Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with ‘C’ –
Simply placing kids in a cooperative environment boosts the ability to resist temptation.
Jennifer Ouellette – Jan 90, (2:
Mischel himself cautioned against over-interpreting the results, emphasizing that children who simply can’t hold out for that second marshmallow are not necessarily doomed to a life of failure. A more nuanced picture was offered by a study that replicates the marshmallow test with preschoolers. It found the same correlation between later achievement and the ability to resist temptation in preschool, but that correlation was much less significant after the researchers factored in such aspects as family background, home environment, and so forth.
Attentiveness might be yet another contributing factor. As we reported last year , kindergarten children whose teachers rate them as being highly inattentive tend to earn less in their s than classmates who are highly highly rated “pro-social,” according to a (paper) in JAMA Psychiatry. In fact, inattention could prove to be a better predictor of future educational and occupational success than the marshmallow test. A single teacher’s assessment may be sufficient to identify at-risk children.
Still, the ability to delay gratification is definitely a desirable quality. Among other benefits, it helps facilitate cooperation with others. (Mischel’s interest stemmed from his own three-pack-a-day smoking habit; he kept trying, and failing, to quit.) For this latest study, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology designed a slightly different version of the marshmallow test to explore the cooperative benefits of self-control.
“For instance, for people to share their food with others — for which they might earn a good reputation or reap long- term reciprocal benefits — they must resist the immediate temptation to eat the food themselves, “the authors wrote. “Likewise, a researcher aiming to contribute to a collaborative project must withstand the urge to watch entertaining videos on the Internet.”
Nor was this a rational calculation, ie, weighing the cost of holding out with how much value the second cookie held for the child. If that were the case, the authors suggest, kids would have been less likely to delay gratification in the riskier interdependence scenario. Instead, “Children may have been motivated to delay gratification because they felt they shouldn’t let their partner down,” said co-author Rebecca Koomen , “and that if they did, their partner would have had the right to hold them accountable. “
“The fact that we obtained these findings even though children could not see or communicate with each other attests to the strong motivational consequences that simply being in a cooperative context has for children from early on in development, ” said co-author Sebastian Grueneisen .
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