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Comment by lr4444lr | Hacker News Reader

Delayed gratification AFAIK has solid research as a trait predictive of many things. That a child's ability at 4 or 5 to do it being predictive of their adult self is something else, though.

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There could easily be confounders to that though. Like people who are wealthy might be able to delay satisfaction better than poor, because their needs are more satisfied.

Indeed, and the article mentions this. “The Watts study findings support a common criticism of the marshmallow test: that waiting out temptation for a later reward is largely a middle or upper class behavior. If you come from a place of shortages and broken promises, eating the treat in front of you now might be the better bet than trusting there will be more later.”

To say this more explicitly, even the idea of waiting for the second marshmallow being the "preferred" behavior is somewhat classist.

Sounds more like the test is just testing for an adaptation that happens to be well suited to living in a upper-middle class to wealthy environment. If resources are scarce, the kid that takes what they can get now rather than trusting other people will do better in the long run.

A lot of observable phenomena function as positive feedback loops, simply because positive feedback loops are usually needed to generate effect sizes that become "observable" beyond individual variation. It's very likely the being able to delay gratification makes you wealthy, which makes you better able to delay gratification, which makes you wealthier, and so on. And that's why we have discernible social classes, where mobility from one to another becomes very difficult.

Breaking the feedback loop usually involves doing something farsighted, risky, and irrational - for example, risking getting fired from your retail job by studying programming and applying to software engineering jobs in your downtime, or quitting your stable corporate job to found a startup.

Predictive is synonymous with correlated in a research setting, but lay use of that word seems like it runs the risk of implying causation. This may be the primary problem with the Standford Marshmallow experiment, right? - that delayed gratification is highly correlated with socioeconomic status, which is well known to be an excellent predictor of future socioeconomic status.

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