PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND INSTANT GRATIFICATION: What do we understand from the Marshmallow experiment?

THE MARSHMALLOW EXPERIEMENT:

The experiment began by bringing each child into a private room, sitting them down in a chair, and placing a marshmallow on the table in front of them. The researcher offered a deal to the child.

The researcher told the child that he was going to leave the room and that if the child did not eat the marshmallow while he was away, then they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. However, if the child decided to eat the first one before the researcher came back, then they would not get a second marshmallow.

So the choice was simple: one treat right now or two treats later.

The researcher left the room for 15 minutes. Some children ate the marshmallow right after the researcher left, Others tried playing around but eventually gave up to the temptation and ate the Marshmallow. However a few of the children managed to wait the entire time and get the second Marshmallow.

THE RESEARCH ANALYSIS:

The researchers review findings on an important aspect of self-regulation: postponing immediately available gratification in order to attain delayed but more valued outcomes.?

In the research program discussed here, two complementary approaches were used to investigate delay of satisfaction. Initially, preference for delayed, more desirable consequences vs immediate, less valuable outcomes was investigated as a choice decision.

Individuals choose among outcomes that vary in value and estimated time before becoming available under actual conditions in this technique. Sets of such choices were given to people from a wide range of sociocultural backgrounds, family structure, and economic circumstances.

It is observed that preferences for delayed rewards decrease when the required time for their attainment increases.

The choice to delay:

1. increases with the values of the delayed rewards relative to the immediate ones;
2. increases with the subject's age;
3. is susceptible to a variety of social influences, including the choice behavior and attitudes that other people display.
4. Choices to delay were related significantly to a number of personal characteristics assessed at about the same time.

For example, children who tend to prefer delayed rewards also tend to be more intelligent, more likely to resist temptation, to have greater social responsibility, and higher achievement strivings.

As efforts at self-reform so often attest, however, decisions to forgo (go without) immediate gratification for the sake of later consequences ( for example, by dieting) are readily forgotten or strategically revised when one experiences the frustration of actually having to execute them. In the face of more immediate temptations, intentions to practice self-control usually fade.

For nearly a century, theoretical assessments of the delay process have believed that the individual's attention throughout the delay phase is especially crucial in the development of the ability to delay gratification.?

William James (an American Psychologist), noting a relation between attention and self-control as early as 1890, contended that attention is the crux of self-control. Beginning with Freud, it has been proposed that attention to the delayed gratifications in thought, mental representation, or anticipation provides the mechanism that allows the young child to bridge the temporal delay required for their attainment.?

It was reasoned that when children can cognitively depict anticipated gratifications, they can delay them by focusing on these thoughts or fantasies, so limiting impulsive acts.? Some learning theorists also have speculated that the cognitive representation of rewards allows some sort of anticipatory or symbolic covert reinforcement that helps sustain effort and goal-directed behavior while external reinforcement is delayed.

In the course of development, children show increasing understanding and awareness of the strategies that facilitate various kinds of self-control. In a sample of middle-class children in the Stanford community, from preschool through grade six, the children's knowledge of the strategies that might help during the delay process were assessed.

The overall results indicate that 4-year-olds often prefer the least effective strategies for self-imposed delay, thereby inadvertently making self-control exceedingly difficult for themselves. For example, they significantly prefer to expose the rewards during the delay period and to think about them (for example, "because it makes me feel good"), thus defeating their own effort to wait.

Within a year, most children understand and choose more effective strategies. They soon prefer to obscure the temptations and consistently reject arousing thoughts about them as a strategy for self-control. At that age many begin to recognize the problem of increased temptation is caused by thinking about the arousing attributes of the rewards and try to self-distract ("just sing a song''). They also begin to recognize the usefulness of self-instructions, focusing on and repeating the contingency ("I'll wait, so I can get two marshmallows instead of one").

So we understand that self control strategies will help to fight against instant self gratification and wait for the delayed gratification.

Whether or not attention to the rewards, or distraction from them, is the better strategy for sustaining self-control depends on how the rewards are represented cognitively. A focus on their arousing features makes self-control exceedingly difficult; a focus on their more abstract, informative features has the opposite effects.

references:

1. James Clear https://jamesclear.com/delayed-gratification
2. Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. (1989a). Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244(4907), 933–938. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.265805