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For their study, researchers Rebecca Koomen, Sebastian Grueneisen, and Esther Herrmann, all affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, used a modified version of the "marshmallow test," a classic psychological experiment designed to examine young children's ability to delay gratification. In the classic experiment, preschool children were led into a room where a marshmallow or other treat was placed on a table. The children were told they could either eat the treat right away, or they could wait until the experimenter, who had to step out of the room, returned, in which case they'd receive a second treat. About a third of the children were able to wait for the second treat for up to 15 minutes.
In their new research, the researchers paired up more than 200 5- and 6-year-olds and had them play a brief balloon toss game to get comfortable in the testing environment. They then put the partners in separate rooms and placed a cookie in front of each of them. Some partners were assigned to a solo condition and only had to rely on their own self-control to earn a second cookie, much like the traditional experiment. Others were placed in a cooperative condition in which they received a second treat only if both they and their partner waited until the experimenter returned. Waiting in this condition was therefore risky and indeed less likely to result in a second cookie because children had to rely both on themselves and their partner to refrain from eating. The authors called this the interdependence condition. To identify any cultural differences in the responses, the researchers tested children at a laboratory in Germany and went to schools in Kenya to test children of the Kikuyu tribe.
Across both conditions, Kikuyu children were more likely to delay gratification compared to their German counterparts. But across the two cultures, significantly more children held off on eating the first cookie in the interdependence condition compared with the solo condition.
Journal Reference:
Rebecca Koomen, Sebastian Grueneisen, Esther Herrmann. Children Delay Gratification for Cooperative Ends, Psychological Science (DOI: 10.1177/0956797619894205)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @03:12AM (1 child)
When you're born during the year has some impact on your future. Being born just after school starts often means that you're the oldest in the class. Whereas if you're born just before the cut off, then you often wind up the youngest in the class. If you don't think that has an impact on schooling, then you should probably think about that.
But, you see similar groupings of birthdays around the time where athletic teams cut off where the ones that are at the older end of the grouping are disproportionately the ones that wind up super stars in the sport later on.
Likewise, having a fall birthday versus a spring birthday will have some influence on what kinds of activities people are doing at various delopmental stages. As you grow older, that becomes less significant, but when you're talking about taking your first steps outside with strangers versus inside with just family, it seems unreasonable to assume that it won't have any impact on your experience.
That's not to say that Astrology is valid, just that on some level when we are born during the year does have some impact and really to argue there's no impact is rather foolish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @02:10PM
You put words in my mouth. I in no way said when you were born had no affect on the outcomes. Alongside examples of things we can clearly measure (such as you've described) there are also undoubtedly things we cannot measure so directly that also would result in aggregate differences overall. But they have likely have little to nothing to do with what we might think. With the examples we can "see" this is obvious. The example you mentioned is reasonably well known. Get born during a certain month and you're more likely than average to excel at sports. In a time of astrology, however, this would likely have been attributed to Mars or some other nonsense.
It's the same with psychology today. Many things correlate to other things but they're, as you mentioned, not only temporal but also local in nature. And the exact causation is generally far beyond anything we can grasp at as we still know fuck all about how the brain actually operates, and so the whole field has turned into what astrology was - loose correlations paired with extensive retrofitted confirmation bias to explain them that rapidly falls apart upon anything remotely like an impartial inspection.