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> which is precisely why you should control for it, no? No. If willpower is inherited then what is required is a serious attempt to deal with this. If parent

> which is precisely why you should control for it, no? No. If willpower is inherited then what is required is a serious attempt to deal with this. If parental income is a proxy for willpower, and willpower is substantially heritable (both quite likely) then naively controlling for parental income is actually controlling away a substantial portion of the child's own willpower! The model needs to specifically allow for the heritability for willpower, which theirs does not. So in this case, the study demonstrates roughly "the marshmallow test does not test willpower, when you control for (much of the child's) willpower". As such it is useless rubbish, like a lot of social science research.

dahart 8y ago
If we should do something serious about it, we should first confirm that will power is heritable, right? How do you propose to validate the heritability of will power? And I'd love to hear more about what you'd do about it, and what the problem is. Why do you think will power is quite likely to be substantially heritable? Are there other better publications that already validate this hypothesis? If you’re right that it is, then the test I described above would still corroborate, or at least fail to demonstrate that will power isn’t heritable, don’t you think? If will power is heritable, then it will follow the same genetic inheritance patterns as other heritable traits, and one can predict the likely willpower outcomes given that of the parents and grandparents, right? I still think that it should be relatively easy to demonstrate whether will power is heritable, and that controlling for income is useful and doesn’t pose any threat to determining the truth. Also, wouldn’t the premise of the original marshmallow test be somewhat moot if will power is heritable? If will power isn’t an environmental or learned trait, then there’s not much you can do about it except for marry up, and excuse the foibles of people who’s bad luck left them with less will power. FWIW, this isn’t the first follow up study that challenges the marshmallow test, previous studies have also pointed at confounding factors. “A 2012 study at the University of Rochester (with a smaller N= 28) altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[11][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children's performance, since self-control should predict ability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment#Follow-up_studies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim... That doesn’t prove that will power isn’t heritable, but it does tend to point in that direction.

dahart 8y ago

If we should do something serious about it, we should first confirm that will power is heritable, right? How do you propose to validate the heritability of will power? And I'd love to hear more about what you'd do about it, and what the problem is. Why do you think will power is quite likely to be substantially heritable? Are there other better publications that already validate this hypothesis? If you’re right that it is, then the test I described above would still corroborate, or at least fail to demonstrate that will power isn’t heritable, don’t you think? If will power is heritable, then it will follow the same genetic inheritance patterns as other heritable traits, and one can predict the likely willpower outcomes given that of the parents and grandparents, right? I still think that it should be relatively easy to demonstrate whether will power is heritable, and that controlling for income is useful and doesn’t pose any threat to determining the truth. Also, wouldn’t the premise of the original marshmallow test be somewhat moot if will power is heritable? If will power isn’t an environmental or learned trait, then there’s not much you can do about it except for marry up, and excuse the foibles of people who’s bad luck left them with less will power. FWIW, this isn’t the first follow up study that challenges the marshmallow test, previous studies have also pointed at confounding factors. “A 2012 study at the University of Rochester (with a smaller N= 28) altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[11][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children's performance, since self-control should predict ability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment#Follow-up_studies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim... That doesn’t prove that will power isn’t heritable, but it does tend to point in that direction.