ON MARSHMALLOW AND GENDER DIFFERENCES:

Rereading Self-Discipline Research

Four decades ago, in the Stanford University laboratory of Walter Mischel, preschool-age children were left alone in a room after having been told they could get a small treat (say, a marshmallow) by ringing a bell at any time to summon the experimenter -- or, if they held out until he returned on his own, they could have a bigger treat (two marshmallows). As the results of this experiment are usually summarized, the children who were able to wait scored better on measures of cognitive and social skills about a decade later and also had higher SAT scores. The lesson is simple, as conservative commentators tell the story: We ought to focus less on “structural reforms” to improve education or reduce poverty, and look instead at traits possessed by individuals – specifically, the ability to exert good old-fashioned self-control.[37]

But the real story of these studies is a good deal more complicated. For starters, the causal relationship wasn’t at all clear, as Mischel acknowledged. The ability to delay gratification might not have been responsible for the impressive qualities found ten years later; instead, both may have resulted from the same kind of home environment.[38]

Second, what mostly interested Mischel wasn’t whether children could wait for a bigger treat – which, by the way, most of them could[39] – and whether waiters fared better in life than non-waiters, but how children go about trying to wait and which strategies help. It turned out that kids waited longer when they were distracted by a toy. What worked best wasn’t “self-denial and grim determination” but doing something enjoyable while waiting so that self-control wasn’t needed at all![40]

Third, the specifics of the situation – that is, the design of each experiment – were more important than the personality of a given child in predicting the outcome.[41] This is precisely the opposite of the usual lesson drawn from these studies, which is that self-control is a matter of individual character, which we ought to promote.

Fourth, even to the extent Mischel did look at stable individual characteristics, he was primarily concerned with “cognitive competencies” – strategies for how to think about (or stop thinking about) the goody – and how they’re related to other skills that are measured down the road. In fact, those subsequent outcomes weren’t associated with the ability to defer gratification, per se, but only with the ability to distract oneself when those distractions weren’t provided by the experimenters.[42] And that ability was significantly correlated with plain old intelligence.[43]

Finally, most people who cite these experiments simply assume that it’s better to take a bigger pay-off later than a smaller pay-off now. But is that always true? Mischel, for one, didn’t think so. “The decision to delay or not to delay hinges, in part, on the individual’s values and expectations with regard to the specific contingencies,” he and his colleagues wrote. “In a given situation, therefore, postponing gratification may or may not be a wise or adaptive choice.”[44]*

If the conservative spin on Mischel’s work is mostly attributable to how others have (mis)interpreted it, the same can’t be said of a more recent study, where the researchers themselves are keen to blame underachievement on the “failure to exercise self-discipline.” Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman attracted considerable attention (in Education Week, the New York Times, and elsewhere) for their experiment, published in 2005 and 2006, purporting to show that self-discipline was a strong predictor of academic success, and that this trait explained why girls in their sample were more successful in school than boys.[45]

Once again, the conclusion is a lot more dubious once you look more closely. For one thing, all of the children in this study were eighth graders at an elite magnet school with competitive admissions, so it’s not at all clear that the findings can be generalized to other populations or ages. For another thing, self-discipline was mostly assessed by how the students described themselves, or how their teachers and parents described them, rather than being based on something they actually did. The sole behavioral measure – making them choose either a dollar today or two dollars in a week – correlated weakly with the other measures and showed the smallest gender difference.

Most tellingly, though, the only beneficial effect of self-discipline was higher grades. Teachers gave more A’s to the students who said, for example, that they put off doing what they enjoyed until they finished their homework. Suppose it had been discovered that students who nodded and smiled at everything their teacher said received higher grades. Would that argue for teaching kids to nod and smile more, or might it call into question the significance of grades as a variable? Or suppose it was discovered that self-discipline on the part of adults was associated with more positive evaluations from workplace supervisors. We’d have to conclude that employees who did what their bosses wanted, regardless of whether it was satisfying or sensible, elicited a favorable verdict from those same bosses. But so what?

We already know not only that grades suffer from low levels of validity and reliability but that students who are led to focus on grades tend to be less interested in what they’re learning, more likely to think in a superficial fashion (and to retain information for a shorter time), and apt to choose the easiest possible task.[46] Moreover, there’s some evidence that students with high grades are, on average, overly conformist and not particularly creative.[47] That students who are more self-disciplined get better grades, then, constitutes an endorsement of self-discipline only for people who don’t understand that grades are a terrible marker for the educational qualities we care about. And if girls in our culture are socialized to control their impulses and do what they’re told, is it really a good thing that they’ve absorbed that lesson well enough to be rewarded with high marks?

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