Teach children that there are bigger rewards for those who wait

Voters queue at a polling station during presidential elections in Zimbabwe last year. Research shows that our patience and self-control predict success in life. AFP 

By MARVIN SISSEY

In Summary

• A little patience in the face of strong temptation can reinforce the value of something.

I sat patiently in the seemingly endless traffic gridlock. Actually, patient may not be the right word to use in this context.

Resigned is more like it because I really didn’t have a choice; at least not a legal one. I silently cursed as I watched some fellow drivers worsen the situation by overlapping.

Why were they so impatient? But this is no longer a puzzle. It turns out that your average overlapping driver is not so intelligent (it’s not a stereotype). They are also unlikely to be very successful (admittedly a very subjective inference).

Apparently one’s propensity to be overly impatient and hence seek instant gratification is not just a pointer to immature character and personality; it is highly correlated to your below par innate intelligence.

This is not one of those wild claims like the overblown yet unsubstantiated health and economic benefits of quails and their eggs. This theory is backed by some healthy dose of scientific research coming from no less an institution than Stanford University.

Ironically, the name of the experiment may not portray the seriousness and the great impact that the studies have had in the field of psychology and personality theory.

Branded the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, it sounds more like some confectionery recipe rather than a serious scientific breakthrough. You remember marshmallows?

Those cylindrical confectioneries that consist of sugar, corn syrup and gelatine whipped to a spongy consistency and coated with maize starch.

Enter Walter Mischel —the Austrian born turned American citizen who in the late 1960s was a professor of psychology at Stanford University.

Mischel is now an accomplished clinical psychologist with feathers in his cap including being the past editor of the highly rated Psychological Review as well as past president of the American Psychological Association Division of Social and Personality Psychology.

Walter Mischel pioneered the first official recorded seminal scientific research into delayed gratification and ability to exert self-control in the face of strong situational pressures and emotionally “hot” temptations.

In what has come to be referred to as the Marshmallow experiment, Mischel aimed to ascertain whether one’s propensity to delay gratification is inbred from an early age and, as shown in the follow up experiments, whether it could be a predictive indicator of one’s future behaviour.

Using children between the ages of four to six, Mischel would put one child in a room without any distractions.

He would then put one marshmallow on a plate on the table and tell the child that they had two options: either they would ring a bell (placed in the room) at any point to summon the experimenter upon which they would only eat that single marshmallow, or that they could wait until the experimenter returned after a few minutes (typically around 15 minutes) and earn an extra marshmallow.

Eating the marshmallow in advance was thus an express forfeiture for the extra marshmallow. The message was: “small reward now, bigger reward later.”