Delayed Gratification

Imagine that you are a four-year-old nursery school student. Your teacher explains that you’ll be playing a new game today. She offers you a single tasty marshmallow that you can eat immediately. However, if don’t eat it right away, she will give you two marshmallows when she returns from an errand. What do you do? Do you take the sure thing and gobble the goodie in front of you? Or do you fight temptation, delay gratification, and reap the double pleasure of two marshmallows?

Most four-year-olds and virtually all younger children choose the immediate over the delayed reward and eat the single marshmallow within seconds of being left alone with it. Psychologist Walter Mischel conducted this simple study at Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School.
So what? A big what! When they were interviewed years later, as eighteen-year-olds, the children who had delayed gratification had developed a range of superior emotional and social competencies compared with the children who had eaten the treat immediately. They were better able to deal with adversity and stress, and they were more self-confident, diligent and self-reliant. Mischel and his team also discovered the intellectual ability of children who controlled their impulses was markedly higher than those who did not. The third of the children who were able to control their impulses at age 4 scored 210 total points higher on verbal and math SAT scores than the impulsive four-year-olds! How big a difference is that? It is as large as the average difference between the abilities of economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. It is the larger than the difference between the abilities of children from families whose parents have graduate degrees and children whose parents did not finish high school. The ability to delay gratification at age 4 is twice as a predictor of later of SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ.