Have results from the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment ever been used to predict adult income? Or even better, adult income controlling for education and IQ?
Any relevant citations are much-appreciated.
Have results from the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment ever been used to predict adult income? Or even better, adult income controlling for education and IQ?
Any relevant citations are much-appreciated.
Feb 1 2013
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Feb 1 2013
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Feb 1 2013
Have results from the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment ever been used to predict adult income? Or even better, adult income controlling for education and IQ?Any relevant citations are much-appreciated.
READER COMMENTS
Emily
Feb 1 2013 at 6:15pm
I think the answer is no. The way to get a definitive answer is to ask Walter Mischel, who is at Columbia.
There was a follow-up study that he co-authored recently, but it didn’t look at income. That follow-up is “Behavioral and neural correlates of delay of gratification 40 years late.”
It references some other literature on this topic: “Previous research has documented that higher delay ability promotes the development of better social–cognitive and emotional coping in adolescence and buffers against the development of a variety of dispositional physical and mental health vulnerabilities in middle age, such as high BMI, cocaine/crack use, features of borderline personality disorder, anxious overreactions to rejection, and marital divorce/separation.” I suspect those references would be a good place to start, but I don’t think you’re going to find anything.
If you broaden this to childhood/adolescent non-cognitive skills of various sorts and adult outcomes including income, there is literature, including literature that conditions on aptitude test scores. (Heckman has done work on this with NSLY79.)
Link: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/36/14998.full.pdf
Taras
Feb 1 2013 at 7:43pm
What if the child preferred to eat only one marshmallow in the first place?
Andy Wood
Feb 2 2013 at 5:44am
By coincidence, half an hour after reading this blog, I read this in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, pp722-723:
His references:
Metcalfe, J. & Mischel, W. 1999. A hot/cool system analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower. Psychological Review, 106, 3-19
Mischel, W., Ayduk, O. et al. In press. ‘Willpower’ over the life span: Decomposing impulse control. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience.
Steve Sailer
Feb 4 2013 at 3:11pm
It’s funny how the ethnic aspect of this series of studies gets forgotten:
“The experiment has its roots in an earlier one performed on Trinidad, where Mischel noticed that the different ethnic groups living on the island had contrasting stereotypes of one another, specifically, on the other’s perceived recklessness, self-control, and ability to have fun.[5] This small (n= 53) study of male and female children aged 7 to 9 (35 Negro and 18 East Indian) in a rural Trinidad school involved the children in indicating a choice between receiving a 1c candy immediately, or having a (preferable) 10c candy given to them in one week’s time. Mischel reported a significant ethnic difference, large age differences, and that “Comparison of the “high” versus “low” socioeconomic groups on the experimental choice did not yield a significant difference”.[5] Absence of the father was prevalent in the African-descent group (occurring only once in the East Indian group), and this variable showed the strongest link to delay of gratification, with children from intact families showing superior ability to delay.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment
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