Page 2 - Flipbook: Sociology Shortcuts Issue 4: Testing the Marshmallow Test

Intro

Although the concepts of immediate and delayed gratification have been widely used in both psychology
and sociology for over 50+ years, perhaps their most well-known application has been through Mischel’s
“Marshmallow Test”.

This experiment has seen its influence spread from the world of academic psychology to the wider
shores of both the popular imagination and, more-interestingly perhaps, into many schools and colleges.

To understand why this has been the case – and to suggest why this should be a cause for concern - we
need to look briefly at the test itself and a range of contemporary psychological and sociological
critiques.

What Is It?

Although the ideas underpinning the Marshmallow Although the 1958 study looked specifically at
Test have, in one shape or another, been around cultural influences in the behaviour of two distinct
since at least the late 1950’s – Mischel’s ethnic groups (the “presence or absence of the
(borderline racist) 1958 study of children in father within the home, age, and socioeconomic
Trinidad arguably being one of the first – the test status”), later studies focused more on individual
itself involves a young (4 years old in Mischel’s gender differences based around measured
1990 study) child being presented with a desired differences in “willpower” or self-control.
object (such as a marshmallow) and told the
examiner will leave the room for 15 minutes. If the The 1990 study, for example, tested “male and
child can delay eating the marshmallow until the female preschoolers in the Bing School of Stanford
examiner returns they will be given a second University, a preschool for mostly middle-class
marshmallow to eat. children of faculty and students from the Stanford
University community”.
As Mischel put it, the main objective of these
studies was “to create a conflict for young children
between the temptation to stop the delay and the
desire to persist for the preferred outcome when
the latter required delay”.

A Marshmallow Test

2