The ability to manage one’s thoughts, regulate emotions, and restrain impulses is key to a happy and healthy life. People who have good self-control often have higher psychological well-being, more academic and on-the-job achievements, and healthier relationships. Low self-control, in contrast, is a core contributing factor to numerous problems, including substance abuse and impulsive buying.
Any of us can succumb to the limits of in-the-moment willpower. We see that box of cookies on the counter and we reach for one, and then two. Most of us can learn how to think before we act and even engage in self-restraint in high-stress situations.
But if we aren’t taught to practice self-control early in our lives, it can be harder, though not impossible. Walter Mischel, a psychologist who taught at Stanford and Columbia, conducted some of the most famous studies on delaying gratification in the late 1960s and 1970s. Decades later, he published a book expanding on this research: The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.
For those unfamiliar with the original study, in brief, children ages three to five were presented with a marshmallow and given two options. They were told they could eat the marshmallow immediately, or, if they waited for 20 minutes and didn’t eat the marshmallow, they could have two marshmallows. Mischel and colleagues followed those children and continued to study them over time.
What they found was remarkable. The preschoolers who had a tough time delaying gratification— who ate the first marshmallow—were less academically and socially skilled, eloquent, attentive, and not as good at managing frustration in adolescence. Over time, large-scale replication and extension studies of the marshmallow test with more diverse socioeconomic and racial samples found more nuanced findings.
While similar findings on wait times and outcomes were found, additional analyses showed that children’s ability to delay gratification and wait for a second marshmallow was more strongly related to parents’ education and children’s home environment. This showed that self-control is not a fixed trait, and that circumstances greatly contribute to children’s ability to delay gratification. In addition, when the marshmallow test was administered to adults, it did not predict their functioning.
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