly a dozen adult outcomes the researchers tested, including net worth, social standing, high interest-rate debt, diet and exercise habits, smoking, procrastination tendencies, and preventative dental care.”
In the summer of 2021, for the first time in my life I forewent patience in favor of the present, cashing in my biggest financial stockpile to fund a creative dream. Stay tuned for part two, where I’ll share more on whether I regret it or not, now that it’s (mostly) gone.4
❤️
Ironically, here I am giving it even more air time 😭
And here’s my dad’s addendum to Sapolsky’s ideas—even if we assume there’s no such thing as free will, there are plenty of variables that still effect our choices and future:
For my favorites on this topic, read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s 2023 New Yorker piece, “They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?” and listen to this episode of Unexplainable:
Loved this, as usual! Thank you. In recent days I have started a new habit: Whenever I catch myself doomscrolling the news, I stop and catch up on back issues of Doh instead. Not only am I entertained, but I learn things too! 🙏