Legendary Marshmallow Test Yields Lessons for Everyday Challenges in Self-Control

Walter Mischel, the psychologist renowned for the groundbreaking study known as the “marshmallow test,” has finally decided to tell the story of that research for a general audience.

He dedicates the book, aptly titled The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control, to his now-grown daughters, saying they inspired him when they were young to study self-control in preschoolers.

“I saw dramatic changes in my own children,” says Mischel, the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in Columbia’s Psychology Department. “I realized I was quite clueless about what was going on in their heads.”

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The Marshmallow Study Revisited

For the past four decades, the “marshmallow test” has served as a classic experimental measure of children’s self-control: will a preschooler eat one of the fluffy white confections now or hold out for two later?

Now a new study demonstrates that being able to delay gratification is influenced as much by the environment as by innate ability. Children who experienced reliable interactions immediately before the marshmallow task waited on average four times longer—12 versus three minutes—than youngsters in similar but unreliable situations [Video]

"Our results definitely temper the popular perception that marshmallow-like tasks are very powerful diagnostics for self-control capacity," says Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and lead author on the study to be published online October 11 in the journal Cognition.