INHE 1003 Week 7 Study Critique Example

One Treat Now or Two Later, and What That Can and Cannot Tell Us: A Study Critique of the Marshmallow Research Tying Each of Three Limits to the Claim It Blocks, Drawing on a Later Replication and a Study of Trust in the Experimenter

Student Name

Walden University

INHE 1003: Introduction to Psychology

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Treat Now or Two Later, and What That Can and Cannot Tell Us: A Study Critique of the Marshmallow Research Tying Each of Three Limits to the Claim It Blocks, Drawing on a Later Replication and a Study of Trust in the Experimenter

The Study

In a series of studies summarized by Mischel et al. (1989), preschool children at a university preschool were offered a choice: one small treat now, or two treats if they waited alone in a room until the experimenter returned. Researchers recorded how long each child waited. Years later, follow-up studies compared children's waiting times with measures of their adolescent abilities, such as ratings of their coping and their academic performance, and reported that children who waited longer tended to do better on several of these later measures. The findings are often summarized as showing that self-control in early childhood predicts later success. That summary has appeared in books, classrooms and parenting advice, which is why its limits are worth examining closely.

Limit 1: Who the Children Were

The original children came from a single university preschool, many of them children of faculty and graduate students. That limits who the findings describe. A sample like this has less variation in family income and education than the wider population, so the results may not apply to children from different backgrounds. This limit blocks the claim that the findings describe children in general.

Watts et al. (2018) addressed this by conducting a conceptual replication with a larger and more diverse sample of children, drawn from a national study, whose mothers had not completed college. They found that the link between early waiting time and later achievement was roughly half as large as the original estimates, and that it became much smaller still once they controlled for family background and early cognitive ability.

Limit 2: Association, Not Cause

The original studies showed that waiting time was associated with later outcomes. They did not show that the ability to wait caused those outcomes. Family resources, parenting, early language and other background factors could affect both a child's waiting time and their later performance. If so, the waiting time would be a marker of those factors rather than a cause of later success. Watts et al. (2018) found that the association shrank sharply after accounting for background, which supports this concern. This limit blocks the claim that teaching young children to wait longer would, by itself, improve their later outcomes.

Limit 3: What the Task Measures

The task is usually described as a measure of self-control, but it may also measure something else: whether the child trusts that the second treat will actually come. Kidd et al. (2013) tested this directly. Before the marshmallow task, children had an experience with an experimenter who either kept a promise or broke it. Children who had experienced a reliable experimenter waited much longer than those who had experienced an unreliable one. For a child whose experience is that adults do not always keep promises, taking the treat now may be a reasonable choice, not a failure of self-control. This limit blocks the claim that waiting time is a pure measure of a child's self-control.

How the Three Limits Fit Together

The three limits point in the same direction. A narrow sample, an association that shrinks once background is considered and a task that partly measures trust all suggest that waiting time reflects a child's circumstances as well as a personal trait. None of the limits shows that self-control is unimportant. Together they show that the popular summary, that a single test in preschool reveals a child's future, claims far more than the evidence supports. A careful reader can accept the narrower finding and still reject the popular version.

What the Research Still Supports

The research still supports a narrower claim: under some conditions, how long a young child waits for a larger reward is modestly related to some later outcomes, and part of that relation reflects the child's background and circumstances. It also opened a useful line of research on the strategies children use to wait, such as distracting themselves, which the course textbook discusses as part of self-regulation (Spielman et al., 2020).

Why This Matters for Integrative Health

Claims about self-control often appear in health messaging, as if people who struggle with diet or exercise simply lack willpower. This critique suggests caution. Behavior that looks like weak self-control may reflect circumstances, past experience and trust as much as character, which matters when designing support rather than blame.

References

Kidd, C., Palmeri, H., & Aslin, R. N. (2013). Rational snacking: Young children's decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition, 126(1), 109-114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.004

Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. L. (1989). Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244(4907), 933-938. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.2658056

Spielman, R. M., Jenkins, W. J., & Lovett, M. D. (2020). Psychology 2e. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology-2e

Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J., & Quan, H. (2018). Revisiting the marshmallow test: A conceptual replication investigating links between early delay of gratification and later outcomes. Psychological Science, 29(7), 1159-1177. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661