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The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

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Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#121

Post by beer451 »

Blackstone4 wrote: post #81
gcthomas wrote: post #7

I 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…

I think that's why socialist countries seem to take the attitude that we, as politicians, know what's good for you and you don't. So we will regulate you and put in laws to protect you while restricting your choices and freedom. This may benefit the poor and irritate the rich.

Unfortunately socialist countries being inevitably corrupt, the programs end up benefiting specific producers regardless of food quality.

Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#122

Post by your-nanny »

wombat92 wrote: post #33

I was always skeptical of the marshmallow test. It let too many questions open on why children eat the marshmallows. Was it because they hadn't eaten before and came to school with low blood sugar, knew that waiting fifteen minutes for two sweets the price of a penny is idiotic or that they felt uncomfortable in the room and wanted to leave as early as possible?

I agree that it's too complicated a good a task. However there are other paradigms that work, at least for older persons: eg asking people $5 today or $20 next week?

Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#123

Post by ItsMe000001 »

your-nanny wrote: post #120
ItsMe000001 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Straw man at the very least? How many people use veggies for their energy? That's what most people use grains for - bread, pasta, potatoes. All of them also cheap. Given obesity rates, the problem is too much energy . After all, one part of calling for more vegetable consumption is so that people lower their energy intake. Example: https://www.fruitsandveggiesmorematters.org/eating-vegetable... (the number of article…

Under scarcity, in choosing which foods to buy, how tolerant are you to the risk of being hungry because you allocated too few dollars to calories rich foods? My guess is extreme risk averse.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198075/

The link between poverty and obesity in the modern world is well established. That means you can hardly point to a lack of energy consumption. I added a video to my comment, from a bio.chem course, that shows a common pathway how high energy state leads to obesity.

Note that I can't and don't want to (and don't need to) show very much here, only provide an argument against what I think is a strange argument from @Retric about "not enough energy in veggies". Energy is not the problem (the psychological feeling of "I have no energy", which may be more prevalent in poor people (I don't know), is not the same as a low energy level).

I doubt the considerations you mention actually happen, or when then it's not widespread. I think it's automatic behaviors rather than conscious choices, and I doubt most people think about their foods energy content (given that a large majority of people, including and for some groups even especially among the poor, consume too much of it). As I see it, the energy claim doesn't fit the available data - which shows an excess, not a lack. That's why I think explanations as well as actions have to aim somewhere else - or would you say we should provide even more energy in food (especially aimed at poor people or not does not matter, since obesity affects all groups to varying degrees).

Another interesting read might be (okay, although it does not say anything actually new): https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/79/1/6/4690070

Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#124

Post by Smaug123 »

jasode wrote: post #87
Smaug123 wrote: post #20

I found the following post [1] to make a very compelling argument that the Marshmallow test isn't really testing for the ability to defer gratification, but for a "generalised ability/desire to take and pass tests" (manifesting itself here as the desire to pass the Marshmallow test). The post argues that this is an underrecognised character trait which can predict success in today's Western test-oriented world. Certa…

>, but for a "generalised ability/desire to take and pass tests [...] the desire to pass the Marshmallow test). [...] You and the blog you linked are getting sidetracked by the word "test" in "Marshmallow Test". You're thinking of academic/schooling connotations of "test" instead of the scientific observations of a "test". I'd suggest to rewrite the "Marshmallow Test" in the brain as "Marshmallow Experiment". It is t…

But the Marshmallow Test is a test! The child is told not to eat the marshmallow (maybe not in so many words), so there's an obvious correct answer to the test ("don't eat the marshmallow"), and some people are motivated to take that answer because they are motivated to do well when they are being tested. My own history is full of this kind of incident.

EDIT: to clarify, the Marshmallow Test is a test when viewed by someone who is always on the lookout for tests, like me and like some other children. Many children, I'm sure, would not view it as a test, and might correspondingly not pass it.

Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#125

Post by tomtimtall »

Poor kids grow up with patents who can’t often fulfil their promises, rich kid man grow up with parents who can. The test is less about some inherent quality a person that can effect their future performance and more about their expectations given their expererience.

The fatal flaw in the original experiment is that they assume that the child is give with 100% certainty a choice between instant and delayer gratifications, when is fact the delayed gratification is contingent in their trust in the experimenter. I’d wager if you did the experiment with one test being a fully trusted adult and the other being a fully distrusted adult but the same kid in both cases you would get both outcomes.

Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#126

Post by amelius »

Developers also routinely fail the Marshmallow test:

Should I develop for iOS, make a quick buck but give Apple more control over my work, and contribute to the growth of the platform, leading to a vicious cycle of control of Apple over developers?

... OR ...

Should I develop applications in a platform-independent way, but perhaps with slower returns?

Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#127

Post by geofft »

amelius wrote: post #126

Developers also routinely fail the Marshmallow test: Should I develop for iOS, make a quick buck but give Apple more control over my work, and contribute to the growth of the platform, leading to a vicious cycle of control of Apple over developers? ... OR ... Should I develop applications in a platform-independent way, but perhaps with slower returns?

But they're not "failing" the test. If you take so long to develop the software that you run out of funding, you're worse off than having written the iOS-only code.

You're only guaranteed to have time to develop things right if you have more than enough personal funds and no investors breathing down your throat, i.e., if you're rich. The marshmallow test just measures richness. Everyone else needs to ship something in three months for Demo Day.

Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#128

Post by yk »

4bpp wrote: post #107

So this is suggesting that childhood poverty may be a strong correlate of whatever the marshmallow test tests (and childhood poverty is plausibly a strong correlate of life outcomes, so the effect might be completely mediated via childhood poverty rather than any notion of "affinity towards delayed gratification"), but I'm not sure I understand how/whether it rules out the following two. (1) whatever quality X the ma…

The study is suggesting that the marshmallow test is a test of mother without college degree, and not testing something about the children beyond that. [0]

And in general, my suspicion about psychology is, that since you can always invent an objection in the form of your (1) and (2), I doubt that statistic is an actually good tool to look at these tests. If we assume for a moment that we somehow get a ground truth of the experiment, by divine revelation or however, then I suspect that we would see that we need as many categories as there are children to get anything predictive.

[0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661

Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#129

Post by chronial »

vanderZwan wrote: post #116
chronial wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new paper shows that this is not the case. The Marshmallow test still is predictive, but that seems to be because being able to take it correlates with having affluent backgrounds, not with it representing an inherent character trait that predicts anything. And Smaug123 referenced that by saying > Assuming the trait is either heritable or culturally imbued (and intuitively it seems very likely that at least one…

First of all, I do not understand why you would argue that I don't understand the article because I supposedly claim that the test has no predictive power, since I literally write "the Marshmallow test still is predictive" . Furthermore, Smaug123's explanation here is flawed: > Assuming the trait is either heritable or culturally imbued (and intuitively it seems very likely that at least one of those is true), it mak…

> If the predictive power of the Marshmallow test could be ascribed to character traits, controlling to socio-economic backgrounds should enhance the signal of the predictive power, not remove it altogether.

This might be the source of the misunderstanding: What you say would only be true if character traits and socioeconomic background were uncorrelated, which is the opposite of what smaug suggested.

Re: The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

#130

Post by comboy »

abainbridge wrote: post #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 par…

Marshmallows represent different value for kids with different background. Some can have them every day, for some it's something they only saw other kids eating.

It's similar to how it would be easy to risk $50K for somebody with $100M net worth compared to somebody whose net worth is $100K.

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