Not Eating That Marshmellow

Scenario Factors: A ton of really boring forms to data entry. A tendency to procrastinate. A yelling boss demanding the processed results of said forms daily. A day that was actually free of meetings for once.

So it is little wonder that I finally decided to get around to putting the finishing touches on the last half-ton or so of forms at work today. I was really hoping that I might be able to do it at home, where a dual monitor setup allows me to watch a movie while data entrying, but it seemed unwise to putter about all day at work and then panic at home at night - even if I do work better and more readily at night.

After a desultory five minutes of googling to see if I could, in theory, convert an available laptop as a desktop's second monitor, it suddenly struck me that trying to extend a sluggish work computer's desktop with tons of admin rights restrictions was a waste of time for the final desired result. Which was to have a second screen showing me a video, or a movie, or anything. It could be a separate computer on its own. And my iPad was sitting right there on the desk.

Since it was still 'work,' Youtube movies were rather dodgy, so I decided to go with the more high-falutin' TED talks - technology, science and design, wot?

Several tens of forms and three talks later, I ran into this talk.
http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html

It's an old psychological study done on four year olds, wherein the researcher gives them a huge juicy fat sugary marshmellow and says, if you can wait 15 minutes, I'm a' gonna give you another one and you can have TWO, count 'em, two marshmellows, a ha ha ha. *thunder/lighting* (Ok, I made up the Sesame Street Count part. Sue me.)

This is ostenstibly supposed to correlate to being successful later on in life, because of the kids' ability to delay gratification. 1 out of 3 kids manage this, and 2 out of 3 kids don't.

Sure, the videos of kids are really cute when you put them through the wringer, but the logic behind the conclusion smelled a little off to me.

The first question that came to my mind while considering this study was, how do you tell whether the kids really believed the researcher or took the experiment seriously?

At that age, I can much more plausibly believe that many kids are experimentalists themselves, casually testing the adult if they will keep to their word, by playing the fool and gobbling up the sweet (acting like a mischevious yet apolegetic goblin, hoping to be able to charm the researcher later into giving them their second sweet all the same.)

Then surely the factor of how strongly the kids believed/trusted/feared authority figures would come into play? If you set the rules, but I don't care about your rules, that marshmellow is disappearing all the same, even if I may still desire the second marshmellow. If you set the rules, and I have reason to believe that an adult will punish me if I break the rules (say, from prior home experiences), then I might be more motivated to strive for not eating that marshmellow yet.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

Fortunately, there are some others writing about the study that reveal other hypothesises, thoughts and conclusions not shared in the video.

The above report mentions that there is a subset of children who failed the marshmellow test at 4, but went on to become high delayers (ie. good at delayed gratification), with corresponding life success. So it turns out that it isn't so clear cut a predictive factor. The skill appears to be learnable. It could simply be that certain subsets of people don't get the opportunity to be taught the skill, or to practice the skill or put it to good use in life.

By the way, I have a little philosophical beef with the entire premise. Life success? How exactly do you define life success? Good at grades? Good at scoring high on an exam? Graduating from a prestigious university? (Are you telling me that delayed gratification contributes more to that than socio-economic factors like where you come from?) Having high salaries or positions higher up in the corporate hierarchy?

Granted, no one is going to argue that having no money and being homeless is better (in terms of "life success") than having some money and a room of one's own. But there is a world of difference between a Buddhist monk in a temple and a CEO in a penthouse, and a whole lot of in-betweens in the middle classes, and can you really argue that the CEO is more successful than a doctor or a dentist (if they own their own clinic, if they are working in a governmental polyclinic?) or an artist or a novelist... unsoweiter.

It also bugs me because I have been exposed to extremist philosophies in delayed gratification. The author of this blog http://www.thesimpledollar.com/ for example is a little bit of a nutjob (to me) when it comes to delayed gratification. He is thrilled to live uber-frugally, to the point where I sometimes worry that his kids are a little malnutritioned or deprived, but I can see where he's been coming from, since he had big debt problems once.

Too much work and no play, makes Jack a very dull boy. Or a miser. See, delayed gratification is all very well, but you can't put it off till forever. Or till retirement. In the hope that things will be better then. You'd have forgotten how to live by then.

Then of course, there's greed to consider. Maybe you don't really need two marshmellows. Eating so many could well be bad for you. Why put yourself through so much torture and agony holding out for that second marshmellow when you could savor one marshmellow now, and then go on to do something else or look for other opportunities? (Except the Man says you should. Exercise self-control, that is.)

It's like raiding. (This is ostensibly mostly an MMO blog, I gotta make a reference to it now and then.) If you're going to delay gratification all the time and 'work' for that extra big reward, then I really wonder about some people. Sure, all power to them if they get kicks out of following the established social structure and working their way up the ladder and being top dog with the big reward of "life success." If you didn't actually enjoy the trip and was fooled into believing it by someone else telling you that you should enjoy it though, then that becomes a much sadder story. Maybe you would have been ok with one marshmellow, not two.

A guy I know celebrated his birthday a couple days ago. In a sort of coming-of-age landmark celebration gesture, his family (with very rich parents) got him a watch. A thirteen thousand dollar watch. He really loves that watch. You can see in his eyes, the way he held the uber-velvet box that held the very shiny, very heavy piece of precision measuring instrument guaranteed to last a lifetime (or two, probably.) Presumably he loves it because it is a status symbol, it has symbolic significance to him (he kept repeating "wow, I really am a MAN now" "wow"). Maybe he's crazy about watches in a hobbyist sort of manner. Certainly it was six times more expensive than the one he was wearing on his wrist, which added to the total impact with which he was bowled over.

I was mostly bemused. Not that I begrudge him the watch, y' understand. He and their family fit the mold of very typical people, to which "life success" is these sorts of trappings, fancy suit, glitterati watch, social status and standing, glamour and hotspots and clubbing. It was more of, wow, their way of thinking is so alien to me.

Me, I have no watch on my wrist. Why the hell would I want one? My iPad tells me the time. :P

And yet, I go everywhere with my iPad. I charge it more religiously than my phone. And yes, I unboxed the iPad I bought with a similar awe to the way he unboxed his watch. Granted, it was 13x cheaper.

Same. Yet different.


(If your mental sums are good, the cost of the old watch is about the sum I first invested into my desktop computer which I happily learned how to assemble.

By now the desktop with peripherals probably has a good five thousand plowed into it, I suppose, if you count the renewed monitors and graphics card, the funky keyboard and mice, the steering wheel, the 5.1 speakers and subwoofer, the Intuous graphics tablet which makes me an ARTIST in the same in potentia way the watch makes him a MAN, I guess, the combination scanner/color printer/fax which mostly exists for me to print papercraft and do utiliarian things, and the automatic scanner that eats paper and digitizes it in seconds.)

Conversely, the guy in question probably can't troubleshoot a blue screen of death and wouldn't see the point of all the black and blue LED monstrosities sticking out in all wired directions from my computer.

The other major difference is that his family bought him the watch, he's still pretty young. But he's been waiting a long time for it, and has had to show that his grades/results were good and he's serious about studying and so on. My desktop has been added to over the course of 5-7 years of working and earning a salary, with which I bought each component, not with my parent's money. Are they examples of delayed gratification?

Or maybe not. It's instant watch for him. And I certainly didn't wait very long after each decision to buy a computer peripheral before going out and getting it, doing just enough research necessary to make sure I didn't regret what I bought later.

 We've gone way off from marshmellows at this point in time. It's sorta become an anecdote about life success and the need to define it in a way that works for the individual. And that it's really complex to make statements about delaying gratification. For how long? For what reward? For whom? What is the context?

I guess we're down to balance again. I got a book from the library about Destructive Emotions, wherein the Dalai Lama and a bunch of Western neuroscientists and philosophers sit together and have a science meets Buddhism talk on how each can learn from the other and collaborate for increased understanding. I hope to get through this weekend and get some more chewy insights from it.


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In a curiously ironic counterpoint, this blog post is written with no delayed gratification whatsoever, as I have dropped the data entry happily to take a break. Back to the grindstone later, after lunch.