My fascination with metacognition (thinking about thinking) and delayed gratification started a month ago when Jocie posted another cool link on Facebook. It was an article explaining “4 easy steps” to find happiness. The article certainly hasn’t change my life, but did link to a very interesting piece in the New Yorker about a 1968 study by the psychologist Walter Mischel. In the study, Mischel presented children with a bowl of marshmallows & told them that they could eat one marshmallow now, or if they waited, they could have two marshmallows a little bit later. The researcher then stepped out of the room, leaving the each child alone with a heaping bowl of temptation on the table in front of them. Some kids gave in within seconds, others held out for 15-20 minutes! Ultimately, Mischel discovered that the difference between the “low delayers” and “high delayers” wasn’t that some wanted the treat and others didn’t, it boiled down to what he calls “the strategic allocation of attention.” The children who could move their attention away from the marshmallows (whether by covering their eyes, singing a song or even pretending the marshmallow was a space ship) were the ones who could wait the longest. At some level, these children understood how their brains worked & had strategies to control their brains.

The crazy part is that years later, when the kids who were originally tested were in High School, Mischel started a series of follow-up tests & discovered that high delayers had significantly higher SAT scores. Now, 40 years later, Mischel & his colleagues are still in contact with many of the original participants & it turns out that a test taken in elementary school has shown associations to everything from the jobs they hold, to body-mass index and illegal drug problems. A fairly startling proposition if you think about it too much. Mischel admits that genetics likely plays a role in self control, but rejects the idea that biology is the only factor at work. For example, there is a “substantial subset” of people who were low delayers in the original study, but went on to become high-delaying adults. Several of his graduate students now plan to perform brain scans on the original participants to study which parts of brain are at work during acts of self control. Mischel himself is working with a number of elementary school on a long-term study trying to determine how to teach children metacognition skills that would help them become high delayers.

At the end of the day, we still know very little about the human mind & human behavior. There may be hundreds of other variables, besides self control, that are shaping these peoples lives but haven’t been uncovered yet. Still, I find the topic fascinating. I would definitely recommend reading the original article in the New Yorker as it contains a lot of interesting details that I’ve glossed over. If you’re more the audio type, Radiolab has a 15 minute segment titled Mischel’s Marshmallows that you can check out too.