The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
theatlantic.com
The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
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Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#2Has anyone studied whether time preference might be genetically heritable?
Edit: why am I being downvoted for this?
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#3I wonder how you'd control for the fact that the Marshmallow Test is widely known and that parents may have explicitly trained their children on similar problems in the hope that they'll benefit later from the ability to delay gratification?
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#4I wonder how you'd control for the fact that the Marshmallow Test is widely known and that parents may have explicitly trained their children on similar problems in the hope that they'll benefit later from the ability to delay gratification?
If you think poor people have time for doing that you haven't been poor.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#5Our cats have never in their lives had to worry about food, yet they still become anxious around mealtimes. That suggests that it is trait common to all mammals regardless of their "wealth".
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#6I wonder how you'd control for the fact that the Marshmallow Test is widely known and that parents may have explicitly trained their children on similar problems in the hope that they'll benefit later from the ability to delay gratification?
Can't see why you would want to control for it.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#7I see so many forum discussions where posters criticise the poor for their 'weak' decisions and effectively blame the poor for their own plight. Why don't they just work harder and earn the money to pay for their healthcare and education? they say. It is easy to withhold funding from deprived areas if you convince yourself that it is their own fault.
These results should be on the front pages of newspapers and on TV (and Twitter: @POTUS I'm thinking of you!). The idea that children raised with few resources need help to plan for the long term seems to be rather lost on many politicians these days.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#8Who cares about an extra marshmallow? They should do the experiment with slices of pizza.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#9> The researchers also, when analyzing their test’s results, controlled for certain factors—such as the income of a child’s household
Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal.
The original paper relied partly on a questionnaire that asked the parents how good their kids were at self-control. That seems unlikely to be reliable. They also used SAT scores, which seems like a better measure. The abstract for the new paper doesn't mention what they measured.
In conclusion, I'm not sure I learned anything here.
Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
#10Our cats have never in their lives had to worry about food, yet they still become anxious around mealtimes. That suggests that it is trait common to all mammals regardless of their "wealth".
You think the behavior of your cats represent the mammal population?