Page 3 - Flipbook: Sociology Shortcuts Issue 4: Testing the Marshmallow Test

Why Is It Important?

As a stand-alone piece of research the Marshmallow Test is
interesting, but what catapulted it into the wider public
consciousness was the follow-up studies Mishcel et al (1990)
carried-out when their original respondents were 16 and 18.

More-specifically they found their respondents SAT scores
reflected their ability to delay gratification: in a nutshell, the 4 year
old students who were able to delay their gratification had higher
levels of academic achievement at age 16 than those who didn’t.

To cut a long story short, the relationship between self-control and
academic achievement not only became an accepted part of the
discourse – if you wanted to be successful, both academically and
in later life, you needed to develop and exercise self-control from a
young age – it also spawned a small sub-genre of self-help
manuals designed to teach “willpower” and, more-worryingly
perhaps, found its way into the curriculum of a significant number
of American schools.

Is the hype justified?

Let’s approach this from a few different directions, starting with some general observations
about the Tests.

The first thing to note is the relatively small sample size. The original tests took place over a
six-year period (1968 -1974) and involved a total of 650 boys and girls who took at least one
test. By the time of the follow-up comparison of these subjects’ SAT scores the sample had
degraded by just over 50% (leaving around 190 respondents).

So, not only was the original sample small, sample erosion leaves a big question mark
hanging over the relationship between the original Test and the SAT comparison. This is
because we know nothing about the SAT scores of over 50% of the original sample and this
makes drawing conclusions about the relationship between “self-control” and academic
achievement tentative at best.

A further dimension here is the sample was drawn from a very narrow pool: “a preschool for
mostly middle-class children of faculty and students from the Stanford University community”.
This means it’s not possible to generalise the results from one very select, ethnically-
homogeneous, affluent community to the wider population – although this hasn’t stopped an
awful lot of people from trying…

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