Episode 46: The marshmallow test

The Studies Show Podcast

It’s one of the best-known findings of psychology research: kids who can delay gratification by not eating a marshmallow will grow up healther, wiser, and more successful. But guess what? Later studies had trouble finding the same results. What do we actually know about delaying gratification?

Get ready to control yourselves, because in this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart tell the story of yet another famous psychological study that turned out not to live up to the hype.

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Show notes

• The famous 1988 paper by Walter Mischel and colleagues on predicting teenage outcomes from childhood marshmallow test performance, and the famous 1990 one (including the SAT predictions)

  • And the much older research that this follows up

• Walter Mischel’s 2014 book The Marshmallow Test

  • Publicity piece on the book in Vox

• First proper replication study from 2018

  • Debate about how the study used covariates

  • Really good Vox article describing the replication

• 2021 paper (co-authored by Mischel) following up on the original participants

• New 2024 paper following up on the replication study

• Heavily-cited 2011 paper from the Dunedin study on the predictive power of self-control measures

• Inzlicht and Roberts (2024) on trait vs. state self-control, and why we might have been thinking about this the wrong way

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.