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)
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Cuttlefish show self-control, pass 'marshmallow test':
"Self-control is thought to be the cornerstone of intelligence, as it is an important prerequisite for complex decision-making and planning for the future," said lead author Alex Schnell, a research associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Not all animals share this trait, and it was previously thought that the ones that do, such as great apes, corvids and parrots, have long and social lives.
To see if a cephalopod should join the ranks, Schnell and her team adapted the famous "marshmallow test" so that it appealed to cuttlefish.
[...] They then set up a two-chamber apparatus with transparent sliding drawers. Behind one drawer, they placed a preferred meal (such as live grass shrimp) and behind the other, they placed a less preferred meal (such as Asian shore crab). The doors had symbols on them that indicated whether it would open with a delay (a triangle) or open immediately (a circle), which the cuttlefish learned to recognize.
The drawer with the less preferred meal always opened to the cuttlefish immediately, but the other drawer opened after a delay. In the control condition, the door with the preferred snack didn't open at all (a square). When the cuttlefish approached one chamber, the researchers immediately removed the snack in the other.
(Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:29PM (4 children)
Now we can wait 30 years to see if this has any predictive value for their life outcomes, which is what the original marshmallow test did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:12PM
I propose a modification [twitter.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bussdriver on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:07PM (2 children)
The classic experiment has had some big attacks leveled against it in recent years. You're going to need 100s more kids and imagine things you never thought about to measure in the test group lest somebody decades later wants to score some skeptic points because you didn't isolate cyborg-gendered kids or ones with gene-X or education differences, account for blah blah blah. It comes down to impulse control over thinking and while common sense says people with poor impulse control will be impaired in many aspects of life, it's hard to prove that--- especially when you try to measure it over decades. I wish they'd come up with an impulse control measurement framework which could be used in multiple ways.
I don't see great benefit for this study. Do the children LEARN impulse control with peer support? Does it just help with this 1 task only? Learning would take multiple interactions over time to develop the habit/learning. So they need the right peers for life? Don't have only children?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:17PM
I think those attacks are mostly valid and social destiny is a somewhat dubious concept that is prone to oversimplification, but I appreciate a single independent variable natural experiment even so.
Just because I'd be wary of taking the original experiment and drawing conclusions like "if we teach kids better delayed gratification, they'll have a higher income when they grow up" as a certainty doesn't mean I'd mind researching that exact question a bit more seriously.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:19PM
Poor impulse control is correlated with a smaller prefrontal cortex as found in psychopaths. Delayed gratification and good impulse control are not necessarily the same thing.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:47PM (3 children)
Maybe the cookie was not as appealing as a marshmallow.
If someone put down a crusty, old, Dad's oatmeal cookie in front of me, I would more easily hold off on eating that when compared to a home made ginger cookie with sugar crystals on top.
Why did they move away from marshmallows?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday January 15 2020, @09:03PM (1 child)
Dammit, now I want a nice, moist ginger cookie. Wait, that might sound bad.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Wednesday January 15 2020, @10:21PM
You had me until "cookie".
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 15 2020, @09:15PM
Because marshmallows are not popular in either Germany or Kenya.
Kids there do prefer crusty, old, Dad's oatmeal cookies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @05:08PM (1 child)
Eat the 1st marshmellon, kill the experimenter when he walks into the room and eat the rest of them.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @05:51PM
Gimme 10 marshmallows or I'll tell mommy you touched me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:23PM (5 children)
Are children who are born in March or in December more likely to delay gratification? And what can this tell us about their love life and partner compatibility? Something I think many don't know is that at one time astrology was literally a 'real' science at least as well regarded as psychology. And it lasted for hundreds of years. It looks like it's going to end up taking psychology a hair over a century for psychology to fall apart. This is just getting dumb.
For those that don't know, the study this was loosely based on (the stanford marshmallow experiment [wikipedia.org]) has also fallen victim to psychology crisis - in that basically nothing replicates and what little does tends to show much less strength than claimed.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:22PM
That wikipedia article mentions several replications?
The lede mentions that subsequent replications found less effect size when accounting for SES, which is a bit of a no-brainer. The citation wikipedia uses for that is even an article titled "The marshmallow test held up OK".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bussdriver on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:34PM
It is easily as complex as predicting the weather. no matter how much they isolate variables there are many involved and some that get missed. Plus here the clouds know they are being observed and studied; even kids know something is unusual. It's in the LIMITS of science so while it is "soft" it is also the hardest science there is. Good luck trying to get enough people, time, and money to do it well and NOBODY wants to reproduce your work; it's hard enough to be able to do it the 1st time let alone the SAME uninteresting thing again... and take many years to see results. We need serious government support to make this stuff actually work. When it doesn't reproduce-- then you have to revise it to account for whatever variables broke it and start over again...
At least the weather happens every day and the results are clear numbers. New experiments/tests daily. lots of funding.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday January 15 2020, @10:48PM
Plus, you know, context. Kids didn't have cell phones/electronic music/big tvs/Disney XD/fire tornadoes back when the test was run, or had simpler ones. Who knows how differently the brain is shaped depending on the rest of their environment at the time?
Just because most of physics doesn't have absolute time as a variable, doesn't mean psychological effects are independent of it. Reproducibility seems completely out of the question -- it seems that the best that you could expect would be to track evolution (or stochasticity?) of these behaviors, treating reproducible results as something of a degenerate case.
(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.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @12:01AM (3 children)
Admittedly didn't rtfa; did they separate for introverts and extroverts and control?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:17AM
What is that "control" in the context? Neither introvert or extrovert? Both? Something else, a sea monster or the like?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday January 16 2020, @06:16PM
Neither the popular article nor the study abstract specifies the experiment type. My guess from skimming it is that it's quasi-experimental without a control group; I don't see given the conditions of the testing that they could possibly have a control. They took data on dependent/interdependent/solo and cultural origin (Germany or Kikuyu), age, sex, and whether they delayed or not.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday January 16 2020, @06:16PM
And, for completeness, the raw data (sourced from the journal entry): https://osf.io/axusj/ [osf.io]
This sig for rent.