Bad Marshmallow

Is there anything as ludicrous as the 1972 Stanford marshmallow experiment?

Yes, I know. Dark socks with sandals. Whole life insurance policies. Grandpa's new lower back tattoo. The stores in malls where you can go to have someone stretch you out while you just lay there. The plot to the Glass Onion sequel. All sexting. Interest in the British monarchy. Countries that allow TV commercials for the gambling industry. 

We are surrounded by absurdity. But I am talking true nonsensicalness. For that, the marshmallow experiment stands alone. At least from the perspective of parenting and offering up meaningful insight about the mental development of young minds. From that vantage, the Stanford marshmallow experiment is the person-with-the-gross-giant-stretched-out-earlobe of research studies. 

As a reminder, or for those not familiar, the experiment involved kids left alone in a room with a single marshmallow. But before leaving each of the little research subjects, an adult would tell the kid that they were going to get a second marshmallow if they could hold off on eating the first until the adult returns. Some kids held off, others didn’t. 

Subsequent research then reveals that the kids who can hold off, who can delay their gratification, end up all going on to be brain surgeons and astronauts. And those who can’t end up spending their days huffing spray paint fumes and playing scratch-off lottery.

I may not have the facts exactly straight, but it was something like that; The kids who struggle to wait the extra time necessary for the additional marshmallow are more likely to later struggle to perform at the same level as those who as kids were able to make short term investments for long term gains.

This of course makes intuitive sense to most of us adults, as we are continually making mental calculations about the degree to which we should make sacrifices in the present in order to reap a greater reward in the future. (And decisions around food are, ironically, an area in which many of us adults not infrequently fail to make the right decision about foregoing eating now for a future payoff, which in the adult case means an easier time bending over to tie our shoes.)

But that seeming obviousness of the marshmallow study’s logic is what masks the absurdity of the research—absurdity that is actually damaging to those of us who are parents and to the manner in which we raise our kids. (Reader note: the essay will get to the more serious aspect of this claim soon, but continues to run facetious for a few more paragraphs, which in the end will help better make the serious point.)

For one thing, where did they find kids who found any aspect of this marshmallow proposition palatable? Maybe these kids can be found around Stanford, but I live in the State of Minnesota and am writing this in the winter, which is AKA hot cocoa and marshmallow season. This means I am regularly having standoffs with my kids and their friends over how many marshmallows they are entitled to.

As an adult, I don’t understand the full appeal of these airy squishy sugary blobs, but there seems to be few things kids find as euphoria-inducing as marshmallows. As such, your typical real child is not, in my experience, going to be cool with just one marshmallow along with vague adult promise of a second.

Instead, the kids I know will cajole and badger for more. They will hound you until you drop a second in their drink right now (not later), at which point they start in on the plaintive pleas for the third, which, depending on how taxing your day was, you might just give into so they will stop. But if you do, they then start in on requests for one on the side. Just one dry one, daddy! And like that, you have been hustled into handing over four marshmallows. Four marshmallows!

I have one friend whose kids threatened to tell her husband about the Facebook friendship she had struck up with her high school boyfriend if she didn’t stop buying the mini marshmallows and instead switched to full size. She made the switch. Another ended up in the ICU after suggesting her kids consider enjoying that day’s cocoa with no marshmallows because of all the sugar they had already had earlier.

I am of course kidding about some of this, while making an initial point that there is something already off in drawing grand conclusions about later life performance based on interactions with very little kids (as young as three), not to mention that the experiment starts off failing to appreciate the creativity of kids in getting what they want, a very different skill that also has real applicability in the adult world.

And now we reach the point in the essay where the gloves come off, and we begin to seriously savage the marshmallow experiment, to the point, I assume, where some Stanford rep will be forced to issue a teary apology for their research, and the author of this post will get swept up in a media storm that results in a sit down with Oprah.

The reason for this very public marshmallow thrashing is because the experiment—at least as it is presented in the media (who has time to actually read it?)—is such an old-old-fashioned bit of propaganda for the power of innate inborn talents being a leading determinant in the eventual success of kids later in life. The antiquated air of it stops just shy of suggesting which ethnic groups most shine in inborn ability to delay gratification.

The kids were three, four, and five. They had learned little. Some would have not yet fully understood the long term gain of waiting to use the potty. There is no phase of the experiment where an effort was made to factor in whether any of the kids could actually learn the lesson of delaying. The focus is on testing kids in a manner that we associate with inborn gifts, which is reliably triggering for parents and thus good at least for gaining media attention.

Parents hear the study, nod sagely at the obvious connection between the value of being able to make a short term sacrifice for long-term gain, and then slide into familiar parenting hope-fear cycle—hoping our kids have the good quality, fearing they might have the bad. Maybe we even observe how one of our kids seems to have had the good trait since early on, while another is maddeningly oblivious to anything other than immediate gratification.

This hope-fear parental death spiral unfortunately has a way of clouding our thinking and obscuring what is so truly damaging about the study: it is an extreme example of fixed mindset thinking, with no apparent interest in the capacity of kids to actually learn important life lessons like the importance of at times delaying gratification (or, for that matter, the importance of sometimes knowing when to actually enjoy the moment).

This early-to-innate trait focus is closely aligned with the era in which the study was originally conducted in 1972, which was a time still obsessed with things like IQ and the degree to which the brain is fixed early on. The intervening years have brought, among other things, an explosion in scientific understanding of the brain’s plasticity, and our ability to impact its development, and how learnable states (such as specific mindsets) can dramatically alter our ability to achieve our goals.

Carol Dweck’s 2007 bestseller Mindset: The New Psychology of Success is a vivid example of how our understanding has shifted. Dweck’s book opened the world’s eyes to how seemingly innate gifts (of which I assume a preternatural ability to hold out for marshmallows qualifies) are just the starting point in our personal journeys. How we fare in life, it turns out, is also driven by learning, dedication, hard work, and it is particularly those who understand this reality—those with a growth mindset, the ones who believe they are not prisoners of some fixed traits but can influence their growth—who in turn most succeed.

“In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.”

As Henry Ford famously put it: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” 

Bringing this back to marshmallows, whether four-year-olds are able to hold out and the degree to which this ability is a predictor of life effectiveness omits any effort to actually engage with these kids as they grow and teach them about their mindsets and the power that comes with a growth orientation. The researchers apparently opted to sit back over the decades and keep this life lesson about the power of self-sacrifice and investing for the future on the DL.

But that is not the approach we take as parents or educators of kids. Aside from the business of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy—and, of course, how it is really important to mommy and daddy that the kids occasionally stay with grandma and grandpa for their sakes—we don’t sit back and let our kids move through life misunderstanding reality. Instead, we teach them the lesson of self-sacrifice, along with many other lessons about behaviors that are likely to help them thrive.

And we also add the meta lesson of Carol Dweck—that their own outlook on their ability to grow will in turn drive their ability to grow.

It has now been fifteen years since Mindset, and in that time the information on how brains work, how they have blindspots, how our values (grit, stoicism, etc.) factor into our development, and so on, has exploded. So too have the resources for absorbing all of this information about mental function, including accessing through audio books, podcasts, and documentaries. 

As I have claimed previously, we increasingly live in a golden age for helping our kids develop their understanding of how we all operate and the strategies that will help us all navigate our way to our most fulfilling lives; in fact, I would argue that we now have the tools and understanding to systematically achieve a radical growth mindset, along with achieving actual radical personal growth itself. Dweck’s work, it turns out, was just the beginning.

And yet those 32 three, four, and five-year-olds from Stanford’s Bing Nursery School continue to exercise a grossly outsized influence on the millions of parents who understandably all too often have their own mindsets nudged toward a more fixed state every time they hear the Stanford study’s conclusions about very young kids and marshmallows.

The thing to most clearly understand about child mental development is that our kids, as they grow into adulthood and live their lives, will all be capable of accomplishing things far beyond what we can even imagine for them, or that they can imagine for themselves (just as you and I even today likely contain astounding potential for more, though, no pressure). But our kids need help acquiring the critical knowledge, self-awareness, and discipline to access their incredible potential, rather than having their parents standing aside, crossing their fingers, and hoping that the kids’ innate and most early qualities are sufficient to achieve their best destiny.

(This optimistic note even applies to those young marshmallow experimentees who are now in their mid to later fifties and may still have some Stanford researcher checking in with them every ten or so years, which is to say that it is still not too late for the misfits who couldn’t hold out for that second marshmallow. Should anyone have a connection with any of the original participants, I would be happy to work with them on their mindsets and how to make the most of this next phase of life.)

Our next post is going to dive deep into just this idea of a mindset and way of pursuing goals that goes beyond Dweck’s growth mindset to enter the territory of a radical growth mindset, and the post will include best present the information to the young people in our lives as they develop so they can have a more concrete sense for how to access their staggering potential.

The post will borrow heavily from flailing-dude-turned-entrepreneur-turned-self-improvement-guru Tom Bilyeu. Bilyeu’s insights into how he transformed his life have on some level been life saving for me personally—insights I wish I had been exposed to as I was preparing to head out into the world, rather than thirty years into adulthood.

Bilyeu’s gift for sharing the ins and out of achieving radical transformation is the antithesis of the seeming predestination message of the marshmallow experiment, and it is hard for a Bilyeu fan not to envision how differently things would have turned out for those tykes had he been involved. Tom Bilyeu would have coached the kids into not only foregoing the first marshmallow, but also passing on the second, and instead focusing all that desire into building the requisite skills so that they could grow up to actually acquire the companies that produce Dandies and Jef-Puffed. 

And then, having acquired those companies, the adult versions of those kids could finally eat all the marshmallows they want, millions and millions of them, and they could also use some of the profits from cornering the marshmallow market to influence Congress to pass legislation banning future studies involving kids and marshmallows, or marshmallow-related products (Peeps, Fluff, Lucky Charms), in the future.

These are the lessons our kids need. They are the lessons we adults need. Enough with marshmallows already.