#Marshmallow Test

[mindblowingscience]

Back in 2021, a test of cephalopod smarts reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence. Cuttlefish were given a new version of the marshmallow test, and the results may demonstrate that there's more going on in their strange little brains than we knew. Their ability to learn and adapt, the researchers said, could have evolved to give cuttlefish an edge in the cutthroat eat-or-be-eaten marine world they live in.

Continue Reading.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Marshmallow Longtermism

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this week!

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "Marshmallow Longtermism"; it's a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as the standards-bearers for deferred gratification and making hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality:

https://locusmag.com/2024/09/cory-doctorow-marshmallow-longtermism/

Conservatives often root our societal ills in a childish impatience, and cast themselves as wise adults who understand that "you can't get something for nothing." Think here of the memes about lazy kids who would rather spend on avocado toast and fancy third-wave coffee rather than paying off their student loans. In this framing, poverty is a consequence of immaturity. To be a functional adult is to be sober in all things: not only does a grownup limit their intoxicant intake to head off hangovers, they also go to the gym to prevent future health problems, they save their discretionary income to cover a down-payment and student loans.

This isn't asceticism, though: it's a mature decision to delay gratification. Avocado toast is a reward for a life well-lived: once you've paid off your mortgage and put your kid through college, then you can have that oat-milk latte. This is just "sound reasoning": every day you fail to pay off your student loan represents another day of compounding interest. Pay off the loan first, and you'll save many avo toasts' worth of interest and your net toast consumption can go way, way up.

Cleaving the world into the patient (the mature, the adult, the wise) and the impatient (the childish, the foolish, the feckless) does important political work. It transforms every societal ill into a personal failing: the prisoner in the dock who stole to survive can be recast as a deficient whose partying on study-nights led to their failure to achieve the grades needed for a merit scholarship, a first-class degree, and a high-paying job.

Dividing the human race into "the wise" and "the foolish" forms an ethical basis for hierarchy. If some of us are born (or raised) for wisdom, then naturally those people should be in charge. Moreover, putting the innately foolish in charge is a recipe for disaster. The political scientist Corey Robin identifies this as the unifying belief common to every kind of conservativism: that some are born to rule, others are born to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/01/set-healthy-boundaries/#healthy-populism

This is why conservatives are so affronted by affirmative action, whose premise is that the absence of minorities in the halls of power stems from systemic bias. For conservatives, the fact that people like themselves are running things is evidence of their own virtue and suitability for rule. In conservative canon, the act of shunting aside members of dominant groups to make space for members of disfavored minorities isn't justice, it's dangerous "virtue signaling" that puts the childish and unfit in positions of authority.

Again, this does important political work. If you are ideologically committed to deregulation, and then a giant, deregulated sea-freighter crashes into a bridge, you can avoid any discussion of re-regulating the industry by insisting that we are living in a corrupted age where the unfit are unjustly elevated to positions of authority. That bridge wasn't killed by deregulation – it's demise is the fault of the DEI hire who captained the ship:

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/03/26/baltimore-bridge-dei-utah-lawmaker-phil-lyman-misinformation

The idea of a society made up of the patient and wise and the impatient and foolish is as old as Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper," but it acquired a sheen of scientific legitimacy in 1970, with Walter Mischel's legendary "Stanford Marshmallow Experiment":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment

In this experiment, kids were left alone in a locked room with a single marshmallow, after being told that they would get two marshmallows in 15 minutes, but only if they waited until them to eat the marshmallow before them. Mischel followed these kids for decades, finding that the kids who delayed gratification and got that second marshmallow did better on every axis – educational attainment, employment, and income. Adult brain-scans of these subjects revealed structural differences between the patient and the impatient.

For many years, the Stanford Marshmallow experiment has been used to validate the cleavage of humanity in the patient and wise and impatient and foolish. Those brain scans were said to reveal the biological basis for thinking of humanity's innate rulers as a superior subspecies, hidden in plain sight, destined to rule.

Then came the "replication crisis," in which numerous bedrock psychological studies from the mid 20th century were re-run by scientists whose fresh vigor disproved and/or complicated the career-defining findings of the giants of behavioral "science." When researchers re-ran Mischel's tests, they discovered an important gloss to his findings. By questioning the kids who ate the marshmallows right away, rather than waiting to get two marshmallows, they discovered that these kids weren't impatient, they were rational.

The kids who ate the marshmallows were more likely to come from poorer households. These kids had repeatedly been disappointed by the adults in their lives, who routinely broke their promises to the kids. Sometimes, this was well-intentioned, as when an economically precarious parent promised a treat, only to come up short because of an unexpected bill. Sometimes, this was just callousness, as when teachers, social workers or other authority figures fobbed these kids off with promises they knew they couldn't keep.

The marshmallow-eating kids had rationally analyzed their previous experiences and were making a sound bet that a marshmallow on the plate now was worth more than a strange adult's promise of two marshmallows. The "patient" kids who waited for the second marshmallow weren't so much patient as they were trusting: they had grown up with parents who had the kind of financial cushion that let them follow through on their promises, and who had the kind of social power that convinced other adults – teachers, etc – to follow through on their promises to their kids.

Once you understand this, the lesson of the Marshmallow Experiment is inverted. The reason two marshmallow kids thrived is that they came from privileged backgrounds: their high grades were down to private tutors, not the choice to study rather than partying. Their plum jobs and high salaries came from university and family connections, not merit. Their brain differences were the result of a life free from the chronic, extreme stress that comes with poverty.

Post-replication crisis, the moral of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is that everyone experiences a mix of patience and impatience, but for the people born to privilege, the consequences of impatience are blunted and the rewards of patience are maximized.

Which explains a lot about how rich people actually behave. Take Charles Koch, who grew his father's coal empire a thousandfold by making long-term investments in automation. Koch is a vocal proponent of patience and long-term thinking, and is openly contemptuous of publicly traded companies because of the pressure from shareholders to give preference to short-term extraction over long-term planning. He's got a point.

Koch isn't just a fossil fuel baron, he's also a wildly successful ideologue. Koch is one of a handful of oligarchs who have transformed American politics by patiently investing in a kraken's worth of think tanks, universities, PACs, astroturf organizations, Star chambers and other world-girding tentacles. After decades of gerrymandering, voter suppression, court-packing and propagandizing, the American billionaire class has seized control of the US and its institutions. Patience pays!

But Koch's longtermism is highly selective. Arguably, Charles Koch bears more personal responsibility for delaying action on the climate emergency than any other person, alive or dead. Addressing greenhouse gasses is the most grasshopper-and-the-ant-ass crisis of all. Every day we delayed doing something about this foreseeable, well-understood climate debt added sky-high compounding interest. In failing to act, we saved billions – but we stuck our future selves with trillions in debt for which no bankruptcy procedure exists.

By convincing us not to invest in retooling for renewables in order to make his billions, Koch was committing the sin of premature avocado toast, times a billion. His inability to defer gratification – which he imposed on the rest of us – means that we are likely to lose much of world's coastal cities (including the state of Florida), and will have to find trillions to cope with wildfires, zoonotic plagues, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

Koch isn't a serene Buddha whose ability to surf over his impetuous attachments qualifies him to make decisions for the rest of us. Rather, he – like everyone else – is a flawed vessel whose blind spots are just as stubborn as ours. But unlike a person whose lack of foresight leads to drug addiction and petty crimes to support their habit, Koch's flaws don't just hurt a few people, they hurt our entire species and the only planet that can support it.

The selective marshmallow patience of the rich creates problems beyond climate debt. Koch and his fellow oligarchs are, first and foremost, supporters of oligarchy, an intrinsically destabilizing political arrangement that actually threatens their fortunes. Policies that favor the wealthy are always seeking an equilibrium between instability and inequality: a rich person can either submit to having their money taxed away to build hospitals, roads and schools, or they can invest in building high walls and paying guards to keep the rest of us from building guillotines on their lawns.

Rich people gobble that marshmallow like there's no tomorrow (literally). They always overestimate how much bang they'll get for their guard-labor buck, and underestimate how determined the poors will get after watching their children die of starvation and preventable diseases.

All of us benefit from some kind of cushion from our bad judgment, but not too much. The problem isn't that wealthy people get to make a few poor choices without suffering brutal consequences – it's that they hoard this benefit. Most of us are one missed student debt payment away from penalties and interest that add twenty years to our loan, while Charles Koch can set the planet on fire and continue to act as though he was born with the special judgment that means he knows what's best for us.

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/04/deferred-gratification/#selective-foresight

Image: Mark S (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/markoz46/4864682934/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[malfiora]

every single one of the batkids would have failed the marshmallow test.

@glitter-stained I go to you for your thoughts on how that test is bullshit.

[skydaemon]

Science Says People (Specifically Kids) Are Good, Actually

okay i just rediscovered the link to one of my favourite studies ever and i wanted to share it with the class.

Koomen, R., Grueneisen, S., & Herrmann, E. (2020). Children Delay Gratification for Cooperative Ends. Psychological Science, 31(2), 139–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619894205

(it's behind a paywall, but if you can't access and you're interested i have the pdf)

This study modified the marshmallow test, where kids are asked to hold off on eating one marshmallow in order to get another one later. The study used children from Germany and Kenya, with localised treats that were familiar to the kids. 70 of the children were paired up interdependently - each pair would only get the second treat if they both held off eating the first. 69 (nice) were paired up dependently - they each thought that they were the only one of the two who had to avoid eating the treat, and 68 were doing the test as normal.

The interdependent kids were significantly better at the test than those doing the test normally - cooperation (the idea that they were doing this for AND with a friend) had a significant positive effect on their willpower ! The dependent kids were also better at the test than the solo ones - showing that children can delay gratification better when they're doing it for a friend - but not as much as the interdependent ones. Even though they knew that they were the only ones who had to hold out, the fact that they weren't doing it with a friend meant they didn't have that amazing boost of willpower. (there are small cultural differences here between the Kenyan and German children, but the overall interdependence effect holds.)

From the discussion: "Delaying gratification is often critical for cooperation to succeed. Here, 5- to 6-year-olds from two highly distinct cultures were more likely to delay gratification when their outcomes were interdependently linked than when they performed the same task alone, even though the interdependent context entailed additional risks. These findings support the notion that human cooperative relations, particularly social interdependence, critically shape cognitive performance from an early age."

i just find this study so heartening, because it's truly applicable throughout life. if you've ever done something for a friend that you couldn't do for yourself, that's this effect! our reliance on others (and their reliance on us) is hugely beneficial for ourselves and for society - how nice is that?

Similar studies:

this one again shows increased willpower in kids for the good of others !

this one shows how kids begin to give more to people that need it

this one found that kids as young as three show altruistic behaviour when it comes to the present, and by five they've developed altruism for future events !

this study found that by the age of 8, children will reject unfairness EVEN WHEN IT BENEFITS THEM !!

in summary i love people and i love children and we are all built kind it is our duty to make sure as many people as possible stay that way

[greenhikingboots]

this is the marshmallow test but with money. i lived with food insecurity growing up so i’m taking the one time payment.

Explain your reasoning plzzz

[madewithonerib]

Founder of Marshmallow Test has Great Advice for Self-Control

[Goals are the same as NY's Resolution]

Here is the history & context of how the psychiatrist who originated this concept, applied it to improve the lives of his family & life:

Walter Mischel, who died on September 12, 2018, was a clinical psychologist best known for his work on delayed gratification. In a series of studies in the 1960s and 1970s, Mischel told children between the ages of three and five that if they could wait 10 minutes to eat a treat, they’d be rewarded with two. Later, he found that the ability to wait longer appeared predictive of how children would achieve in school and in life. (Modern attempts to replicate the study have had differing results, suggesting that the test may have been better at gauging parental wealth than it was any other metric.)

In the process of his work, Mischel developed strategies for self-control that he eventually applied to his own life. Once, for example, he made a promise to his three-year-old daughter that if she stopped sucking her thumb, he’d stop smoking his pipe.

Breaking a habit works like this, he told the New Yorker: If you want to stop yourself from wanting something, you mentally ring-fence it to make it less desirable—and busy yourself with something else, to keep your mind off it.

“The key, it turns out, is learning to mentally “cool” what Mischel calls the “hot” aspects of your environment: the things that pull you away from your goal. Cooling can be accomplished by putting the object at an imaginary distance (a photograph isn’t a treat), or by re-framing it (picturing marshmallows as clouds not candy). Focusing on a completely unrelated experience can also work, as can any technique that successfully switches your attention.”

In Mischel’s case, he used the technique to eventually replace his pleasurable associations with smoking with the image of a man in hospital.

For small children, the key to self-control is often finding a distraction from the object of their desire. “Four-year-olds can be brilliantly imaginative about distracting themselves, turning their toes into piano keyboards, singing little songs, exploring their nasal orifices,” he told The Atlantic in 2014.

But adults may do better by implementing slightly more sophisticated “if-then” strategies: Someone trying to give up smoking, for instance, might choose to take a break to play a game on their phone instead of having a cigarette.

It helps if you have some kind of motivation nudging along your efforts in self-control. Mischel’s best graduate students were not the ones with the most sitzfleisch, but the ones who were there because they wanted to answer some kind of burning question, he told the Times—to cite one example, why some people don’t recover from heartbreak.

The more you employ these tactics, the better you’ll get at them—and the happier you’ll be. “We’ve found a way to really improve human choice and freedom,” he told the New Yorker. “If we have the skills to allow us to make discriminations about when we do or don’t do something, when we do or don’t drink something, and when we do & when we don’t wait for something, we are no longer victims of our desires.”

This post originally appeared on Quartz and was published September 13, 2018. This article is republished here with permission.

Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome, also known as the imposter phenomenon, is the feeling of self-doubt that you're not good enough or don't deserve your accomplishments:

You have difficulty internalizing your abilities and instead attribute your success to other factors [world claiming gift of GOD as an ability they have in themselves, playing GOD 666]

You have an ongoing fear of being "found out" as incompetent or or unable to replicate past successes

You feel like you're tricking your coworkers into thinking you're good at your job

You rationalize your successes, such as by believing you got your job because the hiring manager felt bad for you

Imposter syndrome can cause:

Anxiety and depression

Lessened professional confidence

Sensitivity to small mistakes

Fear of success or failure

Burnout from working too hard

Pushing yourself harder than most

Psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes first identified imposter syndrome in the 1970s while studying high-achieving women. Some ways to overcome imposter syndrome include:

Writing down your observations to organize your thoughts

Using self-esteem journal prompts to counter self-criticism

Some measures of imposter syndrome include: The Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale (CIPS), The Perceived Fraudulence Scale, The Leary Impostor Scale, and The Impostor Phenomenon Assessment.

Why you still feel like you're faking when you've already made it? September 23, 2024 | By Arlin Cuncic, MA Medically reviewed by Amy Morin, LCSW

Ever find yourself consistently experiencing self-doubt, even in areas where you typically excel? Do you often feel like a fake or a phony despite all your accomplishments? Because same. In fact, it's a common phenomenon called impostor syndrome. Imposter syndrome may feel like nervousness, accompanied by the belief you'll be "found out" and it may also manifest as negative self-talk. Symptoms of anxiety and depression often accompany imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome is not a diagnosable mental illness. Instead, the term is usually narrowly applied to intelligence and achievement, although it also has links to perfectionism and the social context. It can show up in the context of work, relationships, friendships, or just overall, that holds us back from the self-confidence we've earned and deserve to feel. Psychologists Suzanna Imes and Pauline Rose Clance first used this term in the 1970s. Clance PR, Imes SA. The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Group Dyn. 1978;15(3):241-247. doi:10.1037/h0086006

The irony is, that people with imposter syndrome are often highly accomplished, impressive individuals. On the outside, there is no apparent reason for them to feel like an imposter, and yet they still do. This is what makes it such a challenging psychological phenomenon that needs to be unpacked.

"Not only can imposter syndrome affect your internal feelings about your work or self-worth, but it can also actually affect the way you approach projects, relationships, or any other areas in which you are feeling insecure," explains Hannah Owens, LMSW. "This essentially creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is what makes it so insidious and necessary to address when it arises."

The Five Types of Impostor Syndrome

Based on research by Dr. Valerie Young, an expert on impostor syndrome and co-founder of the Impostor Syndrome Institute, imposter syndrome can be broken down into five basic types:

The Perfectionist. This type of imposter syndrome involves believing that, unless you were absolutely perfect, you could have done better. You feel like an imposter because your perfectionistic traits make you believe you're not as good as others might think you are.

The Expert. The expert feels like an imposter because they do not know everything there is to know about a particular subject or topic, or they haven't mastered every step in a process. Because there is more for them to learn, they don't feel as if they've reached the rank of "expert."

The Natural Genius. In this imposter syndrome type, you feel like a fraud simply because you don't believe you are naturally intelligent or competent. If you don't get something right the first time around or it takes you longer to master a skill, you feel like an imposter.

The Soloist. It's also possible to feel like an imposter if you had to ask for help to reach a certain level or status. Since you couldn't get there on your own, you question your competence or abilities.

Superman/human. This type of imposter syndrome involves believing you must be the hardest worker or reach the highest levels of achievement possible and, if you don't, you are a fraud.

How Do I Know If I Have Imposter Syndrome?

Originally, the concept of imposter syndrome was thought to apply mostly to high-achieving women. Since then, it has been recognized as a more widely experienced phenomenon. Imposter syndrome can affect anyone—no matter their social status, work background, skill level, or degree of expertise.

While impostor syndrome is not a recognized mental health disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR), it is fairly common. It is estimated that 70% of people will experience at least one episode of this phenomenon at some point in their lives.

If you wonder whether you might have imposter syndrome, ask yourself the following questions:

Do you agonize over even the smallest mistakes or flaws in your work? Do you attribute your success to luck or outside factors?

Are you sensitive to even constructive criticism?

Do you feel like you will inevitably be found out as a phony?

Do you downplay your own expertise, even in areas where you are genuinely more skilled than others?

If you often find yourself feeling like you are a fraud or an imposter, it may be helpful to talk to a therapist. The negative thinking, self-doubt, and self-sabotage that often characterize imposter syndrome can affect many areas of your life.

Mastery: Practice Makes Perfect

“Put them to work … It’s process. It’s one [foot] in front of the other.”

[shifasaman]

Delve into the fascinating revisit of the Marshmallow Test, where delayed gratification meets the reality of economic pressures. This exploration reveals how self-control isn’t just an individual trait but one deeply influenced by socio-economic backgrounds. Learn how external challenges reshape the ability to wait for rewards and what this means for interpreting success. Discover the complex dynamics between willpower, financial hardship, and future achievement, shedding light on why some succeed against the odds and others struggle. Read more in this compelling analysis of psychology and context.

Read the full article here.

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[capitalism-is-parasitism]

The marshmallow test (is a lie)

Modern attempts to replicate the study have had differing results, suggesting that the test may have been better at gauging parental wealth than it was any other metric.

[daisukitoo]

This is a good addition on unintentional training. You can teach people not to trust you and then be shocked when they do not trust you.

Sometimes when children fail a marshmallow test, it signals low ability to defer gratification and low time horizons. Sometimes it signals that authority figures in their lives regularly make promises and then renege.

Promises mean everything when you're little And the world is so big

I have been thinking about small children and small dogs.

It is sometimes observed that small dogs can be unholy terrors. I have come to think this is more because of unintentional training rather than a lack of training.

If you have a large and potentially dangerous dog, you will probably seek to train it just so it does not damage your home or family. If you have a 2 kg dog, you just pick it up and move it if it is misbehaving.

This inadvertently trains your small dog to escalate if it wants any degree of self determination. It avoids someone but gets picked up. It runs away but gets picked up. It barks, it growls, it gets scolded and picked up. If it goes absolutely berserk and does its best to kill someone, it might not get picked up. You have taught your dog *this* is what it takes to be taken seriously as a very small animal.

Small children are often treated a lot like small pets. They are small people filled with needs and wants, almost powerless in the face of a nigh incomprehensible world. And larger people scold them and pick them up when their needs and wants are inconvenient for the larger people.

I have been around many small children this week and seen many meltdowns. Some of them are just exhausted and overstimulated. Some are probably classic brats who have been taught they can get their way if they just whine enough, which is a variation on the same idea.

But I must believe that some of them have learned this is the *only* way they will get *any* attention to their stated wants and needs.

Your parents have a plan and an agenda for the day, and you were not consulted because you are 4 years old, but you are still a human being with needs to understand and to some extent control your environment, and if the only way you can get anyone to listen to you for 5 minutes is to make those minutes absolute hell for everyone involved, yourself included, well, that is what it takes.

When you are 4 years old, fairly petty inconveniences can in fact be the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Small children can have the best and worst moments of their lives several times a day. They are learning the bounds of "normal," and they don't have many days that could have been worse.

It can be hard being a Very Small Animal.

[benevolentdinosaur]

ceos only care about short term profits and don't consider long term success. I think we should start making them do the marshmallow test before hiring.

[friendofthecrows]

WE DID A WORSE JOB THAN THE AVERAGE 3-5 Y/O GUYS (2002-2012 study)

>3 thousand votes with 7 thousand notes... that's more than a third of you who voted. Almost half.

"Close to 60% of the children tested held out the full 10 minutes for a bigger reward. And only about 12% claimed their reward in the first half-minute."

Marshmallow test:

Do not vote on this poll. If the number of total votes in the poll by the time it closes is below the vote threshold, I will make two polls tomorrow. If it matches or exceeds it, I will not and also be very disappointed in all of you. The vote threshold is secret but not very high; I will not tell you what it is, because otherwise people would be able to tell if it's been exceeded and have no reason not to vote.

[artechouse]

Roth IRAs are like the adult version of the Marshmallow Test