I really don’t see how this casts doubt on the original experiment. Suppose we express a child’s decision as maximizing expected reward minus the cost of waiting, where the latter takes “self control” as a parameter. If we lower expected reward, (nearly) all the kids eat the marshmallow. If we raise expected reward (by reinforcing waiting twice), about half the kids wait. But still, 6⁄14 kids in the second group didn’t wait, so clearly there’s variance from another source.
One way to tease out this connection might be to compare the kids who waited to the kids who tried to hold out and ate the marshmallow late (say after 10 minutes). Presumably the latter group trusted the adults, and their failure to wait was due to lack of self control. Now compare those two groups 10 years later.
I read the experiment with adults who renege on their promises some time ago, and my reaction was along the lines of “seriously, the kids would have to be idiots to take them at their words after all this.”
There’s no point in engaging one’s ability to delay gratification for a reward that almost certainly isn’t coming.
For some value of “almost certainly”. If you value one marshmallow fifteen minutes from now 0.95 times as much as one right now, and you’re 90% sure you won’t get a second marshmallow, you still are better off in average by waiting.
I really don’t see how this casts doubt on the original experiment. Suppose we express a child’s decision as maximizing expected reward minus the cost of waiting, where the latter takes “self control” as a parameter. If we lower expected reward, (nearly) all the kids eat the marshmallow. If we raise expected reward (by reinforcing waiting twice), about half the kids wait. But still, 6⁄14 kids in the second group didn’t wait, so clearly there’s variance from another source.
The other source of variance could still be the children’s “trustingness.” The more trusting children could have a higher expected reward even after the kids are shown that the adults are reliable/unreliable. So the results are consistent with both of the following hypotheses:
More trusting children will wait longer and self control is not relevant
More trusting children will wait longer and children with more self control will wait longer
But this experiment ruled out the following:
It doesn’t matter if a child is more trusting; only self control affects how long they wait
It doesn’t matter if a child is more trusting; only self control affects how long they wait
I agree, but I don’t think anyone believed that nothing else matters to marshmallow eating.
We have to distinguish between the propositions:
(P1) A significant fraction of the variance in marshmallow eating among children observed in past experiments is explained by trustingness.
(P2) Inducing large changes in trustingness in children produces changes in marshmallow eating behavior.
This study supports (P2), but it is only informative about (P1) to the extent someone previously assigned substantial probability mass to the proposition:
(P3) There is large variation in childrens’ trustingness, but trustingness doesn’t affect childrens’ marshmallow eating decision.
I suspect most people didn’t assign much probability to (P3), and so this study shouldn’t change their opinion very much.
Agreed, but I think the reason this experiment is interesting is that it previously didn’t occur to people (or at least to me) that trustingness is a possible alternative explanation of the classic marshmallow experiment, rather than self control. It was a blind spot.
It didn’t occur to me either, but ironically it was the first thing my wife suggested when I told her about the marshmallow experiment yesterday (it came up in the context of that professor’s comments about fat people, self control, and PhD programs recently). This post’s timing was thus quite serendipitous.
It probably occurred to her because she is a doctor who works with primarily poor patients, many of whom are black and hispanic, and so is used to the associated mistrust when crossing cultural and socio-economic lines.
EDIT:
The key is to focus on what the experimental subjects observe, not the rules the experimenters intend to follow. The kid is promised another marshmallow, he doesn’t know that he is going to get one, and he doesn’t know that the one he has now won’t be taken away. With priors associated with abuse, the kid should eat the marshmallow as soon as possible.
I really don’t see how this casts doubt on the original experiment. Suppose we express a child’s decision as maximizing expected reward minus the cost of waiting, where the latter takes “self control” as a parameter. If we lower expected reward, (nearly) all the kids eat the marshmallow. If we raise expected reward (by reinforcing waiting twice), about half the kids wait. But still, 6⁄14 kids in the second group didn’t wait, so clearly there’s variance from another source.
One way to tease out this connection might be to compare the kids who waited to the kids who tried to hold out and ate the marshmallow late (say after 10 minutes). Presumably the latter group trusted the adults, and their failure to wait was due to lack of self control. Now compare those two groups 10 years later.
I read the experiment with adults who renege on their promises some time ago, and my reaction was along the lines of “seriously, the kids would have to be idiots to take them at their words after all this.”
There’s no point in engaging one’s ability to delay gratification for a reward that almost certainly isn’t coming.
For some value of “almost certainly”. If you value one marshmallow fifteen minutes from now 0.95 times as much as one right now, and you’re 90% sure you won’t get a second marshmallow, you still are better off in average by waiting.
The other source of variance could still be the children’s “trustingness.” The more trusting children could have a higher expected reward even after the kids are shown that the adults are reliable/unreliable. So the results are consistent with both of the following hypotheses:
More trusting children will wait longer and self control is not relevant
More trusting children will wait longer and children with more self control will wait longer
But this experiment ruled out the following:
It doesn’t matter if a child is more trusting; only self control affects how long they wait
I agree, but I don’t think anyone believed that nothing else matters to marshmallow eating.
We have to distinguish between the propositions:
(P1) A significant fraction of the variance in marshmallow eating among children observed in past experiments is explained by trustingness.
(P2) Inducing large changes in trustingness in children produces changes in marshmallow eating behavior.
This study supports (P2), but it is only informative about (P1) to the extent someone previously assigned substantial probability mass to the proposition:
(P3) There is large variation in childrens’ trustingness, but trustingness doesn’t affect childrens’ marshmallow eating decision.
I suspect most people didn’t assign much probability to (P3), and so this study shouldn’t change their opinion very much.
Agreed, but I think the reason this experiment is interesting is that it previously didn’t occur to people (or at least to me) that trustingness is a possible alternative explanation of the classic marshmallow experiment, rather than self control. It was a blind spot.
It didn’t occur to me either, but ironically it was the first thing my wife suggested when I told her about the marshmallow experiment yesterday (it came up in the context of that professor’s comments about fat people, self control, and PhD programs recently). This post’s timing was thus quite serendipitous.
It probably occurred to her because she is a doctor who works with primarily poor patients, many of whom are black and hispanic, and so is used to the associated mistrust when crossing cultural and socio-economic lines.
I’m not so trusting, and it occurred to me.
EDIT: The key is to focus on what the experimental subjects observe, not the rules the experimenters intend to follow. The kid is promised another marshmallow, he doesn’t know that he is going to get one, and he doesn’t know that the one he has now won’t be taken away. With priors associated with abuse, the kid should eat the marshmallow as soon as possible.