Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes - PubMed (original) (raw)

Tyler W Watts et al. Psychol Sci. 2018 Jul.

Abstract

We replicated and extended Shoda, Mischel, and Peake's (1990) famous marshmallow study, which showed strong bivariate correlations between a child's ability to delay gratification just before entering school and both adolescent achievement and socioemotional behaviors. Concentrating on children whose mothers had not completed college, we found that an additional minute waited at age 4 predicted a gain of approximately one tenth of a standard deviation in achievement at age 15. But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment. Most of the variation in adolescent achievement came from being able to wait at least 20 s. Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant.

Keywords: achievement; behavioral problems; early childhood; gratification delay; longitudinal analysis; marshmallow test; open data.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.

Predicted achievement score by minutes of delay for children of mothers with no college degree. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Values are shown separately for each of the four delay-of-gratification groups (< 0.333 min, 0.333–2 min, 2–7 min, 7 min); the _x_-axis shows the deviation in achievement composite scores from the reference group (delay < 0.333 min) against the within-group average amount of time waited. The average wait times for the models with no controls and with child background and Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) controls only are displaced by ±.025 to distinguish the sets of error bars. The high-delay group’s coefficients are plotted at 7 min, although the 7-min truncation prevents us from knowing what the mean value of minutes waited would have been for this group in the absence of this limit.

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