Marshmallow Test with a twist: 3- and 4‑year-olds kids display more self-control when their reputation is at stake

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Chil­dren Will Wait to Impress Others—Another Twist on the Clas­sic Marsh­mal­low Test (Asso­ci­a­tion for Psy­cho­log­i­cal Science):

If you asked peo­ple to name a famous psy­chol­o­gy study, the “marsh­mal­low test” would prob­a­bly come out near the top of the list. In this task, young chil­dren are told they can imme­di­ate­ly get a small reward (one marsh­mal­low) or wait to get a big­ger reward (two marsh­mal­lows)…

A new study pub­lished in the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence expands on this ear­li­er research … The researchers told the chil­dren that they could earn a small reward imme­di­ate­ly or wait for a big­ger one. Chil­dren were assigned to one of three con­di­tions: a “teacher” con­di­tion, in which they were told that their teacher would find out how long they wait; a “peer” con­di­tion, in which they were told that a class­mate would find out how long they wait; or a “stan­dard” con­di­tion that had no spe­cial instructions.

Chil­dren wait­ed longer in the teacher and peer con­di­tions than in the stan­dard con­di­tion, and they wait­ed about twice as long in the teacher con­di­tion as com­pared to the peer condition.

The researchers were sur­prised by their find­ings because the tra­di­tion­al view is that 3- and 4‑year-olds are too young to care about what oth­er peo­ple think of them.

“The chil­dren wait­ed longer in the teacher and peer con­di­tions even though no one direct­ly told them that it’s good to wait longer,” said Hey­man. “We believe that chil­dren are good at mak­ing these kinds of infer­ences because they are con­stant­ly on the look­out for cues about what peo­ple around them val­ue. This may take the form of care­ful­ly lis­ten­ing to the eval­u­a­tive com­ments that par­ents and teach­ers make, or notic­ing what kinds of peo­ple and top­ics are get­ting atten­tion in the media.”

The Study:

Delay of Grat­i­fi­ca­tion as Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment (Psy­cho­log­i­cal Science).

  • Abstract: Although delay-of-grat­i­fi­ca­tion tasks have long been used as mea­sures of self-con­trol, recent evi­dence sug­gests that per­for­mance on these tasks is also dri­ven by ratio­nal deci­sion process­es. The present research exam­ined whether the effects of ratio­nal deci­sion process­es extend beyond costs and ben­e­fits embed­ded in the task itself to include antic­i­pat­ed con­se­quences for the child’s rep­u­ta­tion. Across two stud­ies, 3- and 4‑year-olds from Chi­na (N = 273) were assigned to a stan­dard delay-of-grat­i­fi­ca­tion con­di­tion or to a rep­u­ta­tion con­di­tion in which they were told that their teacher or a peer would find out how long they had wait­ed. Chil­dren wait­ed longer in the rep­u­ta­tion con­di­tions and longer in the teacher con­di­tion than in the peer con­di­tion. This is the first evi­dence that children’s per­for­mance on a delay-of-grat­i­fi­ca­tion task is sen­si­tive to rep­u­ta­tion­al con­cerns and to the iden­ti­ty of poten­tial eval­u­a­tors of their behavior.

The Study in Context: