> The researchers also, when analyzing their test’s results, controlled for certain factors—such as the income of a child’s household
Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal.
The original paper relied partly on a questionnaire that asked the parents how good their kids were at self-control. That seems unlikely to be reliable. They also used SAT scores, which seems like a better measure. The abstract for the new paper doesn't mention what they measured.
In conclusion, I'm not sure I learned anything here.
> this controlling would remove most of the signal
That's the whole point of controlling. If all of your signal can be explained by a correllation, then you aren't measuring what you think you are.
If "willpower" (waiting for second marshmallow) was important, it would be important regardless of whether your parents are rich or not. This means that among poor kids, those with willpower would be more successful, and among rich kids, those with willpower would be more successful.
The results of the follow up study show us that this is not the case. The important factor is your parents income, not your "willpower".
If willpower is the strongest indicator for income then controlling for parent’s income leads to some strange circular reasoning: willpower is not a strong influence of income when controlling for income.
- Willpower is proportionally developed (to their final amount) in children at the time of testing
I would assume the hypothesis of the researchers was that children were more tabula rasa at the age tested, and therefore controlling for variables wouldn't be circular.
That's not the issue. Controlling for a variable is a model like `y ~ x + z` where x is the explanatory variable and z is the control. The commenter complained that since `y ~ z` and `x ~ z` the interpretation of the effect is strange. Not so. This is the sole purpose of controlling for confounders. If parents income were either not correlated with willpower or child's income, it could be dropped from the model. The stronger the correlation of x and z, the more important the control.
If x and z are strongly correlated you can't determine causality for either within linear models. They are practically interchangeable and removing one will not decrease the effect of the other. "Controlling for", or keeping both on the right side, will decrease the effect of one over the other in unexpected ways, and why strong collinearity yields strange results in linear models.
If multicollinearity were such an issue, you'd be rejecting a wide range of techniques, such as including a lag term as a regressor for autoregressive models.
In fact, you could consider this situation as an autoregressive process, using generations instead of traditional time steps.
Multicollinearity is a huge issue when fitting autoregressive and distributed lag models. In fact, it is even mentioned as such in the introduction section of the Wikipedia article on distributed lag [0].
Imagine a second order autoregression model for a time series that is a flat constant value for all time. How would you assign the coefficient for the first lag term and the second lag term? 0.5 to both? 1.0 to one and 0.0 to the other? In the presence of perfect correlation like that, it would be indeterminate how to assign effect sizes. Prediction accuracy of the model might be fine, but any causal interpretation of the effect sizes would be nonsense.
This also happens greatly for lagged regressors for more standard regression problems, and you often have to do something like z-scoring them and then combining the correlated regressions together into some type of pre-treatment aggregate score, like an average... effectively reducing N correlated lag terms into 1 composite score, when the correlations are high enough to cause multicollinearity problems. [1] has some further details.
In the context of pure forecast accuracy, you may not care so much about multicollinearity as long as the overall prediction is highly accurate.
But since this comment thread was about causality, I think it's important to point it out here. It can cause problems for causal inference in many classes of models, and it is a reason why you have to do careful pre-treatments, instrumental variable methods, etc., in some cases.
Those are good points. Your initial comment criticized the endogeneity issue, not the multicollinearity.
Further, controlling for parents income is essentially an AR1 model, which doesn't suffer from the multicollinearity interpretation issues you described. The problem would be if child willpower were too highly correlated with parents' income, not if parents' income were highly correlated with child's income.
No, you've forgotten that there are two incomes in question, parents and child. Parents' income and child's willpower are both correlated with child's income and each other.
I think it's already well proven that parents' income is highly correlated with childrens' income, for a variety of reasons. It's pretty safe to use them interchangeably
Not if you're trying to identify the effect of a child's willpower on the child's future income. Gotta control for those confounders and prevent endogeneity.
> The important factor is your parents income, not your "willpower".
Or perhaps the opposite is true.
Maybe all the studies that reference parental income "should" be referencing the child's willpower. Maybe willpower is the most important/influential trait, and we should be looking at the several factors increase willpower: parental income, parenting technique X, an inherited willpower gene, etc.
Keyword being hypothical though. If there's a study where genetics are controlled, we could then talk about causation. Before that we both have an opinion at best.
Marshmallows represent different value for kids with different background. Some can have them every day, for some it's something they only saw other kids eating.
It's similar to how it would be easy to risk $50K for somebody with $100M net worth compared to somebody whose net worth is $100K.
In general only small part of the test is really related to willpower. Friends tried the test on their children once - the marshmallow windfall "if you wait 1hour" just didn't happen [for an unplanned reason] , and thus the ones who took marshmallow right at the beggining won. The same reason why many take earlier smaller retirement.
> the marshmallow windfall "if you wait 1hour" just didn't happen ... The same reason why many take earlier smaller retirement.
Most people take a smaller retirement because they know they are going to die at some point. I hope that isn't what happened to you friend's children! :)
I grew up in a household without sugary cereals. My siblings and I would sing songs and dance with excitement when we had them. Socioeconomic status certainly explains the difference between cohorts, but perhaps it’s the easier signal to catch while the core mechanism is a matter of what is available in one’s household.
Yeah, I'm a little torn on this. The OP's claim makes sense on its face, but then I think about my own household, where we're solidly upper-middle class, and my wife and I refuse to keep sugary cereals (and most other junks like Doritos or candy, etc) in our cupboard.
My daughter has definitely experienced them at birthday parties and at her grandparents'. Would she have "willpower"? I'm leaning towards "yes" because her experience has been that she can rely on people. Perhaps a poor child is simply more likely to have unreliable caretakers, so there's less trust.
My mother grew up on a farm with eight siblings. For Christmas they would get a single apple in their stocking from Santa! My mother said everyone would be very excited. There was an an apple orchard on the farm.
Why did your parents seek to create a household which avoided sugary snacks? The fact is, that itself could be representative of the genetic predisposition towards self-control.
It was a health decision. For good or bad? It could be parents who don’t trust their self-control or who have a surplus of it and expect the same from their children.
It could also be indicative of poor self-control - if you know that buying the cereal means you'll eat it too quick, it's easier to avoid buying it than not eating it once you have it.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but self control can cut both ways.
>Marshmallows represent different value for kids with different background.
Or kids with different tastes. I liked candy and cookies as much as any other kid, I suppose, but I never much cared for marshmallows. For me to leave one sit there would not have required much strength of will.
I wonder why they didn't ask each kid what their absolute favorite candy or sweet treat in the world was, and use that for the test instead.
Reminds me of how I grew up wishing I could eat cereal and watch TV - at all.
It’s good to know that it’s my parents’ active decisions to shape how I think, and not something I can’t control like my innate willpower, which led me to be so successful.
They used a lot of different measures. I'll try and summarise the key ones here:
Academic achievement was measured using the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery Revised, a "commonly used measure of cognitive ability and achievement". They used various sub-tests from this battery for measuring maths/english seperately.
Behavioural problems were measured by reports from mothers. (They used the 1991 "Child Behavior Checklist") This was apparently done to be consistent with the original report.
> [child cognitive indicators were] measured at age 24 months by the Bayley Mental Development Index (MDI; Bayley, 1991) and at age 36 months by the Bracken Basic Concept Scale (BBCS; Bracken, 1984).
And the child's home environment was measured by the HOME inventory (Caldwell & Bradley, 1984).
>If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal.
If some underlying willpower was the cause for the behaviour and willpower would lead to better outcomes, then there would be differentation between children within the same income bracket who score different on this test, right? But that is not the case:
This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior—than those who dug right in.
Wait a second, when did the discussion narrow to standardized test scores? I only read the article and did not follow through with sources, it seemed to imply “success” was measured more broadly, by their end socioeconomic status.
If the marshmallow test is truly valid, then we should see a difference for kids in low income households that waited for the second marshmallow vs kids in low income households that didn't.
>> Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal.
Exactly. The way to control for the income of a child's household while not filtering out a possible inherited trait, would be to do the test with only adopted children. Then it would be ok to control for parents' income.
> The way to control for the income of a child's household while not filtering out a possible inherited trait, would be to do the test with only adopted children.
It's truisms like this that make me cut psychologists and economists slack when results fail to reproduce.
If experiments are prohibitively expensive or impossible to recruit large enough populations, the right answer isn't to just toss hands up, but to do the best you can with what you have.
So respect to all the people working in "messy" real life fields and still trying to push the frontier of knowledge!
Publishing results which are then used as the basis for other work, which are not replicable, is not 'pushing' the frontier of knowledge. It's not even stagnating it. It's sending it backwards as it not only poisons derivative works, but also any relevance of the field itself. At this point it's statistically wiser to dismiss studies in certain fields than it is to assume that their results are meaningful and replicable. That's just ridiculous, but true.
And you can perform twin studies for problems like this. I don't think most people understand how these work - you don't need separated twins living in different areas or anything crazy like that. The whole 'trick' is that identical twins are more genetically much more similar than fraternal or non-identical twins. If the results between identicals in something is closer than it is between non-identicals, then there is probably a strong genetic link to the thing being studied. It's just a handy way of automatically controlling for environmental variables, so much as possible.
Of course twin studies can also be misleading, but that's another issue.
> Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal.
I would think so. If what seems like “will power” is strongly correllated with your parents’ income, that seems to demonstrate that will power is not a strongly heritable trait, thus the hypothesis is likely false.
Just because something correlates with parental income doesn't mean that it isn't heritable. Take an example that you agree with. Being white (or Asian) correlates with parental income. Those traits are also rather heritable.
I agree with that, which is precisely why you should control for it, no?
You’re example is correct, but not what I was talking about. You’re only talking about one kind of correlation, and assuming that the data is otherwise ignored. What I imagined was will power being easy to test for heritability if it changes from generation to generation. Being white or Asian might correlate with average income for a population, but Asianness & whiteness don’t change with income. On the other hand, if “will power” changes from generation to generation and the sign and magnitude of the change correllates with the sign & magnitude change of income, then the likelihood that will power is heritable drops rapidly.
> which is precisely why you should control for it, no?
No.
If willpower is inherited then what is required is a serious attempt to deal with this.
If parental income is a proxy for willpower, and willpower is substantially heritable (both quite likely) then naively controlling for parental income is actually controlling away a substantial portion of the child's own willpower! The model needs to specifically allow for the heritability for willpower, which theirs does not.
So in this case, the study demonstrates roughly "the marshmallow test does not test willpower, when you control for (much of the child's) willpower".
As such it is useless rubbish, like a lot of social science research.
If we should do something serious about it, we should first confirm that will power is heritable, right? How do you propose to validate the heritability of will power? And I'd love to hear more about what you'd do about it, and what the problem is.
Why do you think will power is quite likely to be substantially heritable? Are there other better publications that already validate this hypothesis?
If you’re right that it is, then the test I described above would still corroborate, or at least fail to demonstrate that will power isn’t heritable, don’t you think? If will power is heritable, then it will follow the same genetic inheritance patterns as other heritable traits, and one can predict the likely willpower outcomes given that of the parents and grandparents, right?
I still think that it should be relatively easy to demonstrate whether will power is heritable, and that controlling for income is useful and doesn’t pose any threat to determining the truth.
Also, wouldn’t the premise of the original marshmallow test be somewhat moot if will power is heritable? If will power isn’t an environmental or learned trait, then there’s not much you can do about it except for marry up, and excuse the foibles of people who’s bad luck left them with less will power.
FWIW, this isn’t the first follow up study that challenges the marshmallow test, previous studies have also pointed at confounding factors.
“A 2012 study at the University of Rochester (with a smaller N= 28) altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[11][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children's performance, since self-control should predict ability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense.”
Asking parents about child's self control generally more reliable than kid self report. Anyway there is a literature on the reliability of these measures. Feel free to consult it before discounting it.
> Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal.
I suspect you might misunderstand what "controling for" means.
Suppose you want to predict A (here "increase household income in adult life") using variable X (here "will power"). You do this by regressing A against X. Saying that you "control for Y" (here "income of a child's household") just means that you regress A against both X and Y simultaneously.
What sense does that make? Suppose that you regress A against X and conclude that "X explains some of A" (these are vague terms which I can make more precise if you want) and you hope that your correlation is capturing some narrative of causality. Well, someone could come along and say "yes, A and X are correlated, but actually the causality is Y causes A, and X just happens to be correlated with Y. So you're focusing your study on X when the interesting dynamics is on Y". This is valid criticism.
One way to mitigate that criticism is that you study how A depends on X while controling for Y (i.e. you include both in the regression). The rationale here is that if the result is that "both X and Y explain some of A" and someone makes that previous criticism you can respond "Yes, you're right that Y has some effect on A, but in addition X also has some effect on A, independently of Y. Therefore, X has signal regardless of whatever is going on in the dynamics between A and Y."
So, to answer your question: Yes, it's perfectly valid if you mean "controlling" in the sense that it is used in statistics.
Collinearity issues can mean that the beta estimates for collinear variables are less robust, making them harder to interpret. Sometimes this is approached by some data reduction technique, eg PCA.
So this is suggesting that childhood poverty may be a strong correlate of whatever the marshmallow test tests (and childhood poverty is plausibly a strong correlate of life outcomes, so the effect might be completely mediated via childhood poverty rather than any notion of "affinity towards delayed gratification"), but I'm not sure I understand how/whether it rules out the following two.
(1) whatever quality X the marshmallow test tests is so strongly heritable that the parents of X children already are X and therefore tend to be more poor
(2) poverty is causative of X (maybe even by the mechanism the article suggests, i.e. less stability -> higher uncertainty -> higher discounting of expected future outcomes), but it's still accurate to label X "delaying of gratification", and it is in fact causative to success; therefore, this is a mechanism by which poverty perpetuates itself
The study is suggesting that the marshmallow test is a test of mother without college degree, and not testing something about the children beyond that. [0]
And in general, my suspicion about psychology is, that since you can always invent an objection in the form of your (1) and (2), I doubt that statistic is an actually good tool to look at these tests. If we assume for a moment that we somehow get a ground truth of the experiment, by divine revelation or however, then I suspect that we would see that we need as many categories as there are children to get anything predictive.
> I suspect that we would see that we need as many categories as there are children to get anything predictive.
Making a category to predict human behavior generally hurts those who are “miscategorized” much more than it helps those who are accurately categorized (there aren’t really “positive stereotypes” that jump into active-decision processes like with negative stereotypes).
Therefore, we should not try to predict behavior by making even fuzzy-categories other than one-child-per-category, since this may literally hurt children, especially systemically underprivileged and underrepresented children.
It’s important to control your own decision factors against your local collection of “known non-causations”!
Actually excessive delayed gratification in such circumstances might be maladaptive, right? Causitive to success in context of type C.
Also not clear that's its ability to delay gratification that is being measured; instead, it's just a measure of risk taking mediated by subjective estimate of situational risk and tolerance for risk.
Good link, but that's not one of the original authors, assuming you meant of the Marshmallow study.
Edit: I enjoyed the post, but his point turns out to be a relatively narrow one:
The other headline from the replication is that the predictive ability of the marshmallow test disappears with controls. That is, if you account for the children’s socioeconomic status [etc...], the marshmallow test does not provide any further information about that future achievement. It’s no surprise that controls of this nature do this. It simply suggests that the controls are better predictors. The original claim was not that the marshmallow test was the best or only predictor.
Such a defense of the original claim makes sense in an academic context but doesn't touch on why the marshmallow study made it into pop culture in the first place. That was because of what it seemed to suggest about character and self-control. The new study puts quite a different spin on that, as Collins agrees:
What is called into question are the implications that have been drawn from the marshmallow test studies.
The fact that those implications weren't part of Shoda, Mischel, and Peake's original study is good to know, but not the most important thing for non-specialists.
> Such a defense of the original claim makes sense in an academic context but doesn't touch on why the marshmallow study made it into pop culture in the first place.
The Marshmallow Test is something the lay person can understand, and comes with a great real-world demonstration, accurate or not. Other measures require more field-specific knowledge or statistics education to understand.
"The differences between the experiments could also be behind the difference in size of correlation. Each study used different measures of achievement. The marshmallow test in the replication had a maximum wait of only 7 minutes, compared to 15 to 20 minutes in the original (although most of the predictive power in the new study was found to be in the first 20 seconds). The replication created categories for time waited (e.g. 0 to 20 seconds, 20 seconds to 2 minutes, and so on), rather than using time as a continuous variable. It also focused on children with parents who did not have a college education – too many of the children with college-educated parents waited the full seven minutes. The original study drew its sample from the Stanford community."
A witty comment on Twitter: The real marshmallow test was to see who could resist pontificating on meaning of the original marshmallow test until a generation passed for it to be properly replicated. And you failed, all of you.
Another example of studies that seem to be hard to dublicate is about the concept of priming [0]. I think sometimes the non-scientific community picks up an idea which just seems so good and starts to apply it to an array of life sitations, while the idea itself might be limited to a small amount of sitations/conclusions. Especially with priming, I read some hair-raising statemens from laymen, about how priming seems to explain virtually everything.
It also happens to scientists, of course, but they tend to be a bit more careful and stick a little closer to the original experiment (which itself might not be evidence enough for the conclusion).
I see so many forum discussions where posters criticise the poor for their 'weak' decisions and effectively blame the poor for their own plight. Why don't they just work harder and earn the money to pay for their healthcare and education? they say. It is easy to withhold funding from deprived areas if you convince yourself that it is their own fault.
These results should be on the front pages of newspapers and on TV (and Twitter: @POTUS I'm thinking of you!). The idea that children raised with few resources need help to plan for the long term seems to be rather lost on many politicians these days.
Scarcity is an outstanding book about this, and makes the point that severe constraints on anything - money, food, free time - can have psychologically damaging effects.
In fact it’s extremely toxic - far more damaging than manynthings that have been banned now.
I'm honestly never sure how seriously to take those sorts of statistics. They tend to be based on participation in food programs, which doesn't tell you that much.
Deaths due to malnutrition are quite rare now, generally being confined to cases of abuse or niglect, while it used to be a normal cause of death.
Because they have access to only poor quality foods. There may not be calorie scarcity but there is nutrition scarcity.
And yes, for some there's also "food insecurity" which is not knowing where your next meal is coming from or having to choose between food and other necessities (shelter, warm winter clothing, medical care, transportation, etc.)
This talks around food scarcity without actually being food scarcity. First, you have to show that poor quality foods actually reduce willpower and contribute to further poverty. People used to fight wars on poor diets. I'm sure there's lots of military planners in the world that would love it if they could feed their army the way America feeds its poor.
Food insecurity isn't food scarcity either, it's just more income insecurity.
The distinctions matter because the policy you craft to fix actual food scarcity is different and far easier than the policy you craft to address income insecurity.
Edit: I'm going to go against my usual playbook and discuss my downvoters. You fix social problems with policy. Policy has to affect everyone. That's what makes it policy. If you tailor bad policy that doesn't work, because it doesn't address the root cause, then you've made the world worse and not better. Giving poor people cheap ubiquitous Whole Foods Markets isn't going to solve their problems.
This just isn't true. It's so obviously not true it's really very amazing that people repeat it. Go to a Dollar General in a poor area sometime. They have lots of potato chips and assorted crap. Yep. They also have canned beans, fruit, refrigerated sausage, cheese, chicken, etc. None of this is unaffordable.
That's Dollar General. Most places have access to a Walmart which is as good nutritionally as any grocery store that ever existed.
If people buy junk food it's because they enjoy it. Christ, even your typical gas station sells salad these days.
Cheap junk food is much more palatable than cheap healthy food.
> Most places have access to a Walmart which is as good nutritionally as any grocery store that ever existed.
Walmart tends to avoid the inner city. If you don't have a car there generally isn't one close enough to shop at more than once a week or so. Bringing home a week of groceries for a family on bus isn't a trivial task.
It's much easier to pick up some cheap food from a convenience store.
> Christ, even your typical gas station sells salad these days.
If you compare the per calorie price of that salad to junk food, it's much more expensive.
There is also an effect about being time poor and having little to no time to cook. And coming from an also poor and time poor family, and never having learned how to cook. Etc. Poverty fucks you in many ways, and is indeed a complicated beast.
Time. Yes that's important as well. It's not just cooking.
Time is lost waiting for the bus, because you can't afford a car. You wait in line at the store because it can't afford another cashier and better technology. Etc.
People think poverty is their well to do life but with less money. Oh God, that's so ignorant.
BTW, the book Evicted is an eye and heart opener. Highly recommended.
Seriously, who in western countries does not have availability to "healthy food"? Everybody has basic grocery stores with cheap simple stuff just as available to them as convenience junk shops.
It's education about how food affects you that makes all the difference. People literally don't know what they're putting in themselves. There's a lot of food purchasing decisions based on stressors related to your very reasonable 2nd point. Basic food education at a personal level brings people out of that particular negative health cycle.
Regardless, what you're naively discounting is the effects of poverty on the mind (and the body). Imagine, if you can, a state of permanent stress, fear, worry, etc. The human mind is __not__ wired to make optimal decisions under such circumstances.
Now let's just say it's time to eat...You're running from your 2nd job to your 3rd...how do you think that decision is going to go?
Poverty is not a lack of wealth. That's a side effect. Poverty is the result of mental, emotional and spiritual starvation; in the face of a world of plenty for everyone else but you and yours.
A main quote from that link is "a small percentage of American consumers are limited in their ability to access" healthier food, seemingly mostly tied to lack of transportation to otherwise close-by stores in densely populated areas. I would posit that's a much smaller percentage than those eating unhealthily in low/poverty income situations.
Your post here coincides with mine. Somebody running between jobs does have means of transportation, but is in a highly stressed life situation. The main problem is not one of literal access to healthy food, yet that is always the first supposition made. Healthy food is cheap, and it is not far away. The problems are beyond that.
Poverty makes your mind stressed and fatty high sugar foods are good to satistfy your mind.
Also these are cheaper and mass produced, highly marketed for low income masses and kids. Supermarkets are designed to make you buy shit.
It's a sad natural phenomenon that amplifies itself. It doesn't really cost a lot to eat healthy but it requires a steady mindset which is usually done by culture. But consumerism ate culture so .. everybody just go for short term convenience until they become obese.
Insecurity (partially) explains obesity, because body fat is an evolutionary adaptation to insecure food supplies. Our parents and grandparents were raised to eat what they were given and clear their plates. That's evolutionarily rational if you aren't sure where your next meal is coming from - food will spoil, but body fat will keep you alive through a famine.
Shaking off that habit is much easier if you never worry about whether you'll go hungry tomorrow; a lot of poor people don't have that luxury. If you're just scraping by, an unexpected bill or a parking ticket might force you to choose between a payday loan or an empty refrigerator. Combine economic insecurity with a food market full of cheap, high-calorie foods and you've got a recipe for nutritional disaster.
We're right to think that capitalism has created tremendous abundance, but we often under-estimate the pathological effects of insecurity. Without a sound safety net, the human brain just isn't capable of prudent long-term planning.
Healthy food isn't really more expensive. The price of the food depends a lot more on the shop it's being sold in than the particular item.
Nah, I think it really comes down to a mix of:
1. Many poorer people have jobs with longer/more awkward hours, and it's easier to buy unhealthy food in a rush/at an inconvenient time. Your local greengrocers/butchers shop/whatever likely closes at about 5PM whereas the corner shop stays open till the wee hours of the morning/doesn't close at all. And if you're in a rush, unhealthy food is often quicker to prepare/sold prepared based on whether you're talking microwave dinners or fast food.
2. Many poorer areas are food deserts, or at least have a lack of decent shops. For instance, over where I currently live, there are about 4 different supermarkets, local grocery shops, butcher's shops, bakeries, fishmongers, etc and every other kind of place to buy food you can imagine.
This means it's somewhat convenient to buy something healthy at almost any time of day.
On the other hand, if your only choices in walking distance are a corner shop, petrol station or pound store, the choices for healthy food are a fair bit less, and its more convenient to buy something unhealthy than travel to the shops elsewhere.
I think there is some truth in what you are saying, but if that is true then people without jobs getting SNAP benefits would tend toward buying healthier food. That isn't the general trend I see in the people I've worked with. Most of them tended toward buying highly processed food and it wasn't because they didn't have time to prepare meals.
I did work with one family who was very concerned about eating healthy, but they would tend to buy the absolutely most expensive food they could find thinking it was healthier and then running out of food halfway through the month.
I'm not saying there aren't people who buy unhealthy food because they can't find healthy food, but I see a lot more people hampered by poor life skills leading too poor food choices than grocery store closing hours.
I'm not sure that healthy food is more expensive when you only look at the items, because vegetables are not (some fruits are, but veggies are far more important). With even limited cooking skills you can produce pretty cheap and yet very good meals.
However, I still think your point is valid, because it's not just the food items themselves. You need time to prepare them, plus a stressful life puts psychological pressure (which is real and not "imagined") on your brain for swift and easy rewards. So if you don't just look at the stuff on the plate, but see "eating" as a system consisting of sooo much more, the entire context, I think that's a big part of what in the end indeed makes bad food more expensive.
I almost forgot to mention a possibly even bigger part: When you live in poor areas availability of certain foods is vastly limited, and availability of bad foods is through the roof. Try shopping in supermarkets in poor areas and compare it to a wealthy suburb supermarket.
Straw man at the very least? How many people use veggies for their energy? That's what most people use grains for - bread, pasta, potatoes. All of them also cheap.
Given obesity rates, the problem is too much energy. After all, one part of calling for more vegetable consumption is so that people lower their energy intake. Example: https://www.fruitsandveggiesmorematters.org/eating-vegetable... (the number of articles on cutting calories by eating more vegetables is uncountable)
Just as an aside, a short excerpt from a bio.chem course that shows the connection between high energy intake and obesity: https://youtu.be/rTR-Ev3hj4c
Under scarcity, in choosing which foods to buy, how tolerant are you to the risk of being hungry because you allocated too few dollars to calories rich foods? My guess is extreme risk averse.
The link between poverty and obesity in the modern world is well established. That means you can hardly point to a lack of energy consumption. I added a video to my comment, from a bio.chem course, that shows a common pathway how high energy state leads to obesity.
Note that I can't and don't want to (and don't need to) show very much here, only provide an argument against what I think is a strange argument from @Retric about "not enough energy in veggies". Energy is not the problem (the psychological feeling of "I have no energy", which may be more prevalent in poor people (I don't know), is not the same as a low energy level).
I doubt the considerations you mention actually happen, or when then it's not widespread. I think it's automatic behaviors rather than conscious choices, and I doubt most people think about their foods energy content (given that a large majority of people, including and for some groups even especially among the poor, consume too much of it). As I see it, the energy claim doesn't fit the available data - which shows an excess, not a lack. That's why I think explanations as well as actions have to aim somewhere else - or would you say we should provide even more energy in food (especially aimed at poor people or not does not matter, since obesity affects all groups to varying degrees).
The point about low calories is veggies are inherently an extra and not a staple. You need to add veggies to your diet and can't simply replace a plate of rice and beans with them.
The preference for low cost per calorie foods makes it easy to over eat when your body is missing some nutrient. Which can create offial feedback loops. But, the simple "how do I eat for 20$ this week" is IMO a factor at the individual and cultural level that should not be ignored.
The point about calories was invalid, as I clearly pointed out. There is a problem of too much, there is no problem of not enough. And energy-rich carbs are cheap. So nothing remains of that argument, it was just silly!
> The preference for low cost per calorie foods makes it easy to over eat when your body is missing some nutrient.
Exactly.
If you agree with me, what's your point? I argued against your very specific - and very silly - argument in your first reply, which makes no sense whatsoever and is completely made up and artificial. See my response!
Please stop making stuff up and reply to what I actually wrote or not at all. I hate it when people make stuff up and pretend to "counter" my comment when they completely ignore it and make stuff up.
I think you are failing to grasp the price differences and my argument.
You can become obese eating rice and beans for less than the 1.50$ per day. Morbid obesity on cheap calorie dense food is cheaper than a healthy diet. This trend continues if you look at fast food or any quick options.
So, no being fat is not cost prohibitive, but eating veggies is. Further, as I said if you eat empty calories like Purple Drank you still need nutrition and again eating calorie dense foods and extra calories costs less than veggies.
This has social consequences as fewer people eat healthy foods they become less accessible, and culture adapted to eating cheap means all food options are high calorie.
Veggies are also perishable. - Rice and Beans don't go bad. You need to have a plan on what to do with said veggies when you get them and need to make sure you use them before they go bad. Rice and beans are as simple as two pots (one if you're lazy), a little bit of water, and 20 minutes of barely looking at the food.
> I think you are failing to grasp the price differences and my argument.
Thank you very much!
I think I DO understand your argument, but I have the suspicion that you fail at understanding my very first reply already, which sums it up quite nicely. Your "argument" is none because it addresses an issue that does not exist. You countered something that you yourself invented, an issue that does not exist.
Please, just read my original reply. This is just plain silly: As I already said, if you don't care one bit what I wrote, why did you (and still do) bother to reply? Again and again?
Yea, I read what you said as they don't need to eat that many calories, but over time their body says they do.
Do you know any poor people? People that grew up in poor families? Just like everyone else when overweight their body wants to maintain that weight. That's going to take food, and in some cases a lot of it which is a real cost.
Eating cheap calorie dense food can cover based nutrition requirements. It's not optimal for health, but it's cheap, really really cheap.
Poor people also indulge in nutrition free food like soda when they can afford it, but then they still need to cover nutrition and the cheapest way to do that is high caloric foods. After a while they need to eat just as much to maintain that weight. But, at no point in that viscous cycle are veggies more than a garnish.
Would a lifetime of 3 servings of veggies a day help avoid weight gain while allowing for some indulgences? Of course, but it would also cost significantly more especially when raising a family which starts up the cycle again.
This fixation on the idea "people eat only vegetables!" is a fabrication of YOUR mind. You keep bringing it up. Are you sick? Do you need professional help? I'm a little concerned for you my little stupid friend. You can't tell what's only in your head from what what's outside? How about you stick to what I wrote and stop posting utter nonsense and made-up bullshit?
Scarcity is toxic in a context of opulence. If you live in a forest you end up hunting and organizing yourself. In a city you see everybody having it easy and you can't even rely on nature to allow your efforts to feed you.
You can tame the stress of scarcity with a bit of meditation and experience.
> "These results should be on the front pages of newspapers and on TV..."
Agreed. But it's not. Instead we get Stormy Daniels, the royal wedding, etc. It's easy to point at DJT but he's merely a mirror. Like it or not, he represents the real America. The one that's been there all along. The one that's been glossed over by incompetent journalism and "news" organization.
Note: I'm not saying all. Only that the segment of the population what's been hiding in plain sight is not longer being ignored.
Yup - research seems to clearly indicate that financial stress has a significant effect on decision making.
> Contrary to the refrain that bad decisions lead to poverty, data indicate that it is the cognitive toll of being poor that leads to bad decisions. And actually, decisions that may seem counterproductive could be entirely rational, even shrewd.
...
> Even for people who are not in poverty, financial pressures can affect decision-making—and some companies are taking steps to address that.
Help children as much as it is possible. There is no other way. You cannot help adults who made weak decisions they will continue making bad decisions. It is only children economic mobility that can help poor, if we enable children to have economic mobility we are winning. One child even in big family going right way can help a lot sisters, brothers, by setting example and providing further help.
Well writting long posts about how people are to blame for theire own fates is the rich mens ritual cleansing of responsibilitys for his fellow human beeing.
It's easy to blame "media" for that, but the media are market-driven in America. The fact that this isn't on good-morning America suggests those viewers don't care.
It'd be nice if there was an easy answer, however wanting the media would force-feed intellectualism to people is wishful thinking.
I think that's why socialist countries seem to take the attitude that we, as politicians, know what's good for you and you don't. So we will regulate you and put in laws to protect you while restricting your choices and freedom.
Stepping back, any country run by humans will inevitably be corrupt. So we are really talking about degrees of corruption.
For context, I was referring to socialist countries under the European definition which is a mix of socialism and capitalism. This might include France, Denmark, Sweden etc. For us socialist != communist which is way further left.
As with everything there is a spectrum. I feel like in the US in some circles... socialism == communism and socialist policies are demonized.... a result of the cold war echoing through history. There is little language to describe a left of center policies.
> The idea that children raised with few resources need help to plan for the long term seems to be rather lost on many politicians these days.
The truth is unacceptable to our modern society. We still live in a harsh world where we have to sacrifice some people for the good of the community.
Many critical traits like intelligence are largely inherited.
Once we focus on the nurture side the three key influencers are growing up with a father in the home, living in a safe community, and having plenty of entry level jobs that build skills.
Feminism has destroyed the first.
Acceptance of gang violence and thug behavior has destroyed the second.
Outsourcing and bringing in cheap migrant labor have destroyed the third.
Until we fix these three key areas the divide between rich and poor will only grow.
This comment is a list of assertions without any base and ties netween each other.
Why would we have to sacrifice anybody?
How do you define intelligence and how is it biologically inherited?
Why would those be the three influencers and not stuff like school, neighbours, family as a whole and public support?
Why would feminism have killed fathers at home?
Who said gangs are more accepted or that there is even more violence?
Can you prove how immigration limits entry jobs? Last time I checked entry level jobs are actually missing candidates in many developped countries because the local youth doesn't take them (typically construction industry is under staffed in whole western europe and needs immigrants to work).
Yes it is. For sure some of it is inherited, but some is environment. The controversy is exactly how much of each. There are unexplained things like the Flynn effect that are probably environment.
Because it's closely related to research on the genetic basis of intelligence. Poor research on these topics in the past have been used to justify rather egregious social policies (eugenics, birth control, racial discrimination, etc). Even if it is heritable, making the knowledge public can only lead to a sense of fatalism.
> Even if it is heritable, making the knowledge public can only lead to a sense of fatalism.
That's a really terrible way to look at the world, and has caused a lot of suffering. It's the very basis of the term 'heretic' that has caused so much loss throughout human history.
No human ever has the right to deny knowledge to another for their own benefit, because humans are not able to accurately determine what knowledge is or is not harmful for others to hold. Often their choice to withhold knowledge causes the most harm of all.
EDIT: Thinking about it more, 'the right' is not correct. Withholding knowledge can be a malicious or competitive activity, but can never be a beneficial one. Ie, you have the right to withhold knowledge from your enemies to harm them, or withhold knowledge from competitors to increase your chances of winning. But you need to be clear on this with yourself: you're not withholding knowledge for anyone's benefit but your own.
If I withhold knowledge of where my gun is from my angry friend who wants to kill someone, that benefits two people that are not myself (my friend who would likely go to jail, and the person he is planning to kill).
Doesn't matter, more knowledge is always to our advantage; not being politically correct is a terrible reason for withholding information. We'll never get better by burying our heads in the sand.
Maybe key thing is to do a good research and to not use it as social policies rather than doing no research at all?
If I knew that my natural behavior is disadvantageous (given that time preference is an advantage), I could behave more consciously and do more analysis than intuition. Rather than just killing everyone suspected to be more succesful than me, if you know what I’m saying.
It can be argued that gratification delay is more psychology related than genetics. And while it can be found a pattern on genes, probably it will be falsified like happened before with these kind of experiments.
Experiments require resources which are limited.
And after the falsification of intelligence genes, it makes sense to find a psychological cause for delay of gratification first, and test other logical explanations second.
I want to praise you for taking the time to admit that you were wrong about a topic you didn't know much about. It is something that is seen far too infrequently in this world.
In "The Influential Mind" she actual proposes another theory. Ultimately, it's about trust. That is, if you've been betrayed in the past and you don't believe the promise of waiting means a reward, you'll not wait.
It makes sense. Trust and risk are also useful tools over the long run.
Not surprising. One thing that I’ve learned about the rich is that they make their children comply and be conscientious. Also, they seem to be really good at creating tests that show that that they are naturally superior⸮
As a side-note (maybe someone can correct me), I thought that GWAS could so far only find two personality traits that were heritable: extroversion and neuroticism. If so, is there much point in these types of experiments except to sell pop-science books and magazines?
I was always skeptical of the marshmallow test. It let too many questions open on why children eat the marshmallows. Was it because they hadn't eaten before and came to school with low blood sugar, knew that waiting fifteen minutes for two sweets the price of a penny is idiotic or that they felt uncomfortable in the room and wanted to leave as early as possible?
So you were able to think of a couple confounding factors off the top of your head, but you dismiss the idea that the researchers had considered those factors and controlled for it? Despite the fact that their full time job it is to think about things like that, and their careers are on the line if they embarrass themselves by disregarding something as obvious and trivial like that? Did you even read the original paper?
This very article is about how the original paper did not control enough for confounding factors:
> Watts and his colleagues were skeptical of that finding. The original results were based on studies that included fewer than 90 children—all enrolled in a preschool on Stanford’s campus. In restaging the experiment, Watts and his colleagues thus adjusted the experimental design in important ways: The researchers used a sample that was much larger—more than 900 children—and also more representative of the general population in terms of race, ethnicity, and parents’ education. The researchers also, when analyzing their test’s results, controlled for certain factors—such as the income of a child’s household—that might explain children’s ability to delay gratification and their long-term success.
You complain to GP for not considering that the people who published the original Marshmallow test paper had controlled for confounding factors. In the opening paragraph, other researchers complain about just that.
In other words: a more sensible reading of GP's comment would be as a reaction to said paragraph.
What you say is essentially an appeal to authority. The questions of wombat92 are legitimate and it is the job of the journalist to answer them in the article. "They are professional, they know their job" is not a valid scientific argument.
LOL, what are you talking about? I asked why OP had such a dismissive attitude towards the original paper, and that's "researcher worship"? Gotta be one of the most toxic responses I've gotten so far on HN.
I agree that it's too complicated a good a task. However there are other paradigms that work, at least for older persons: eg asking people $5 today or $20 next week?
The article misses a keyword - RISK or risk tolerance.
Rich kids are able to take MORE risks than poor kids. We know that risk taking is positively correlated with wealth.
Both rich kids and poor kids take risks (financial and otherwise) get different results when they fail and when they succeed.
Simply, the rich kids suffer less from financial failures and make more money from their financial successes.
FAILURE
The poor become fearful after a few failures. Then over-compensate (by being wasteful spenders as mentioned in the article) or under-compensate (stick only to absolutely safe paths - bad in the long term)
A loss of $10,000 might get only a shrug from the rich kid but the poor kid might go mad with depression and suicidal thoughts.
SUCCESS
Finally, let's look at what success means to both classes. If we look at money as leverage, then even financial success between the rich and the poor is completely different.
Let's look at what a $0.1 increase in a stock price means to the two classes.
Person A has 100 stocks - $10 profit. Person B has 100,000 - $10k profit. Same investment. Both succeed in the same stock but result is completely different.
Writing this has clarified one point for me. The poor need to risk a larger percentage of their networth to see sizeable returns on their success.
When wins don't feel like wins and losses are devastating, it creates apathy towards trying.
I wonder how you'd control for the fact that the Marshmallow Test is widely known and that parents may have explicitly trained their children on similar problems in the hope that they'll benefit later from the ability to delay gratification?
So maybe well-off people score better on the test because they have time to teach their kids some self-restraint, not because they're genetically better able to resist marshmallows?
The question was not whether delayed gratification is genetic or not. The question was whether not eating candy when stranger promiss you more candy for not eating it makes you more successful later in life.
The paper may be good, but the article is poorly written:
- it suggests that it is only after the publication of this paper that people have questioned the causality relationship in the results of the original study
- it talks about reinterpretation of the original study's outputs as 'replication', whereas nowhere in the article does it suggest that anyone attempted to replicate the experiment
Did the new researchers check to see if the parents were aware of the marshmallow test or had ever tried it with their kids?
My guess is that at least some of the parents would have heard of it since it is very well-known. These days, it's even in kid-focused apps [1] that are designed to help with emotional development. I know many parents who have tried it with their kids to see how they'd do.
It's likely that knowledge of the marshmallow test correlates with education and income, so this could be part of the reason for the effects the researchers saw.
Thinking that the only reason poor kids would prefer to eat the first marshmallow due to having a low willpower is incredibly shallow: what if the kid had an experience in life that tells him that no matter how credible the source is, the second marshmallow has a huge probability of never coming; or for what's it worth - they'll take away both of them since the child tried to be "smart”?
Edit: came here to attack the article, but turns out my opinion is actially the opinion of the article in the first place. They actually do say that this test is not actually a test of willpower.
You have an over-simplistic view of the original research. It wasn't only about the "willpower", but also coping mechanisms than we employ to control our urges. And it proven that some children are way better in this than others. For instance some kids would turn their back to the cookie, or would come up with some other distraction, so that they don't think about eating it. Having this type of resourcefulness to quickly adopt to the situation is probably a personal trait that comes very handy in one's life.
You’re arguing definitions. Resourcefullness is encompassed by willpower in the context of this article.
Yet the point I am trying to make is that poor kids would have a tendency to make their decisions based on their context which isn’t, sadly - optimal in most cases.
The connection between “this kid doesn’t have to think about rudimentary issues because he’s better off” becomes closer to “rich people can risk more because their risk is hedged by their well-being”.
Presumably, you'd get the pizza from a pizza place. If you go for a national chain, you wouldn't even be restricted to testing kids all in the same location.
I would imagine a kid would think they would be full after the first slice and not care about the second.
It would be better for the test to have the child rank edible items they like. Then a few weeks later run the test.
But as a new father, I've learned that eating training will vary widely between families. Some families do not provide sweets as treats at all. Some will always provide it after every meal so the kids do not feel it is a reward or scarce resource. You can read up on the Satter method for details.
Actually, the result DID replicate here even though the experiment was slightly different. Other variables were introduced that might suggest additional explanations of the replicated result.
Marshmallow willpower is still correlated with future success, but only because it is correlated with wealth. This means that there's isn't a causal link between eating marshmallow willpower and success. which is a different result, as the previous result included that as a possibility.
If success is correlated with wealth, then wouldn't the original study (done with kids at a Stanford preschool) have shown a small/null result? That is, most of the kids have wealthy and well-educated parents.
Agreed. If I understood correctly, the recent experiment possibly indicated that socio-economical factors can influence more the future "success" of a subject than other variables, e.g. delayed gratification.
The original experiment, by only containing children of the same socio-economical background isolated these variables, and achieved an orthogonal conclusion.
Many comments seem to cast doubt on the marshmellow test based on the article. I honestly don’t understand how the contents of the article could lead to such conclusion. Aren’t the economic status of the family and the result of the test both correlated with the future economic status, and no causal relationship is suggested?
Poor kids grow up with patents who can’t often fulfil their promises, rich kid man grow up with parents who can.
The test is less about some inherent quality a person that can effect their future performance and more about their expectations given their expererience.
The fatal flaw in the original experiment is that they assume that the child is give with 100% certainty a choice between instant and delayer gratifications, when is fact the delayed gratification is contingent in their trust in the experimenter. I’d wager if you did the experiment with one test being a fully trusted adult and the other being a fully distrusted adult but the same kid in both cases you would get both outcomes.
Ok, they threw in lots of other parameters: so maybe the correct question should be - what does this test predict for children of the same social background? If this is a question that may not be asked then you may reconsider your basic assumptions.
The paper's abstract [1] doesn't conclude that affluence is the source of delay gratification.
Nor could it, using only this experiment. Even if a correlation is found, correlation does not imply causation. One could equally suspect that delay gratification leads to affluence (assuming parent-child similarity, whether by nature or nurture), or a third factor affecting both, etc.
I've come across variations of this conclusion many times now: That it is really your parents affluence and educational background that predicts your success in school and how much you will earn in the future. This is often portrayed as being unjust. To me it always seemed obvious that children with affluent and well educated parents are more likely to be intelligent, have good self-control and other traits that are useful for being successful, simply because those traits are hereditary.
This very article shows that rich tend to succeed and poor tend to fail regardless of whether the grab the marshmallow or not.
But a summary of other issues include:
If intelligence corresponds to wealth, we would expect Nobel prize winners and widely cited scientist to be the richest people.
Royal families and their descendants, having concentrated their genes, should also be the most inventive, artistic or scientifically productive people.
It is possible to improve earnings skills, the degree to which it can be improved is the degree to which it is behavioral rather than genetic.
Rich people are scattered through the world and through history and thus have maximum genetic difference. They can not reasonably share a common gene that skips over millions of people between them, let alone crossing the Atlantic to end up in Montezuma's line. And if there were such genes, they would be extremely conspicuous.
Yet in spite of great interest and success in sequencing, no gene correlating to wealth has been found.
If some genes corresponded to earnings, it would have a geographic origin and concentration as do eye color, lactose tolerance, epicanthic folds, malaria-resistance/cycle-cell etc. Yet every region has a few rich people and many poor.
In fact, regions change in wealth over time: nations like Egypt were rich for millennia while Scandinavia and Japan were poor. This does not happen with genes eg blue eyes don't emerge and disappear over millennia at random around the world.
All of the above points to wealth acquisition as a essentially a purely behavioral activity. Even if there were any genetic components, they would be negligible to the point of being undetectable.
Pardon me for summaries rather than finding dozens of links but here is one readable citation:
>> rich tend to succeed and poor tend to fail regardless of whether the grab the marshmallow or not.
We were talking about intelligence. The marshmallow test measures delayed gratification.
>> If intelligence corresponds to wealth, we would expect Nobel prize winners and widely cited scientist to be the richest people.
It's a correlation - so we'd expect them to be richer than average, and richer on average than dumber scientists. They are - you can sell a Nobel prize for $5M.
>> Rich people .. scattered through the world .. history and thus have maximum genetic difference. They can not reasonably share a common gene that skips over millions of people between them. ... no gene correlating to wealth has been found. ...
I am not proposing "wealth" genes - how ridiculous. It would be trivial though, just find a richer ethnic group and use their novel variants. That doesn't prove causality, though.
Intelligence is a highly polygenic trait, there are probably thousands of variants involved. But here's a simpler model - inheriting a high IQ is partly due to a lack of damaging variants. There are plenty of variants associated with intellectual disability, go search OMIM. Inheriting one of them leads to not being able to hold down a job, and thus lower income.
There you go - inherited intellectual disability - an exact genetic link to wealth acquisition (or lack thereof).
"Absence of the father was prevalent in the African-descent group but occurred only once in the East Indian group, and this variable showed the strongest link to delay of gratification, with children from intact families showing superior ability to delay."
...but not the richest of all people. Nor do the richest people in the world tend to be great scientist, mathematicians, chess players, writers etc.
Because intelligence can only shuffle you around in the class you inherit but only luck will get you out of it.
Children born to carpenters will tend to become good carpenters because they get connections, learn skill and are given tools by their parents not because they are inheriting more intelligence than someone just breaking in to carpentry.
Children born to massive landlords will be landlords because they inherit the estate not because they are smarter than people wanting to become landlords with no cash.
>Wouldn't controlling for inherited wealth completely wipe away the signal?
You need to measure delta in wealth so in fact you _must_ control for wealth. Otherwise a rich kid who looses half his inheritance will be counted more successful than a poor kid who doubles his.
>just find a richer ethnic group
I point out above why this is impossible. If, for some reason, you decide this moment in history was the one to make the judgment on, you would find that the richest countries are also the most progressive and have the largest social safety nets. Are we going to claim the intelligence correlates to progressive politics and the wisdom of social safety nets as much as wealth?
>The marshmallow test measures delayed gratification.
And yet when it was believed to predict future wealth, it was said delayed gratification _was_ intelligence.
>the original marshmallow experiment showed...
The article explains why the original test was fundamentally flawed. For one reason, because it only had 90 subject rather than 900
I believe scholarships are a nearly perfect indicator of intelligence. Self motivation toward education is certainly another. These things allow people to move from one part of their class to another. And by class I don't mean the ever shifting terms politicians use, I mean the very specific meaning when the term was coined: those who must work to survive vs those born never needing to.
>Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg
1% of the population is in the top 1% of intelligence. 0.02% of the population are billionaires. Clearly intelligence is a trivial factor for immense wealth.
For that list, some of the people you cite as smart were born to wealthy parents, others not. If we assume[1] they are intellectually in the top 1%, then this very list shows no correlation between inherited wealth and inherited brains.
Since the claim is that the rich pass down smart genes, we should look look at the top hereditary billionaires in the world and see if there is any evidence that they are all in the top 1% intellectually.
Is Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia super smart? How about Liliane Bettencourt, who does not even have hand in the business which makes her a billionaire. Or Georg Schaeffler who drove the company he inherited deeply in to debt. How about the wife of Steve Jobs.
Most relevant would be those who have been ultra rich for generations and only married other rich people: is Prince Charles among the smartest people in the world?
And the fact that rich Japanese adopt unrelated adults into the family who then run the business for the heirs. Obviously genes are irrelevant to wealth maintenance here.
>In the 60s China and Korea were African level poor, but they had high IQs
For that last several centuries, China's GDP was so low famines were a regular occurrence. Only in the last silver of history have they become rich. So obviously this has nothing to do with genetics but with changes to society both inside and outside China.
From my cohort, I'd pin it more on discipline/self-control than anything else. Well-disciplined peers--who weren't particularly wealthy or bright--did the best. Gifted peers with more IQ points than self-control had much bumpier rides.
Or rather that every child is born equal and that its intelligence, skills, behaviour and success is solely the result of its education and social environment, DNA is assumed to play no part in our brain, and therefore if any deviation is observed, it must be the result of social factors, and therefore unjust.
I think by far the most important traits are cultural and behavioural.
'Intelligence' is a small thing.
Grit, self-discipline, conscientiousness, curiosity, disposition, manners, curiosity, ethics, integrity, attitude towards education, planning for the future, views towards family etc. etc. I think are far more important than raw intelligence.
Of course if your parents are CEO's in industry, they're going to expose you to that and the frame of mind necessary, much like so many actors parents are also actors/directors/creatives etc..
The lesson that one should never take candy from strangers does not seem like an acceptable place to practice human experimentation, especially on children.
Makes me wonder what happens if the kid simply doesn't like eating marshmallows. Would that also be counted as them putting it off, or is the test set up in such a way that said people are counted out beforehand?
Hell, it seems someone's taste in general may affect the results for any of these tests. Much easier to put off something you only sort of like rather than something you're obssessed with...
Since there's nothing inherently appealing about marshmallows to children, an assortment of interesting looking treats could have been presented, and the children should have ranked them in terms of how much they wanted to try each. Then they could perform the test with each and the outcomes could be compared by the weighted values.
They did the marshmallow test with me as a child, and I thought it was dumb because I didn't like marshmallows; of course I wasn't eager to eat one. When we got the reward, I gave mine away to a kid who ate theirs initially. Had it been a puzzle they asked us not to touch, it might have gone differently.
It's a very subjective test and can easily underestimate the children's preferences.
If I am not mistaken article didn't mention kids age? Anyone knows? I assume above 3 (judging by paragraph about home environment.) The thing is, above certain age it would be very easy to get kids into a challenge and make them to wait. Not to mention that marshmallow may not be a treat for some.
How is the marshmallow test (or "The Boy Who Ate the Marshmallow") different from "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"? Both teach a lesson with a nugget of wisdom, the former about the perils of self-indulgence, the latter about the foolishness of sounding a false alarm. Both lessons are supported by numerous examples--far more than 90--that each of us has observed in our own lives. But one is presented as a self-contained fictional story, while the other is told as the result of an experiment that revealed some kind of natural law.
Why is our culture so drawn to presentations of basic life lessons as if they were the results of scientific experimentation? It's as if we have some sort of self-consciousness about "believing in" fables that drives us towards the telling of "fables-as-science".
>For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting.
If food is scarce, wouldn't food hoarding be the rational action?
That happens too, but sitting in a room looking at a marshmallow that's not yours as part of some weird test by adults that aren't trustworthy is NOT the same as having the marshmallow.
You might reimagine the test as the 'adults lie and don't keep their promises' test. There's been times I'd absolutely snatch the marshmallow. Then it's munch mine, good luck taking THAT away, adult ;)
This is the first time I've read about this test and the correlation of willpower to being good at managing money looks like those theories that people share on social media but are just fake news.
> evaluated according to a standard research measure that notes, for instance, the number of books that researchers observed in the home and how responsive mothers were to their children in the researchers’ presence
Number of books? Seriously? This is the stupidest...
Almost all the books in my childhood home belonged to me. My parents and one of my brothers never read for fun, and and my other brother only rarely. One of my friends was similar, his siblings didn't read almost at all (though I think he got most of his books from the library, so there were few in the house).
Counting just the number of books tells you almost nothing about any given individual family member.
Someone, please, tell me this journalist is incorrectly simplifying the actual standard practice...
Is this field even about "science" per se? It seems more oriented towards fashioning just-so-stories that lend a scientific veneer to some piece of folk wisdom in order to generate a buzz.
My own "experimentation" suggests that the character trait that predisposes one to bandy about pop allegories such as "marshmallow test" is a portentous sign in potential managers.
"This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior—than those who dug right in."
Since "standardized test scores" tends to measure IQ, it seems this can be re-phrased as "those who did well on the will-power test did not necessarily do well on the IQ test, and vice versa."
In other words, raw will-power is not correlated with raw IQ. Which I think I already knew? I've certainly known some athletes who were probably not as smart as me, but who definitely had more will-power than me.
Now that I think about it how is athleticism not considered a parameter of IQ? If you can learn to shoot a basketball 10x faster and with more accuracy than me, isn't your brain learning faster than mine?
It doesn't mean you know a lot or are good at high school maths.
IIRC an ideal IQ test would be something you could take even if you can't read and haven't learned maths and it will tell you something about your general problem solving skills.
And as we all know, people can be excellent problem solvers without being very athletic at all, so mixing that into the score would actually make it less useful.
Someone who in principle has a very high "Athletic Quotient" may be relatively bad at this depending on how many times they've attempted it before the test.
A good AQ test would hopefully control for this? Though my understanding is that IQ doesn't control very well for practice either. It's a hard problem.
Motor skills and muscle memory vs brain thinkings stuff (logic, analysis, problem solving, etc). I don't know what the difference is between the two in terms of how much brain activity and ability they require, but it seems like there would be a difference.
Motor skills and muscle memory both originate from the brain, just a different area than brain thinkings stuff. I would assume shooting a ball would require more brain activity than solving a math problem because more senses are involved.
It always perplexed me why the people who were great at math could not figure out how to spin the ball of the backboard and score from anywhere on the court without athleticism required.
I'm sure they could, or at least approximate it to a close degree.
But even if you determine the proper amount of force and launch angle for a given position, that doesn't mean you'll be able to actually execute. Also, of course, basketball isn't played in a vacuum. No defender is going to let you sit there and calculate the proper trajectory or let you shoot the ball unimpeded.
A much better example would be pool - and in fact, pool is often used as a teaching method for basic geometry (angles/reflections/etc) and physics (elastic collisions).
> A much better example would be pool - and in fact, pool is often used as a teaching method for basic geometry (angles/reflections/etc) and physics (elastic collisions).
It gets even more interesting once you start adding spin to your shots! Unfortunately, my physics skills are relatively lacking, so most of my pool knowledge/skills don't have much of a mathematical basis.
Because very precisely throwing a ball using the human muskulo-skeletal system is an extraordinarily difficult and complicated problem, not easily amenable to symbolic analysis.
Even stating the problem precisely (on paper) requires PhD-level physics/math, there are dozens of moving parts involved, the timing of various actions must be perfectly choreographed, and the system is constantly changing.
They also seem to be strongly suggesting that those who perform well at this test of will power are no more likely to be successful than those who don't when controlled for economic background.
In other words, people who have more resources available don't optimize for immediate reward as much.
I found the following post [1] to make a very compelling argument that the Marshmallow test isn't really testing for the ability to defer gratification, but for a "generalised ability/desire to take and pass tests" (manifesting itself here as the desire to pass the Marshmallow test). The post argues that this is an underrecognised character trait which can predict success in today's Western test-oriented world. Certainly I personally possess this trait in spades, and my personal history is full of instances where this trait was extremely useful to me.
Assuming the trait is either heritable or culturally imbued (and intuitively it seems very likely that at least one of those is true), it makes sense that rich parents are more likely to have children who are either natively or culturally high in The Desire To Pass Tests: indeed, our society heavily rewards people who have TDTPT, so rich parents are more likely to be high in TDTPT and therefore are more likely to have genetically or culturally passed it to their children.
Not to be snarky, but a comment like this makes it look like you did not bother to read the submitted article, as it states:
> This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior—than those who dug right in. Similarly, among kids whose mothers did not have college degrees, those who waited did no better than those who gave in to temptation, once other factors like household income and the child’s home environment at age 3 (evaluated according to a standard research measure that notes, for instance, the number of books that researchers observed in the home and how responsive mothers were to their children in the researchers’ presence) were taken into account. For those kids, self-control alone couldn’t overcome economic and social disadvantages.
Please refer to the hn guidelines (linked in the footer)
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Regarding the content of your post: I don't see how that quote relates at all to the parent. They were talking about how "desire/ability to pass a test" is an interesting variable in these scenarios – something that's not mentioned in the article at all.
It's directly related. His quote says that students who did well on the marshmallow test didn't do better on standardised tests. So it's unlikely they are just better test-takers.
GPs explanation is nothing more than a hypothesis as to why the Marshmallow test would be predictive of later performance:
> The post argues that [a "generalised ability/desire to take and pass tests"] is an underrecognised character trait which can predict success in today's Western test-oriented world.
In other words: it follows the assumption that being good at the Marshmallow test represents inherent character traits that are predictive of later performance. Except that the whole point of the article is debunking this notion, and the paragraph that I quote highlights this in particular.
The new paper shows that this is not the case. The Marshmallow test still is predictive, but that seems to be because being able to take it correlates with having affluent backgrounds, not with it representing an inherent character trait that predicts anything.
> The new paper shows that this is not the case. The Marshmallow test still is predictive, but that seems to be because being able to take it correlates with having affluent backgrounds, not with it representing an inherent character trait that predicts anything.
And Smaug123 referenced that by saying
> Assuming the trait is either heritable or culturally imbued (and intuitively it seems very likely that at least one of those is true), it makes sense that rich parents are more likely to have children who are either natively or culturally high in The Desire To Pass Tests
You might have misinterpreted the article in question, since you write:
> it follows the assumption that being good at the Marshmallow test represents inherent character traits that are predictive of later performance. Except that the whole point of the article is debunking this notion [...]
The article does no such thing. It only shows that controlled for socioeconomic situation, there is no correlation. That does not mean that there is no predictive power.
First of all, I do not understand why you would argue that I don't understand the article because I supposedly claim that the test has no predictive power, since I literally write "the Marshmallow test still is predictive".
Furthermore, Smaug123's explanation here is flawed:
> Assuming the trait is either heritable or culturally imbued (and intuitively it seems very likely that at least one of those is true), it makes sense that rich parents are more likely to have children who are either natively or culturally high in The Desire To Pass Tests
The reason it does not make sense in this context is the very thing you cite yourself: when controlled for socio-economic background, the predictive power disappears. If the predictive power of the Marshmallow test could be ascribed to character traits, controlling to socio-economic backgrounds should enhance the signal of the predictive power, not remove it altogether.
> If the predictive power of the Marshmallow test could be ascribed to character traits, controlling to socio-economic backgrounds should enhance the signal of the predictive power, not remove it altogether.
This might be the source of the misunderstanding: What you say would only be true if character traits and socioeconomic background were uncorrelated, which is the opposite of what smaug suggested.
If the relationship is `y=x₀+x₁+𝓝`, then x₀ is more strongly correlated to `y-x₁` than it is to `y` alone. This holds even if x₀ and x₁ are strongly correlated, as long as they're not 100% correlated.
The question isn't whether you can produce example models where "What [vanderZwan says] would only be true if character traits and socioeconomic background were uncorrelated", it's whether it holds in general.
>, but for a "generalised ability/desire to take and pass tests [...] the desire to pass the Marshmallow test). [...]
You and the blog you linked are getting sidetracked by the word "test" in "Marshmallow Test". You're thinking of academic/schooling connotations of "test" instead of the scientific observations of a "test".
I'd suggest to rewrite the "Marshmallow Test" in the brain as "Marshmallow Experiment". It is the observation of an experiment.
The children ages 4 to 6 in the original Stanford experiments were not aware they were "taking a test" for a "correct" answer. There is no correct answer. It's a setup for choices taken by children. Choosing 1 marshmallow instead of waiting 15 minutes for 2 is not a "wrong" answer. The choices are collected as observations and researchers try to find correlations. In this way, the "Marshmallow Test" is more like "Pepsi/Coke taste test" instead of "SAT tests".
The Marshmallow experiment may be flawed and the correlations may be also be dubious but dismissing it because children are trying to "pass tests" is misinterpreting it.
But the Marshmallow Test is a test! The child is told not to eat the marshmallow (maybe not in so many words), so there's an obvious correct answer to the test ("don't eat the marshmallow"), and some people are motivated to take that answer because they are motivated to do well when they are being tested. My own history is full of this kind of incident.
EDIT: to clarify, the Marshmallow Test is a test when viewed by someone who is always on the lookout for tests, like me and like some other children. Many children, I'm sure, would not view it as a test, and might correspondingly not pass it.
Again, you're still misinterpreting the word "test" in "Marshmallow Test". (Also keep in mind that "marshmallow test" isn't what the Stanford researchers called it.[1] The "Marshmallow Test" was only colloquial shorthand for behavioral experiments.)
When you use the phrases "correct", "do well", "pass", it means you're repeating the same mistake of applying your post-hoc reasoning of "test" to 4-year old brains.
Thinking that "waiting for 2 marshmallows" is the _correct_ answer is the wrong framework to use.
This is not a school test where "2+3" where "5" is correct and "8" is incorrect.
This is a psychological test where "test" means a contrived social apparatus to observe behavioral choices. This means that "choosing not to wait and immediately consume 1 marshmallow" is also the _correct_ answer.
The child is given a choice where he/she must weigh an uncertain future with a certain present desire. There is no right or wrong answer. There is no pass or fail. There are only choices and observations of those choices.
For example, one of the criticisms of the "Marshmallow Experiment" is that the researchers were actually measuring "trust & reliability of adults" vs "delayed gratification". In other words, the way we label the behavorial experiments will distort our view of what we think the "correct" answer is.
E.g. if Johnny was told in the past by his mother that if he stopped pulling his sister's hair in the car, he'd get a treat when they got home. However, his monther didn't followup on that promise. Therefore, when the researcher gives him a choice between 1 marshmallow now or 2 if he waited until later, it means the 4-year old's "optimization" of the uncertain future is to take the 1 marshmallow now. This is the "correct" answer for him.
I think you're misunderstanding The Desire To Pass Tests, and GP's point about it.
One choice of the Marshmallow Test results in a bigger number and one choice results in a smaller number. To a person with The Desire To Pass Tests, this is interpreted as equivalent to the score on a school test. In other words, the bigger number signals that one answer is correct, to someone who looks out for those signals.
This is not saying that the choice is correct, in an inherent sense, and I think that's what you're getting hung up on. The Marshmallow Test measures behavior choices and there's no objective correct answer, but those behavior choices may have a reason or a reasoning framework behind them. And that reasoning framework may be an already-instilled belief that given two options, one option is correct and it's important to choose that option. In other words, the behavioral choice is to treat the experiment as a school test and try to pass that test.
Reply to both Cogito and lmkg since they are similar counterpoints:
>Cogito: "maximum number of marshmallows"*
>lmkg: "the bigger number signals that one answer is correct,"
If the child doesn't trust or believe the researcher (a stranger), then in his mind, the 1 marshmallow is a bigger number than zero marshmallows promised later. Because "later" could translate to "never", and "2 marshmallows" could translate to "0 marshmallows".
Is it possible for a few, or some of the very young 4-year old children to meta-analyze the situation and conclude "you can't trick me, this is really a test!" ??
Sure, but Smaug123 contended that this reasoning process generalized to the test population.
If we want to entertain the fact that children want to "please" adults to "pass a test", we also have to accept that they can interpret the situation as "evaluating promises of future rewards being kept or broken" and rationally choose 1 marshmallow as the optimum decision. Choosing 1 now is also "passing a test" if we insist on framing it as a "test" in the vein of Hercules 12 labors. ("See mom, you told me to never trust strangers and so I got the 1 marshmallow right away.")
If we still want to hang on to the idea that 4-year olds keep reinterpreting life interactions as a "test to pass", a lot of frustrated parents are going to wonder... "why can't Johnny see that keeping to himself instead of pulling his sisters hair to get a piece of candy later is a TEST TO PASS?!? He just keeps misbehaving!" <-- If that situation is happening, it means overlaying observed behavior (both wanted & unwanted behaviors) with a framework of "desire to pass a test" is overestimating its explanatory power.
I don't think they are misinterpreting anything, just explaining their point in a way that looks like misinterpretation to you :D
Let me try another way.
1. Some children, of which I would have been an example, when sat down and told about the marshmallows will interpret this interaction as a test.
2. Believing that they are being tested, some of these children, of which I would also have been an example, will want to pass the test.
3. Based on previous experience, some of these children, of which I would have been an example, will believe that they pass the test if they get the maximum number of marshmallows.
To be fair, what I would have considered the correct answer may have depended on how exactly the scenario was described to me, but considering various options I think almost every time I would have thought waiting was the correct action - this is obviously through the lens of hindsight rationalisation so I have no way to support this idea.
All that aside, it appears that even if having some desire to pass tests makes a child more inclined to "pass" the Marshmallow Test, it doesn't provide any significant predictive power on the outcome that was measured when you also account for the socio-economic factors discussed in the article.
I, on the other hand, am completely devoid of any desire to take or pass tests or perform for grader's/test takers, yet subjectively, I'd rate myself out to the right on the delayed gratification ability.
The first created/creates significant problems in engaging with formal schooling: when I was younger I began simply not turning up to class or participating in assessment. It created the awkward situation where I did do a national standardised test one day and topped the year group for maths, but received a failing grade for maths class. In uni, the pattern essentially repeated itself. I (correctly) percieved the test taking and assessment as pedagogically irrelevant, and deviated from the course curriculums where my interests and own study took me.
Delayed gratification however IS an important skill. One that, almost mathematically by definition, must give an advantage since it has an absolute advantage over the alternative. A person capable of delayed gratification has a greater range of possible options and strategies to achieve their goals, and can always opt for immediate gratification where it is appropriate, whereas a person incapable of delayed gratification can partake in no such choice.
If empirical attempts to measure the effect of delayed gratification show no advantage therefore (assuming successful experiment design), there's actually another troubling possibility: society is (now) basing the distribution rewards and outcomes on those behaviours that are not determined by delayed gratification.
Two immediate ways spring to mind, but it's a fundamental feature of my nature and I feel its influence in many of the things I do.
* Liking (and therefore being good at) taking tests was useful in getting me into Cambridge, for example, and then in doing well at Cambridge.
* I can feel The Desire To Pass Tests unfolding within me during interviews, like Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres's dark side, and it definitely helps: my Test-Taker enjoys interviews, however scared I might be of them, so I just let the Test-Taker take the interview instead of me.
I absolutely hated taking tests (despite being good at it), and it's the reason why I dropped out of grad school and started a business. Everything in academia seemed to be a never ending series of tests: first literal tests and exams, later talk proposals and article submissions and applications for scholarships or grants... Academia seemed like one test after another, with no end in sight.
At some point I just couldn't stand the feeling of other people judging me any more. I really liked university, I liked all those smart people, the work seemed interesting, but I just didn't want to be tested any more.
Being self-employed means I no longer need to take tests. (I probably couldn't start a "startup" either, since applying for investments would be like taking a test as well)
> When my friends said I was a “genius,” I would sort-of-joke that I didn’t know anything but could score 75% on any test with a Scantron.
This was a common sentiment among me and my friends in highschool. Much of the time, one or two of the answers to any given multiple-choice question were obviously wrong, and quite often another could be eliminated just because we knew the teacher or their previous tests well enough.
That's too absolute a statement. If you're really good at a subject but terrible at taking tests, you can still do really well in a test by pure brute ability. But one of the money quotes from the blog post is:
> When my friends said I was a “genius,” I would sort-of-joke that I didn’t know anything but could score 75% on any test with a Scantron.
Test-taking is an ability that you can train (and, like any ability, some people enjoy exercising it and some do not), which in a select few situations can substitute for mastery of many other skills. Those select few situations also happen to be pretty common in the Western world.
When I was in school I used to joke that my greatest aptitude was for taking multiple-choice tests. I can do well on almost any multiple choice tests by using elimination and observations about the system of the test writer.
It's simple: we're looking for thoughtful conversation. We don't much care about your opinions, but if you express them in flamebaity or shallow ways, we'll ask you to do better. Please do better.
You'd expect poor kids to be good at self control (they're used to not be fed every 15 minutes) while rich kids being spoiled and not caring for an extra marshmallow.
- a poor man and a rich man are going to work when they each see a dollar coin on a sidewalk. Which of them would bother to pick it up?
- a poor man and a rich man are both drunk after spending a night at the bar. Which one would take a $50 taxi home, and which one will take a bus for $5 (you have to wait 15 minutes for a bus).
- a poor man and a rich man are both hungry and walk by a restaurant for rich people. It would take an extra 15 minutes to walk to a crappy diner for poor people, but a lunch costs 5x cheaper there. Where would each man dine?
Rich man would pick it up, that's $720/hour if it takes 5 seconds. It's things like that that make you rich. Poor guy would probably pick it up too unless he's paranoid people will think he's poor.
>bus
Again looks like huge earnings per hour. He'll take the bus in this example unless he has something very lucrative that he's missing out on, but he's drunk so that's very unlikely.
>restaurant
Depends on the cost of the different places. It might not be worth the time to walk to the other place if the difference isn't great. If he's on a weekday lunchbreak, his time might be better spent elsewhere. Same thing for the poor guy.
You're assuming all rich people are pennypinchers like Warren Buffet. In reality most rich people are rich because they were born into a rich family and had the ideal opportunities to win at life from the start. The fact that in reality you won't see rich people riding buses or picking up coins on the street just shows that it's not about making most money per hour.
And in marshmallow test specifically you don't have kids who are good at business and kids who are bad at business. You have kids of rich parents and kids of poor parents. The fact that the former are supposed to act like pennypinchers, despite not ever having to worry about money or being fed seems counterintuitive to me.
If you define rich as the top 1% than yes it might be from inheritance but studies I've seen say over 80% of millionaires are self-made and didn't grow up wealthy.
Our cats have never in their lives had to worry about food, yet they still become anxious around mealtimes. That suggests that it is trait common to all mammals regardless of their "wealth".
My cat has food laid out for it all day. It has no "mealtimes" to get anxious over. Not sure what conclusions you can draw from the fact that your cats did indeed build up an appetite between meals.
um... They naturally get hungry, in other words. They recognize patterns. This isn't the same.
This is more like giving your cat a treat, and testing whether or not the cat has the self-control to not eat it for a time so they can double their reward.
Developers also routinely fail the Marshmallow test:
Should I develop for iOS, make a quick buck but give Apple more control over my work, and contribute to the growth of the platform, leading to a vicious cycle of control of Apple over developers?
... OR ...
Should I develop applications in a platform-independent way, but perhaps with slower returns?
But they're not "failing" the test. If you take so long to develop the software that you run out of funding, you're worse off than having written the iOS-only code.
You're only guaranteed to have time to develop things right if you have more than enough personal funds and no investors breathing down your throat, i.e., if you're rich. The marshmallow test just measures richness. Everyone else needs to ship something in three months for Demo Day.
Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal.
The original paper relied partly on a questionnaire that asked the parents how good their kids were at self-control. That seems unlikely to be reliable. They also used SAT scores, which seems like a better measure. The abstract for the new paper doesn't mention what they measured.
In conclusion, I'm not sure I learned anything here.