“CHILDREN WITH MORE WILLPOWER ARE MORE SUCCESSFUL IN LATER LIFE”

In the 1960s, the American psychologist Walter Mischel began a series of iconic experiments that involved challenging several dozen young children to sit alone with a marshmallow for around 15 minutes and resist eating it. Their reward, if they waited, was to eat the first marshmallow, plus another. Famously, the researchers caught up with the same kids in the 1980s and 1990s, by which time they were adults, and found that those who’d been successful at this ‘delayed gratification’ task had subsequently done better in life, in terms of exam results and avoiding getting into trouble. The results appeared to suggest that if we could teach kids to have stronger willpower, their lives would benefit.

However, in 2018 psychologists at New York University and the University of California, Irvine, conducted the first replication attempt of the marshmallow study, but this time using data from hundreds of children. Unlike in the original research, Tyler Watts and his colleagues also controlled for a host of social and situational variables, such as parental educational background and how responsive parents were to their kids. The team found that correlation between delay of gratification and later success (in this case in adolescence) was far weaker than in the original research. Moreover, the correlations became statistically non-significant when the researchers factored in the social and family variables.

Watts and his colleagues’ interpretation was that a child’s ability to resist the marshmallow has less to do with their inherent willpower, and more to do with their family circumstances – for instance, whether the child had learned to trust being promised greater rewards in the future or not. This chimes with other research that’s found that adults succeed at their goals through forward planning and avoiding temptation, rather than through brute willpower.