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The findings of the original study were called into question by a larger 2018 study[0]. The original study had 90 students. Some folks did a study with 900 peop

The findings of the original study were called into question by a larger 2018 study[0]. The original study had 90 students. Some folks did a study with 900 people. They found the same correlation that the original study did. But when they controlled for household income, they found most of the correlation disappeared. The obvious conclusion is that household income is a predictor of both: - inability to delay gratification, and - higher academic achievement This makes sense when you consider that someone growing up in a poor household may have both: - less reliable/continuous/predictable access to material things, meaning they would rationally seize immediate opportunities rather than taking the risk of a larger future opportunity, and - less academic support Now, this new study (OP) goes even further, finding that the correlation itself is weak. [0] Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J., & Quan, H. (2018). Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes. Psychological Science, 29(7), 1159-1177. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661

Squeeeez 2y ago
The obvious conclusion is not that obvious. You can have genetic traits which affect self-control, for example.
- planb 2y ago
  It doesn’t even have to be genetic. Parents which are able to raise their children to be functioning adults probably were raised by functioning adults and were able to find a job that leads to higher household income. We‘re talking about statistics here, so outliers are not relevant. Unfortunately this often prevents lots of meaningful discussions, because that would imply that a) it’s not just „you need to work hard to be successful“ (which one side of the political spectrum does not like to hear) and b) where and how you grew up is very predictive of how capable you are (which the other side does not like to hear).
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
    In regards to a and b, wouldn't someone who thinks the former likely be someone who also thinks the latter? Those don't seem contradictory and, indeed, one is a possible explanation of the other.
    - frogpelt 2y ago
      I think in general, those divisions do exist. People who lean right, tend to think movement from lower classes to higher classes is possible with hard work and that a person’s starting point doesn’t matter as much. People who lean left tend to think where you start is the biggest predictor of where you will end up regardless of how hard you work. Hence the reasons one side favors the social safety net more than the other side does. That has been my observation at least.
    - planb 2y ago
      Yes, this is exactly as I see it - but as you can see in the downvotes many people very strongly think just one of these is true and very aggressively disagree with the other one.
    - tristor 2y ago
      That would be true if these issues were discussed in rational terms, but unfortunately because it's predominantly political, it means rational terms are not the basis of these discussions. That is presupposing either point A or B is even true.
    - harimau777 2y ago
      I think that the difference is probably that one side thinks that being a parent that raises healthy functional adults comes down mostly to personal factors. The other side believes that societal/structural factors play a large part. So they don't exactly disagree on what the circumstances for success looks like as much as they disagree on the degree to which those circumstances are under an individual's control.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      The premise of personal responsibility is surprisingly partisan.
- WillPostForFood 2y ago
  Yes, and likely with environmental reinforcement. High income/high IQ -> self sorting, and assortative mating. That will lead to households with kids who have both genetic traits, and an environment that's going to teach and reward self control.
- ren_engineer 2y ago
  people really don't want to accept that beyond the most extreme cases(starvation, lead poisoning, complete neglect, no school access at all, etc.), environment really doesn't play that big of a role. Twin studies have shown this for literally decades
  - astrange 2y ago
    Lead poisoning isn't an extreme case, it's a very common problem. Twin studies don't exclude environmental causes because twins have the same maternal environment.
    - drowsspa 2y ago
      Yeah, I never got how the womb doesn't count as an environment, and even the circumstances that led to the twins being separated.
      - somenameforme 2y ago
        While commonly thought, this isn't how twin usually studies work. The way it works is you look at the correlation between identical and non-identical twins on some given thing. If there's a much stronger correlation between the identical twins, then it's probably primarily genetic. What this does is helps to eliminate environmental factors because identical vs nonidentical twins will both be raised in basically the exact same environment. So take height. If identical twins have identical heights while non-identical twins have varying heights, then it's safe to assume height is largely genetic. Interestingly separated twins would actually be worse in many cases because you reintroduce environmental deviation. For instance with height, differences may well be down to e.g. nutrition, but when you have them in the same household you can usually assume roughly identical nutrition.
  - lovethevoid 2y ago
    That's not true, for example metacognitive ability studies have shown environment plays the dominant role. Twin studies on trust provide the same, in which genetic component while large at 33% certainly doesn't indicate what you're stating that it's only "extreme cases". Even in studies re-assessing conventional twin studies and educational attainment, the conclusion was that while some is genetic (sometimes even a large portion) the correlations between a mother and father's educational attainment points to environment playing a large role (unless you have the belief that the mother and father are siblings I suppose). You'll be extremely hard pressed to find researchers conducting these twin studies who minimize the role of either genetic or environmental impact on certain aspects in the way you did.
biofox 2y ago
Psychology is messy. If you assume that impulse control and the ability to delay gratification is an inherited trait, then the income of parents becomes supporting evidence rather than a confounder. Time to do some GWAS to see if there is indeed a genetic component :)
- narag 2y ago
  Maybe the only possible conclusion is that you need much more specific experiments to conclude anything useful. I believe that any experiment that involves the whole life of someone is doomed and useless.
- Guvante 2y ago
  Why do people make up inherited traits and apply them as if that is a legitimate critique? The entire reason they did the marshmallow study is because most studies on impulse control cannot avoid confounding factors. Time value money matters if I am offering you money now vs later. E.g. if you are in debt money later effectively involves the interest earned on that money at likely 25% or worst case 900%. If you aren't in debt the alternative is investing at 7% with risk or 2-5% without risk. Trust is incredibly important. Money now is money now, money later might be money later if they actually fulfill the promise. And this isn't income agnostic as the risk of this varies wildly based on the impact of the money. A "get back on your feet" amount of money today or a slightly larger amount in a year implies a lot more risk than some spending money on either case. Additionally while genetic markers have sometimes been effective at predicting even those have trouble with the random nature of gene transference.
  - bobcostas55 2y ago
    All psychological traits are highly heritable. See eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/
    - toolz 2y ago
      All traits, psychological or otherwise are heritable. The hard question to answer is how predictive those inherited genetics are relative to other factors.
fardinahsan 2y ago
Wut? The causation can flow the other way as well. Having high tike preference results in lower household income. And time preference is probably genetic. They literally controlled for the variable they were testing for....
searealist 2y ago
Why is it instead not obvious that delayed gratification is a predictor of household income?
- michaelt 2y ago
  How would a 4-year-old's ability to delay gratification increase their parents' income?
  - hnthrowaway121 2y ago
    Perhaps if they inherited the ability from a parent, the parent is more likely to have an income as a result of investing in their education for example.
    - advael 2y ago
      I mean, maybe, but this is definitely doing causal modeling backwards Yes, it's possible that there are strong genetic predictors of household income, as a lot of people seem to want there to be for some reason, but when predicting the behavior of a child, their immediate circumstances are a much more parsimonious explanation for their behavior than some genetic factor strongly predicting both the circumstances and the behavior. I'm not saying that genetics being somewhat causally upstream of income is an inherently bad hypothesis, but this kind of correlation analysis doesn't support it as well as it does an environmental influence on time preference
  - searealist 2y ago
    This is the crux of the controversy. Some people think behaviors have 0% genetic inheritance and some people think it’s >0%. To assume low income parents can only cause low future orientation, but not the reverse, you must be in the former camp.
    - rvense 2y ago
      Some people desperately want poverty to be due to individual moral failure, as opposed to a systemic failure.
jncfhnb 2y ago
More simply: people who grow up hungry learn to eat whenever they can because being hungry is awful It doesn’t even need to generalize. This is just a basic food security thing and is part of the reason why obesity is counter intuitively common among people who suffer from food insecurity.
- searealist 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - telgareith 2y ago
    "Not even wrong"
  - KittenInABox 2y ago
    Cost of food has grown significantly just in the past year or two. In 2022 alone, there was a 45% increase in food insecurity in children of the USA. [0] 0. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/26/1208760054/food-insecurity-families-struggle-hunger-poverty https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/26/1208760...
    - searealist 2y ago
      Common sense says kids are not growing up hungry. If you look at actual times when they were, like the great depression, kids were rail thin. The opposite is true now. If you read the fine print on these reports they usually boil down to something like: “there is not enough variety in the household”.
      - jncfhnb 2y ago
        You’re being presented with literal statistics on food insecurity and ignoring what you’re being told. Many people are both food insecure AND fat because food insecurity drives people to eat as much as they can because of the fear of being hungry later.
queuebert 2y ago
In Table 3, being white is a very significant predictor (p=0.007) of being able to wait at least 7 min, but in Table 7 they don't report white among the races at all. Does this mean the difference among white kids is entirely explained by SES and other covariants? Conversely, does this mean being black has an effect not explained by other covariants? That seems pretty controversial.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > Conversely, does this mean being black has an effect not explained by other covariants? That seems pretty controversial. Controversial? There's a major effect in every context. It'd be hard to get less controversial.
toss1 2y ago
>> less reliable/continuous/predictable access to material things, meaning they would rationally seize immediate opportunities rather than taking the risk of a larger future opportunity THIS — the environment definitely changes what is the most rational behavior. In economics, this is Counterparty Risk — the risk that the other party will fail to fulfill their obligation. E.g., as a vendor it is rational to accept a piece of plastic from a complete stranger without a word, because the issuer of the card is good for the money, and has taken on the problem if the buyer doesn't pay their bill that month. For kids in affluent stable households, it is rational to expect that they'll get the second cookie in 20 minutes. For a kid in an unstable household, being told by someone who neither looks nor talks like they do, that they'll get two cookies in 20 minutes, it's often rational to take what you can get NOW. The marshmallow test measures mainly environmental counterparty risk in everyday events. Seems when controlling for those factors, the 'marshmallow effect' disappears. This is good science. Discover an effect. Generate a hypothesis. Keep testing until you find the limits of that hypothesis, and/or hidden variables.
- quotemstr 2y ago
  It's more of the same slop we've seen for decades from the social sciences. We know most traits are heritable. We know that low time preference yields higher lifetime earnings. Of course an experiment is going to show no effect when it controls for the effect! What else would you expect?
eezurr 2y ago
And they never factor in time and place. Cultures vary annd change. Every 10-20 years the US is a different country.
quotemstr 2y ago
Yeah. The reality is exactly the opposite of the headline. The study is confirmed, not refuted. Low time preference is heritable no matter what you believe the mechanism might be.
keybored 2y ago
I don’t know about children but it makes sense that poorer adults have worse impulse control. Poorer people have more worries and less to look forward to. Maybe a 12-hour workday rather than an eight-hour one. I’m sure that overworked wealthy people have plenty of vices, i.e. “poor impulse control”. But they have successful careers so those things are coping mechanisms, really. It’s compartmentalized. In any case my cynicism would just be vindicated if a study just turned out to rationalize (as an emergent property because, duh, there is a population overlap between researchers and this group) the position of the upper-middle class.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  The acoup blog series on medieval agrarian societies made an interesting point that resonated with me. Things that look like failures in long term planning (to people with resource surpluses) can actually be optimal decisions (to people without resource surpluses). In that case, it was the observation that maximizing currency profit from farming in a society that experiences arbitrary taxation and repeated famine is useless -- if no one has food then no one will sell you any, assuming your saved currency hasn't already been seized. In contrast, optimizing for familial and social ties were much more reliable ways to see yourself through then-common perils. If you're poor and don't have a stable living situation, delaying gratification presents risks to you. (ones that people with money and stability don't have to consider) Sometimes people are dumb, but sometimes they're optimizing for factors others are oblivious to.
  - jkolio 2y ago
    People might reply, "Well, take the risk," without acknowledging that risk is two-dimensional. There's a range of success and and range of consequences. Something traditionally considered "high risk", like investing millions of a billionaire's money in a start-up, might have low consequences for the direct investor. It sucks if the start-up fails, but they're still a billionaire, probably. Their lifestyle doesn't change substantially. Compare to a low-income worker choosing a car: maybe a cheap used one that could break down at any time, or a more expensive one is less likely to break down (if you stay up-to-date with expensive maintenance), or a much more expensive new car that is unlikely to break down (but that puts them in a substantial amount of debt). In every case, there's a way for the prospect to go sideways in a manner that would likely end with the worker losing their job, with (statistically-speaking) no savings cushion. However you rank the risk of each (at least one being the lowest financial risk), you have high negative potential consequences.
amelius 2y ago
> The obvious conclusion is that household income is a predictor of both Could you please add if you think the prediction goes in the positive or negative direction?
hinkley 2y ago
One of the big psychology books mentions this study. Maybe Thinking Fast and Slow? All it tells you really is whether the person has to grab what joy they can now because their life experience has taught them that promises about tomorrow sometimes do not come. You see that marshmallow, you enjoy it while you can. And that’s also ignoring the joy of small things. Three marshmallows is as enjoyable as fifty. So now you need to decide if one is enough joy or if you should wait for ten or whatever the reward is.
slibhb 2y ago
> The obvious conclusion is that household income is a predictor of both: > - inability to delay gratification, and > - higher academic achievement > This makes sense when you consider that someone growing up in a poor household may have both: > - less reliable/continuous/predictable access to material things, meaning they would rationally seize immediate opportunities rather than taking the risk of a larger future opportunity, and > - less academic support While this is all true, there's another factor that no one ever brings in: wealthy people are likely to possess attributes that lead to wealth accumulation like conscientiousness, intelligence, ability to delay gratification, etc. Those traits are quite heritable, so their children are likely to have higher income. People are allergic to the idea that outcomes have something to do with heritable characteristics. And allergic to the idea that economic success is related to positive personality traits.
- elromulous 2y ago
  Good points. But you know what's even more heritable than those traits? Wealth.
  - rvense 2y ago
    Some people attribute success to raw ability. You get good grades because you know the material, you get the job because you're the best at doing the work. There's also a component of giving others the perception that you're capable. Seeming smart, navigating the politics of a school or workplace, fitting in. A lot of this seems like it's obviously learned, and that affluent people will be ahead.
- enavari 2y ago
  It's both. Higher household income means better nutrition for their children (which also maxes out your genetic disposition), better education, more secure attachment, focus on careers, etc, in addition to the points you raised.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  > wealthy people are likely to posses attributes that lead to wealth accumlation like conscientiousness, intelligence, ability to delay gratification, etc. Those traits are quite heritable, so their children are likely to have higher income. It's just as likely that proximity to these characteristics is sufficient. As heritable as those might be, inheritance of assets is protected by law. What more heritability is needed? > People are allergic to the idea that outcomes have something to do with heritable characteristics. Heritable only through learned behaviors, imitating family. Too many playboys squandering grandpa's hard-earned wealth to think otherwise. The right lessons just weren't taught for some. Positive personality traits do relate to economic success, but too few who have those have the parenting skills to transfer those to the next generation. Their genes certainly aren't doing the heavy-lifting.
sulandor 2y ago
> This makes sense when you consider that someone growing up in a poor household may have both: the inverse makes equal 'common sense': wealth begs complacency and indifference yes, there may be a correlation but i bet it's insignificant as the factors playing into this are just too numerous.
zozbot234 2y ago
> But when they controlled for household income, they found most of the correlation disappeared. This does not really prove much, since attitudes to long-term gratification are probably shared within households due to the effect of idiosyncratic cultural factors, which might affect both income and academic achievement. One would need to look for a "natural experiment" where divergence in income was totally exogenous and not due to any shared factor in order to conclusively resolve the issue.
- eru 2y ago
  You could also look at adoption and twin studies.
watwut 2y ago
And trust. Does the kid trusts the researcher they will actually get more marshmallows? Or is their life experience such that adults promise candy and then dont deliver?
whyenot 2y ago
>The obvious conclusion is that household income is a predictor of both... Correlation, but of course, not causation. We need to be very careful about storytelling, especially when it comes to behavioral studies, where it's easy and intellectually satisfying.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  Yup, I fell into the same trap I was pointing out :( I should have said something like "it's just as plausible that ...". My main point is that these 3 studies don't provide any evidence that teaching someone willpower will help with other life outcomes.
astrange 2y ago
> But when they controlled for household income, they found most of the correlation disappeared. Controlling for things is mostly bad statistics, although of course all social science is bad statistics. Confounding variables are bad controls more often than they're good ones, so controlling for them introduces collider bias. Also, finding a result and then controlling for something is a multiple comparison fallacy. The correct thing to do is to have a theory of causation and then design a study that's capable of detecting it, not the other way round.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  In this case household income is the parents' household income, so it can't be affected by the child's (future) academic achievement. Can controlling for household income introduce collider bias? (Sorry I know the words you're using, and a few years ago I started reading Pearl's book, but I did not finish it and do not have a strong grasp of the concepts.)
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> household income is a predictor of both: > - inability to delay gratification, and I'm not sure we can draw that conclusion. Household income is a predictor of higher education -- that is well established -- and higher education as a child could mean you are more likely to have learned lessons on the benefits of waiting vs instant gratification (the principle behind savings and investments). So higher education _might_ be correlated with delayed gratification, but not household income itself.
cat_plus_plus 2y ago
Alternatively, ability to delay gratification could be heritable and/or influenced by parenting styles, in which case controlling for household income doesn't make sense. Parents with high time preference tend to not do as well financially AND to have children with high time preference. I have no idea how much these factors are at play, everything is at least a little bit nature and at least a little bit nuture. But science must find out rather than acting squeamish. We know that patience can be improved through training and maybe eventually we will even have meds like we have for ADHD. If these things matter, we could improve millions of lives.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  We know that patience can be improved through training Right, but AFAICT none of these suggest show a causal link between improving patience and life outcomes.
godelski 2y ago
> household income is a predictor of both Household income is a predictor[0] of a lot of things. It strongly correlates zip code (almost identical) and from these you can make good predictions of race and even politics. A naive mistake a lot of people often make is thinking that removing explicit race data removes race from your model. It's still there, but now only expresses itself indirectly. This is not just true for things like race or politics, but for a lot of factors, which is why causal statistics is such a different (and harder) ball game. [0] Predictor means correlates with, not causal. I see some people confusing this in the comments. I've never liked the word because of this result.
- goatlover 2y ago
  I don’t understand the racial part, since there are plenty of trailer parks and poor rural areas. Zipcodes in the Appalachias for example.
  - ruined 2y ago
    it's scale-invariant and self-similar. pick a big city or a sundown town, the demographics change but you're measuring a consequence of modern/historic systems larger and longer-lived than either place
  - timetopay 2y ago
    It just is a thing, tbh. It manifests in the data pretty clearly. In aggregate, in large data sets, race comes through - especially with a few datapoints. For example, when I worked at a fintech company: with household income and zip code, we could accurately target race with >80% accuracy [0]. Add a few more datapoints, and this would very quickly get closer to 95% accuracy. That was an _actual_ party-trick[1] demo we did, alongside also de-anonymizing coworkers based on car model, zip code, and bank name. [0] I worked as a SecEng and were trying to prove that we were(n't) inadvertently targeting race, for compliance reasons. In the end, the business realized the threat and made required changes to prevent this. [1] We were doing this to make a case for stricter controls and stronger isolation/security measures for storing non-PII data. The business also saw the light on this. Sometimes we'd narrow them down to 30 or 40 people in their zip code, and sometimes (such as a coworker with an old Bentley), it was an instant hit.
DAGdug 2y ago
The direction of causality is just hard to determine. The “obvious” conclusion could be that ability to delay gratification is a predictor of: - the offspring’s ability to delay gratification (genetic; what is tested in the experiment) - household income - higher academic achievement (for the offspring)
acchow 2y ago
Or that the ability to delay gratification led to higher incomes in their parents and was a hereditary trait passed down to the kids?
madaxe_again 2y ago
There is one big variable here that is being overlooked - which is the test itself. I remember my mother doing the marshmallow test on me, aged 3. She put two packs of play-doh moulds on the stairs where I could see them - one with three in it, one with five in it. She told me that if I didn’t touch them, then she would give me the pack with five for my birthday a week later, and the pack with three to a friend. If I did touch them, she would give them both to said friend. After passing them on the stairs for the umpteenth time, after a few days, I caved, and opened the small pack. She made good on her threat. This was 40 years ago, and remains seared into my mind as a learning moment, and I have, since that moment, been absolutely ruled by delayed gratification - I never made that error again. So, in short, merely administering the test likely influences the outcome, as humans have memories, and children learn from experience.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Squeeeez 2y ago

The obvious conclusion is not that obvious. You can have genetic traits which affect self-control, for example.

planb 2y ago
It doesn’t even have to be genetic. Parents which are able to raise their children to be functioning adults probably were raised by functioning adults and were able to find a job that leads to higher household income. We‘re talking about statistics here, so outliers are not relevant. Unfortunately this often prevents lots of meaningful discussions, because that would imply that a) it’s not just „you need to work hard to be successful“ (which one side of the political spectrum does not like to hear) and b) where and how you grew up is very predictive of how capable you are (which the other side does not like to hear).
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  In regards to a and b, wouldn't someone who thinks the former likely be someone who also thinks the latter? Those don't seem contradictory and, indeed, one is a possible explanation of the other.
  - frogpelt 2y ago
    I think in general, those divisions do exist. People who lean right, tend to think movement from lower classes to higher classes is possible with hard work and that a person’s starting point doesn’t matter as much. People who lean left tend to think where you start is the biggest predictor of where you will end up regardless of how hard you work. Hence the reasons one side favors the social safety net more than the other side does. That has been my observation at least.
  - planb 2y ago
    Yes, this is exactly as I see it - but as you can see in the downvotes many people very strongly think just one of these is true and very aggressively disagree with the other one.
  - tristor 2y ago
    That would be true if these issues were discussed in rational terms, but unfortunately because it's predominantly political, it means rational terms are not the basis of these discussions. That is presupposing either point A or B is even true.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    I think that the difference is probably that one side thinks that being a parent that raises healthy functional adults comes down mostly to personal factors. The other side believes that societal/structural factors play a large part. So they don't exactly disagree on what the circumstances for success looks like as much as they disagree on the degree to which those circumstances are under an individual's control.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    The premise of personal responsibility is surprisingly partisan.
WillPostForFood 2y ago
Yes, and likely with environmental reinforcement. High income/high IQ -> self sorting, and assortative mating. That will lead to households with kids who have both genetic traits, and an environment that's going to teach and reward self control.
ren_engineer 2y ago
people really don't want to accept that beyond the most extreme cases(starvation, lead poisoning, complete neglect, no school access at all, etc.), environment really doesn't play that big of a role. Twin studies have shown this for literally decades
- astrange 2y ago
  Lead poisoning isn't an extreme case, it's a very common problem. Twin studies don't exclude environmental causes because twins have the same maternal environment.
  - drowsspa 2y ago
    Yeah, I never got how the womb doesn't count as an environment, and even the circumstances that led to the twins being separated.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      While commonly thought, this isn't how twin usually studies work. The way it works is you look at the correlation between identical and non-identical twins on some given thing. If there's a much stronger correlation between the identical twins, then it's probably primarily genetic. What this does is helps to eliminate environmental factors because identical vs nonidentical twins will both be raised in basically the exact same environment. So take height. If identical twins have identical heights while non-identical twins have varying heights, then it's safe to assume height is largely genetic. Interestingly separated twins would actually be worse in many cases because you reintroduce environmental deviation. For instance with height, differences may well be down to e.g. nutrition, but when you have them in the same household you can usually assume roughly identical nutrition.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  That's not true, for example metacognitive ability studies have shown environment plays the dominant role. Twin studies on trust provide the same, in which genetic component while large at 33% certainly doesn't indicate what you're stating that it's only "extreme cases". Even in studies re-assessing conventional twin studies and educational attainment, the conclusion was that while some is genetic (sometimes even a large portion) the correlations between a mother and father's educational attainment points to environment playing a large role (unless you have the belief that the mother and father are siblings I suppose). You'll be extremely hard pressed to find researchers conducting these twin studies who minimize the role of either genetic or environmental impact on certain aspects in the way you did.

biofox 2y ago

Psychology is messy. If you assume that impulse control and the ability to delay gratification is an inherited trait, then the income of parents becomes supporting evidence rather than a confounder. Time to do some GWAS to see if there is indeed a genetic component :)

narag 2y ago
Maybe the only possible conclusion is that you need much more specific experiments to conclude anything useful. I believe that any experiment that involves the whole life of someone is doomed and useless.
Guvante 2y ago
Why do people make up inherited traits and apply them as if that is a legitimate critique? The entire reason they did the marshmallow study is because most studies on impulse control cannot avoid confounding factors. Time value money matters if I am offering you money now vs later. E.g. if you are in debt money later effectively involves the interest earned on that money at likely 25% or worst case 900%. If you aren't in debt the alternative is investing at 7% with risk or 2-5% without risk. Trust is incredibly important. Money now is money now, money later might be money later if they actually fulfill the promise. And this isn't income agnostic as the risk of this varies wildly based on the impact of the money. A "get back on your feet" amount of money today or a slightly larger amount in a year implies a lot more risk than some spending money on either case. Additionally while genetic markers have sometimes been effective at predicting even those have trouble with the random nature of gene transference.
- bobcostas55 2y ago
  All psychological traits are highly heritable. See eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/
  - toolz 2y ago
    All traits, psychological or otherwise are heritable. The hard question to answer is how predictive those inherited genetics are relative to other factors.

fardinahsan 2y ago

Wut? The causation can flow the other way as well. Having high tike preference results in lower household income. And time preference is probably genetic. They literally controlled for the variable they were testing for....

searealist 2y ago

Why is it instead not obvious that delayed gratification is a predictor of household income?

michaelt 2y ago
How would a 4-year-old's ability to delay gratification increase their parents' income?
- hnthrowaway121 2y ago
  Perhaps if they inherited the ability from a parent, the parent is more likely to have an income as a result of investing in their education for example.
  - advael 2y ago
    I mean, maybe, but this is definitely doing causal modeling backwards Yes, it's possible that there are strong genetic predictors of household income, as a lot of people seem to want there to be for some reason, but when predicting the behavior of a child, their immediate circumstances are a much more parsimonious explanation for their behavior than some genetic factor strongly predicting both the circumstances and the behavior. I'm not saying that genetics being somewhat causally upstream of income is an inherently bad hypothesis, but this kind of correlation analysis doesn't support it as well as it does an environmental influence on time preference
- searealist 2y ago
  This is the crux of the controversy. Some people think behaviors have 0% genetic inheritance and some people think it’s >0%. To assume low income parents can only cause low future orientation, but not the reverse, you must be in the former camp.
  - rvense 2y ago
    Some people desperately want poverty to be due to individual moral failure, as opposed to a systemic failure.

jncfhnb 2y ago

More simply: people who grow up hungry learn to eat whenever they can because being hungry is awful It doesn’t even need to generalize. This is just a basic food security thing and is part of the reason why obesity is counter intuitively common among people who suffer from food insecurity.

searealist 2y ago
[flagged]
- telgareith 2y ago
  "Not even wrong"
- KittenInABox 2y ago
  Cost of food has grown significantly just in the past year or two. In 2022 alone, there was a 45% increase in food insecurity in children of the USA. [0] 0. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/26/1208760054/food-insecurity-families-struggle-hunger-poverty https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/26/1208760...
  - searealist 2y ago
    Common sense says kids are not growing up hungry. If you look at actual times when they were, like the great depression, kids were rail thin. The opposite is true now. If you read the fine print on these reports they usually boil down to something like: “there is not enough variety in the household”.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      You’re being presented with literal statistics on food insecurity and ignoring what you’re being told. Many people are both food insecure AND fat because food insecurity drives people to eat as much as they can because of the fear of being hungry later.

queuebert 2y ago

In Table 3, being white is a very significant predictor (p=0.007) of being able to wait at least 7 min, but in Table 7 they don't report white among the races at all. Does this mean the difference among white kids is entirely explained by SES and other covariants? Conversely, does this mean being black has an effect not explained by other covariants? That seems pretty controversial.

deleted 2y ago
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thaumasiotes 2y ago
> Conversely, does this mean being black has an effect not explained by other covariants? That seems pretty controversial. Controversial? There's a major effect in every context. It'd be hard to get less controversial.

toss1 2y ago

>> less reliable/continuous/predictable access to material things, meaning they would rationally seize immediate opportunities rather than taking the risk of a larger future opportunity THIS — the environment definitely changes what is the most rational behavior. In economics, this is Counterparty Risk — the risk that the other party will fail to fulfill their obligation. E.g., as a vendor it is rational to accept a piece of plastic from a complete stranger without a word, because the issuer of the card is good for the money, and has taken on the problem if the buyer doesn't pay their bill that month. For kids in affluent stable households, it is rational to expect that they'll get the second cookie in 20 minutes. For a kid in an unstable household, being told by someone who neither looks nor talks like they do, that they'll get two cookies in 20 minutes, it's often rational to take what you can get NOW. The marshmallow test measures mainly environmental counterparty risk in everyday events. Seems when controlling for those factors, the 'marshmallow effect' disappears. This is good science. Discover an effect. Generate a hypothesis. Keep testing until you find the limits of that hypothesis, and/or hidden variables.

quotemstr 2y ago
It's more of the same slop we've seen for decades from the social sciences. We know most traits are heritable. We know that low time preference yields higher lifetime earnings. Of course an experiment is going to show no effect when it controls for the effect! What else would you expect?

eezurr 2y ago

And they never factor in time and place. Cultures vary annd change. Every 10-20 years the US is a different country.

quotemstr 2y ago

Yeah. The reality is exactly the opposite of the headline. The study is confirmed, not refuted. Low time preference is heritable no matter what you believe the mechanism might be.

keybored 2y ago

I don’t know about children but it makes sense that poorer adults have worse impulse control. Poorer people have more worries and less to look forward to. Maybe a 12-hour workday rather than an eight-hour one. I’m sure that overworked wealthy people have plenty of vices, i.e. “poor impulse control”. But they have successful careers so those things are coping mechanisms, really. It’s compartmentalized. In any case my cynicism would just be vindicated if a study just turned out to rationalize (as an emergent property because, duh, there is a population overlap between researchers and this group) the position of the upper-middle class.

ethbr1 2y ago
The acoup blog series on medieval agrarian societies made an interesting point that resonated with me. Things that look like failures in long term planning (to people with resource surpluses) can actually be optimal decisions (to people without resource surpluses). In that case, it was the observation that maximizing currency profit from farming in a society that experiences arbitrary taxation and repeated famine is useless -- if no one has food then no one will sell you any, assuming your saved currency hasn't already been seized. In contrast, optimizing for familial and social ties were much more reliable ways to see yourself through then-common perils. If you're poor and don't have a stable living situation, delaying gratification presents risks to you. (ones that people with money and stability don't have to consider) Sometimes people are dumb, but sometimes they're optimizing for factors others are oblivious to.
- jkolio 2y ago
  People might reply, "Well, take the risk," without acknowledging that risk is two-dimensional. There's a range of success and and range of consequences. Something traditionally considered "high risk", like investing millions of a billionaire's money in a start-up, might have low consequences for the direct investor. It sucks if the start-up fails, but they're still a billionaire, probably. Their lifestyle doesn't change substantially. Compare to a low-income worker choosing a car: maybe a cheap used one that could break down at any time, or a more expensive one is less likely to break down (if you stay up-to-date with expensive maintenance), or a much more expensive new car that is unlikely to break down (but that puts them in a substantial amount of debt). In every case, there's a way for the prospect to go sideways in a manner that would likely end with the worker losing their job, with (statistically-speaking) no savings cushion. However you rank the risk of each (at least one being the lowest financial risk), you have high negative potential consequences.

amelius 2y ago

> The obvious conclusion is that household income is a predictor of both Could you please add if you think the prediction goes in the positive or negative direction?

hinkley 2y ago

One of the big psychology books mentions this study. Maybe Thinking Fast and Slow? All it tells you really is whether the person has to grab what joy they can now because their life experience has taught them that promises about tomorrow sometimes do not come. You see that marshmallow, you enjoy it while you can. And that’s also ignoring the joy of small things. Three marshmallows is as enjoyable as fifty. So now you need to decide if one is enough joy or if you should wait for ten or whatever the reward is.

slibhb 2y ago

> The obvious conclusion is that household income is a predictor of both: > - inability to delay gratification, and > - higher academic achievement > This makes sense when you consider that someone growing up in a poor household may have both: > - less reliable/continuous/predictable access to material things, meaning they would rationally seize immediate opportunities rather than taking the risk of a larger future opportunity, and > - less academic support While this is all true, there's another factor that no one ever brings in: wealthy people are likely to possess attributes that lead to wealth accumulation like conscientiousness, intelligence, ability to delay gratification, etc. Those traits are quite heritable, so their children are likely to have higher income. People are allergic to the idea that outcomes have something to do with heritable characteristics. And allergic to the idea that economic success is related to positive personality traits.

elromulous 2y ago
Good points. But you know what's even more heritable than those traits? Wealth.
- rvense 2y ago
  Some people attribute success to raw ability. You get good grades because you know the material, you get the job because you're the best at doing the work. There's also a component of giving others the perception that you're capable. Seeming smart, navigating the politics of a school or workplace, fitting in. A lot of this seems like it's obviously learned, and that affluent people will be ahead.
enavari 2y ago
It's both. Higher household income means better nutrition for their children (which also maxes out your genetic disposition), better education, more secure attachment, focus on careers, etc, in addition to the points you raised.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> wealthy people are likely to posses attributes that lead to wealth accumlation like conscientiousness, intelligence, ability to delay gratification, etc. Those traits are quite heritable, so their children are likely to have higher income. It's just as likely that proximity to these characteristics is sufficient. As heritable as those might be, inheritance of assets is protected by law. What more heritability is needed? > People are allergic to the idea that outcomes have something to do with heritable characteristics. Heritable only through learned behaviors, imitating family. Too many playboys squandering grandpa's hard-earned wealth to think otherwise. The right lessons just weren't taught for some. Positive personality traits do relate to economic success, but too few who have those have the parenting skills to transfer those to the next generation. Their genes certainly aren't doing the heavy-lifting.

sulandor 2y ago

> This makes sense when you consider that someone growing up in a poor household may have both: the inverse makes equal 'common sense': wealth begs complacency and indifference yes, there may be a correlation but i bet it's insignificant as the factors playing into this are just too numerous.

zozbot234 2y ago

> But when they controlled for household income, they found most of the correlation disappeared. This does not really prove much, since attitudes to long-term gratification are probably shared within households due to the effect of idiosyncratic cultural factors, which might affect both income and academic achievement. One would need to look for a "natural experiment" where divergence in income was totally exogenous and not due to any shared factor in order to conclusively resolve the issue.

eru 2y ago
You could also look at adoption and twin studies.

watwut 2y ago

And trust. Does the kid trusts the researcher they will actually get more marshmallows? Or is their life experience such that adults promise candy and then dont deliver?

whyenot 2y ago

>The obvious conclusion is that household income is a predictor of both... Correlation, but of course, not causation. We need to be very careful about storytelling, especially when it comes to behavioral studies, where it's easy and intellectually satisfying.

rahimnathwani 2y ago
Yup, I fell into the same trap I was pointing out :( I should have said something like "it's just as plausible that ...". My main point is that these 3 studies don't provide any evidence that teaching someone willpower will help with other life outcomes.

astrange 2y ago

> But when they controlled for household income, they found most of the correlation disappeared. Controlling for things is mostly bad statistics, although of course all social science is bad statistics. Confounding variables are bad controls more often than they're good ones, so controlling for them introduces collider bias. Also, finding a result and then controlling for something is a multiple comparison fallacy. The correct thing to do is to have a theory of causation and then design a study that's capable of detecting it, not the other way round.

rahimnathwani 2y ago
In this case household income is the parents' household income, so it can't be affected by the child's (future) academic achievement. Can controlling for household income introduce collider bias? (Sorry I know the words you're using, and a few years ago I started reading Pearl's book, but I did not finish it and do not have a strong grasp of the concepts.)

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> household income is a predictor of both: > - inability to delay gratification, and I'm not sure we can draw that conclusion. Household income is a predictor of higher education -- that is well established -- and higher education as a child could mean you are more likely to have learned lessons on the benefits of waiting vs instant gratification (the principle behind savings and investments). So higher education _might_ be correlated with delayed gratification, but not household income itself.

cat_plus_plus 2y ago

Alternatively, ability to delay gratification could be heritable and/or influenced by parenting styles, in which case controlling for household income doesn't make sense. Parents with high time preference tend to not do as well financially AND to have children with high time preference. I have no idea how much these factors are at play, everything is at least a little bit nature and at least a little bit nuture. But science must find out rather than acting squeamish. We know that patience can be improved through training and maybe eventually we will even have meds like we have for ADHD. If these things matter, we could improve millions of lives.

rahimnathwani 2y ago
We know that patience can be improved through training Right, but AFAICT none of these suggest show a causal link between improving patience and life outcomes.

godelski 2y ago

> household income is a predictor of both Household income is a predictor[0] of a lot of things. It strongly correlates zip code (almost identical) and from these you can make good predictions of race and even politics. A naive mistake a lot of people often make is thinking that removing explicit race data removes race from your model. It's still there, but now only expresses itself indirectly. This is not just true for things like race or politics, but for a lot of factors, which is why causal statistics is such a different (and harder) ball game. [0] Predictor means correlates with, not causal. I see some people confusing this in the comments. I've never liked the word because of this result.

goatlover 2y ago
I don’t understand the racial part, since there are plenty of trailer parks and poor rural areas. Zipcodes in the Appalachias for example.
- ruined 2y ago
  it's scale-invariant and self-similar. pick a big city or a sundown town, the demographics change but you're measuring a consequence of modern/historic systems larger and longer-lived than either place
- timetopay 2y ago
  It just is a thing, tbh. It manifests in the data pretty clearly. In aggregate, in large data sets, race comes through - especially with a few datapoints. For example, when I worked at a fintech company: with household income and zip code, we could accurately target race with >80% accuracy [0]. Add a few more datapoints, and this would very quickly get closer to 95% accuracy. That was an _actual_ party-trick[1] demo we did, alongside also de-anonymizing coworkers based on car model, zip code, and bank name. [0] I worked as a SecEng and were trying to prove that we were(n't) inadvertently targeting race, for compliance reasons. In the end, the business realized the threat and made required changes to prevent this. [1] We were doing this to make a case for stricter controls and stronger isolation/security measures for storing non-PII data. The business also saw the light on this. Sometimes we'd narrow them down to 30 or 40 people in their zip code, and sometimes (such as a coworker with an old Bentley), it was an instant hit.

DAGdug 2y ago

The direction of causality is just hard to determine. The “obvious” conclusion could be that ability to delay gratification is a predictor of: - the offspring’s ability to delay gratification (genetic; what is tested in the experiment) - household income - higher academic achievement (for the offspring)

acchow 2y ago

Or that the ability to delay gratification led to higher incomes in their parents and was a hereditary trait passed down to the kids?

madaxe_again 2y ago

There is one big variable here that is being overlooked - which is the test itself. I remember my mother doing the marshmallow test on me, aged 3. She put two packs of play-doh moulds on the stairs where I could see them - one with three in it, one with five in it. She told me that if I didn’t touch them, then she would give me the pack with five for my birthday a week later, and the pack with three to a friend. If I did touch them, she would give them both to said friend. After passing them on the stairs for the umpteenth time, after a few days, I caved, and opened the small pack. She made good on her threat. This was 40 years ago, and remains seared into my mind as a learning moment, and I have, since that moment, been absolutely ruled by delayed gratification - I never made that error again. So, in short, merely administering the test likely influences the outcome, as humans have memories, and children learn from experience.

deleted 2y ago

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