There was a famous study done 50 years ago at Stanford University. It is referred to as the “marshmallow test” I recently listened to a podcast of Hidden Brain that reviewed the test and came up with some alternate theories on what happened. A brief recap from the podcast
You bring a child into a room, the child is between the ages of three and five years old, and you offer them a choice. They can have one marshmallow right now, or if they can wait until the researcher leaves the room and then comes back. They’re told if they have not touched or tasted the marshmallow, then they’re going to be given two marshmallows instead. The researcher leaves the room, they leave the child alone with the one marshmallow on the table. The child is instructed to stay in the chair. Then the researchers wait to see how long before the child eats the marshmallow.
When to eat the Marshmallow: Hidden Brain
As you can imagine, some kids waited, while other just ate the marshmallow in front of them. The author of the study, Walter Mischel, said that those kids that that could wait had a capacity for “delayed gratification”. He though this might be an important skill in life, so he followed up with the participants later in life.
The follow up results are what catapulted this study into pop culture. He found that those who had the self-control to wait for the second marshmallow had better life outcomes as adults. They had lower body mass indexes, high SAT scores, and over all did better in life.
The podcast then talked about explanations other than an innate ability of self-control. Dr Celest Kidd, a psychologist UC Berkley, had worked with kids in shelters. When she first heard of the marshmallow test, her first though went to a little girl at the shelter, who when and older boy took her lollipop did nothing. No crying, just accepted it as a condition of living in the shelter. Dr Kidd knew that this little girl would eat the marshmallow immediately because if she didn’t, somebody might come and take it away, or there might not even be a second marshmallow. Her theory was that the ability to delay gratification in the marshmallow test doesn’t just depend on your capacity for self-control. It depends on whether you believe there really is a second marshmallow waiting for you if you hold off eating the first.
She then devised an experiment to test her theory. She had two groups of kids, one labeled reliable, and the other unreliable. A child was placed in a room and given some crayons to color with. They were then told that if they wait, the person would come back in a few minutes with a much bigger art set. All the kids chose to wait. Those that were assigned to the reliable group were brought the bigger art set in a few minutes. The experimenter came back to the child assigned to the unreliable group in a few minutes, and apologized, telling them that they were mistaken, and they don’t have the bigger set of art supplies, and to just use the crayons.
Now all the kids were given the marshmallow test. The kids in the unreliable group only waited on average 3 minutes before eating the marshmallow. The kids in the reliable group waited on average 12 minutes, four times as long. In some cases the reliable group never at the marshmallow.
Dr Kidd’s results show that our capacity for self-control is shaped by whether we live in a safe and predictable world or a dangerous and unpredictable world.
How could this be applied to religious belief? The whole idea of religion is “delayed gratification”. Sacrifice something now to get something greater in the afterlife. Those with the will power to live a life of sacrifice are better people, and deserve a greater reward. But applying the results of Dr Kidd’s study above, what about people that have been pre-conditioned through life experiences to distrust people in authority? Could the circumstances of one’s upbringing make one less susceptible to religion, especially a high demand religion?
What is your thoughts on the results of Dr Kidd’s test? Could these results help us to be less judgmental of others for their lack of “self-control”?
Wheat & Tares 
“The whole idea of religion is “delayed gratification”. Sacrifice something now to get something greater in the afterlife. Those with the will power to live a life of sacrifice are better people, and deserve a greater reward.”
This is a central problem with many religions: They’re basically just reward & punishment based. But what if religion is based on service to humankind and creation itself? What if we actually paid attention to and followed the teachings and example of Jesus? What if, instead of focusing on “celestial placement,” we spent our time, effort, and energy on loving and serving others?
I know, what crazy and foolish ideas! Just eat the marshmallow(s). Or is it a choice between a red pill or blue pill?
Great post BB! I wish there was an online discussion group that could get together after each Hidden Brain podcast to discuss, it is always thought provoking.
I had not thought of the implications of the study in terms of high demand religions, but it I agree that it does has important ramifications.
It does seem like some churches/religions focus on the value of an action to its consequences within a local time frame: treat others as you would like to be treated so that the community is fair and supportive while others like Mormonism place much more emphasis on the pay-out in the afterlife. And if one loses faith in the LDS church’s actual knowledge of the afterlife (e.g. that only those sealed in temple get the reward of eternal companionship and living with God):then the motivation to do costly acts (pay huge amounts of money to the institution, spend most of Sundays away from family in church callings, excluding members of other faiths from wedding ceremonies, constantly badgering others to join your church, giving up the social value of adult beverages, wearing ill fitting underwear, treating women and LGBTQ individuals as inferior) for that supposed greater payout in the afterlife goes away rapidly.
I think in the long run, spiritual movements that have something like a 60:30:10 reward outcome portfolio might be best at motivating action. Meaning its teaching have 60% payoff in terms of a better life in the near term (happier relationships. more meaningful work, and feeling of peace and security) 30% payoff in the longer term (better community and world-the kingdom of God is with you) and a 10% payoff in the nebulous afterlife. Most importantly, it helps if, like what Jesus taught, the chosen actions have clear connections to all three phases of outcome. That’s the kind of reliable outcomes it seems worth trusting in enough to make real sacrifices for. In that way, putting trust in Jesus makes much more sense to me than putting trust in RMN.
This is exactly why we shouldn’t judge why someone does something. If the world makes sense to you, if the prosperity gospel has always worked, if the authorities telling you what to do have been reliably compassionate and never hypocritical, why wouldn’t you follow their directions?
However, if the authorities have been deceptive, oppressive, and apparently acting without understanding or knowledge of the actual situations of your life, if following their directions has failed to work out in the past, then why would you do what they ask?
You may have your own reasons, but their statements of theology and authority won’t mean anything to you except cultural pressure and condemnation.
“The whole idea of religion is “delayed gratification”.
I disagree. I won’t deny that many people make religion into an exercise in delayed gratification, but if that’s the primary feature of religion you can count me out. The gospel of Jesus Christ (I won’t pretend to speak for non-christian religions) should make the world a better place today for the adherent and their neighbors. Yes, there are marshmallows to be shared rather than gobbled up, but that isn’t a case of delayed gratification. A marshmallow shared can be better than a marshmallow eaten. Loving and serving others is rewarding today.
The Mormonism that focuses on slogging through guilt inducing meetings today for the promise of a celestial mansion is one of the worst kinds of Mormonism. (There are so many bad kinds of Mormonism that it is frightening to think about ranking them.)
Dang – my comment disappeared! First off I had to grab a marshmallow from an opened stash so that they get slightly hardened. No delayed gratification for me!
What I think I wrote was that I wonder what this church would be like if we didn’t have temples and all the rituals. Would members still feel committed and connected without making the covenants that we have promised to keep with a sense that our eternal lives are tied to keeping them? I wonder instead what out church could be if all that time and money could be funneled into what Jesus actually taught. Perhaps having that hope for eternal reward can assuage some of the angst, hurt and pain we might have here in our earthly life? But from what I have heard and gleaned from several GC talks is that group that meet them ‘C’ (I refuse to say the latest catchphrase) threshold is getting smaller and smaller. So many families aren’t fitting the tidy Mormon ideal. And then we have our LGBTQ+ families and friends who are just totally othered.
The experiment misses the depth of the problem because an important point it is a laboratory experiment. There is a difference between children who didn’t get the art set and a neglected child. It was an experiment where it is unethical to starve children. Real children raised in abusive or neglectful situations are not like happy well fed kids in a laboratory. If they eat the whole marshmallow as soon as they can grab it, they get a whole marshmallow. If they go to share it they may not get any marshmallow because the bigger brother they offer to share with will just take the whole thing. So, giving to the poor is hard because that is that much less food security for them. As children when in foster care, they hoard food, stealing it and hiding it. As adults, they may become hoarders, saving every paper bag, newspaper, plastic bowl, bleach bottle. Because that starving child never leaves their mind and they are still afraid of doing without. Religion may mean nothing because the concept of God is based on your idea of parents, and when you have never known parental love or caring, how can you imagine a “Heavenly Father”? They are incapable of giving to others and can’t imagine a nurturing kind of love or community.
The kids responded differently after only one disappointment about being promised something more. Imagine growing to be six, seven, whatever you are when someone finally notices and reports to child protective services. Then, while you might be cared for, you get bounced from foster home to foster home.
[Anna takes off her social worker hat.]
But the posters who say religion should not be about delayed gratification are right about what religion should be. It should be about sharing and not worrying that the other does not share in return. It shouldn’t be about earning brownie point for some life after death.
Notice that Jesus didn’t go around telling single sisters that someone will marry them in the next life, or barren women that they will be given children after they are dead. He didn’t tell the beggar that there will be plenty of food in Heaven, nor did he tell the lame man that he will be healed in the resurrection. He took care of the things they needed right then. Or, he just loved them in their pain and comforted them.
But our religion is really good with the promises that God will fix things in the next life. Worried about polygamy. God will work it out. Worried about sickness, think celestial. Worried about destructive family relationships, think celestial.
The Church wants it both ways. On the one hand, they sell the plan of salvation as “the plan of happiness” and in Conference talks always talk about how happy the gospel makes converts. But when things don’t go well or this or that member encounters difficulties, it’s “sacrifice bring forth the blessings of heaven” or something to the effect that God will make it all right in the end. If you’re not happy, you’re at least supposed to *pretend* you are happy.
There is simply no set of worldly situations or outcomes that can’t be wrapped up in the simplistic idea that this is how God wants it, we’ll all be happy in the end, so stop complaining.
“Mortal lifetime is barely a nanosecond compared with eternity. But what a crucial nanosecond it is! Consider carefully how it works: During this mortal life you get to choose which laws you are willing to obey—those of the celestial kingdom, or the terrestrial, or the telestial—and, therefore, in which kingdom of glory you will live forever. What a plan!”
Were I to read these words in isolation, I would assume that the writer was critically pointing out plot holes in the plan of salvation. How reasonable is it that the choices that we make in this “crucial nanosecond”, where none of us has solid evidence regarding exactly what we’re being tested on, would have infinite consequences?
But no, President Nelson (and Oaks when he quoted Nelson in the latest GC) was actually touting the plan, adding “It is a plan that completely honors your agency.”
An analogous marshmallow test would be one in which the child must wait some unrevealed amount of time before eating the marshmallow, or the child will never be able to eat anything sweet ever again, worlds without end.
It’s certainly true that “charity covereth a multitude of sins.” Even so, the Savior tells his disciples that not only should they not commit adultery–they shouldn’t even lust. And not only should they not kill–they shouldn’t even get angry. Now maybe he’s only trying to convey the notion that there’s a gap between the behavior of those who are transformed by his spirit and those who aren’t. But even so, it seems to me that those who wish to follow the Savior would put forth some effort to behave in the ways that he’s outlined — regardless of where they’re at in the process of transformation — even if it means having to put some things aside to do things his way–whether it’s pride & vanity, hate & anger, lust & passions, possessions & toys, etc.
Robert,
Re: the crucial nanosecond of mortality that decides everything,
Our own theology and practice obviously contradicts this notion. We perform ordinances on behalf of dead people, who must be experiencing some type of agency to choose to accept them long after their nanosecond of mortality. I don’t understand how people with the intellectual gifts of Presidents Nelson and Oaks, given also the amount of time they have to read and think about the scriptures, cannot see these kinds of inconsistencies in their approach.
Jack, it is probably just me, but often when I read your comments, the song, “I can buy myself flowers” pops into my head.
No one is talking about our right to “pride & vanity, hate & anger, lust & passions, possessions & toys” here. It’s much more about recognizing that we have inherent critical thinking abilities, and allowing ourselves the right to use them.
Jack – I think you and almost everyone misses the deeper point Jesus is teaching to his Pharisaical audience. These folks are caught up in “external behaviors” as the defining characteristic of Holiness, and Jesus comes along like a good defense attorney to cross examine their claims. The sermon on the mount is about replacing the idea that the gospel is about how you are “seen” by God, and instead, entirely the process of “seeing” like God. Jesus is pointing to how their rigid, obedience-based system has corrupted their insides, created enmity in their hearts, and hatred for those who don’t fit the “mold”. Their religious system has been hijacked by sin and repurposed for personal gain and glory. The message from Jesus is clear to me, as Hosea 6:6 states, “wants mercy, not sacrifice”. He wants to stop the futile game of keeping rules as a way to get God’s mercy and allow the gospel to transform us “Into Mercy”. He wants us to “be mercy”, not get mercy.
Both Bishop Bill & I appear to be listening to the same podcasts. I love Hidden Brain, and this specific update on the old marshmallow test was really great. Considering the OP’s questions, what struck me is that all church members are asked to sacrifice / perform certain rules & commandments, but those sacrifices are nothing to some people in their circumstances and are a huge deal to others. The commandment or rule is the same, but the impacts are completely different.
For a few quick (and obvious examples) if couples are told by leaders not to delay child-bearing, whose actual body is on the line? Whose education and career goals are more likely to be negatively impacted? Or here’s another with a clear gender difference: garments. We’ve already discussed plenty that garments are more similar to men’s underwear and work fine with the majority of men’s clothing. A post on BCC (with a whole lot of research behind it) showed that only between 4-8% of women’s clothing on macys.com actually would work with garments, depending on the woman’s height and body type. This wasn’t really a “modesty” issue either, just the fact that women’s clothing is not designed like men’s clothing, and our bodies also differ greatly. Another obvious one is that the Proclamation as written hits completely differently for men than for women, and for heterosexuals and cisgender people than for LBTQ people.
But, as with the marshmallow test, it’s much easier to look at those who didn’t wait and make a moral judgment when their outcomes are worse when the reality is that the worse outcomes could be due to underlying factors. Correlation doesn’t always equal causation, but as humans, it’s our go-to explanation. It could in fact be that instead of A causing B or B causing A, both A and B are caused by C.
I always hated that experiment. What if I only want ONE marsh mellow? It presupposes that more is better AND that we all agree that more is better.
On another note, I am always a little peeved when people say, be happy now, and quite worrying about your reward. I think if you have had a happy full life, that works for you. My life has been a bitter disappointment. I’m hoping the next WILL be more rewarding.
There’s value in learning to delay gratification, but I don’t think that should be the primary purpose of religion. I think ideally religion should be a community where people can be accepted and supported in a way that helps them rise above the uneven playing field of life.
My late grandfather had a lot of friends from all different backgrounds. Once when I was very young my cousin and I were with him in the city, and we were chuckling at an overweight homeless man sleeping in the park. I still remember his rebuke: “Don’t you judge that man – you don’t know his story. You don’t know how people got where they are or what they’ve had to live through.” How many people would feel welcome at church if they were treated this way?
The marshmallow experiment also assumes that all kids find marshmallows irresistible…I hate them and have since I was a kid. It would not be hard for me to indefinitely resist a marshmallow for the promise of another disgusting marshmallow even as a child.
Now, switch to tacos and we have a much different experiment 🌮.
If the new drugs out for weight loss have taught us anything, they should teach us that “will power” or “delayed gratification” are not all there is. I found it suspicious that as part of their life success measure the marshmallow test people measured obesity as a negative outcome. So, take the poor kid whose metabolism is off just enough that he feels hungry all the time. He can’t resist the marshmallow. Crayons or money, he could have waited to get twice as much later, but not food. So, duh, he is more likely to end up overweight as an adult. Now, put the same kid on Ozempic and he can resist the marshmallow because he really doesn’t want the marshmallow. By using a marshmallow as their bait, instead of something else the kids might want, the pre-selected those kids more likely to end up with a weight problem, and then just look at their shocking results. In the kids with no will power to resist food, a lot of them ended up overweight.
Anna: which I think goes to another core point of why the marshmallow test isn’t great. We have a tendency to over-ascribe moral values to morally neutral things such as weight and poverty. We so seldom question these assumptions that we go around for decades considering the one-marshmallow kids a bunch of losers when the reality is we as a society are losers for judging people for things out of their control.
The tragedy here is with how many kids have been labelled as “one-marshmallow kids” because of poor experiments like this one? Labelling someone a certain way can have a huge impact on a person throughout their life, same with self-labelling.
There have been studies done where average kids end up in elite schools. They struggle at first, but then have very similar outcomes to the “elite” students… because they are given the resources needed to succeed, not because they’re secretly two-marshmallow kids.
We step into hot water very fast when we start assuming which way the causation arrow points and labelling people accordingly…especially when it’s based on a terrible oversimplification.
The #1 predictor of living in poverty is growing up in poverty…not how many marshmallows you eat. If you are perceived as a high performer, people tend to give you the resources you need to actually be one.
I am entirely with you on that Angela. We make up these stupid stories about how everything happens for a reason and then we ascribe our actions or God’s as controlling what’s happening. But reality is, whether you believe in God or not, the world we live in is controlled by a myriad of physical factors that are mostly out of our control, and almost entirely unknown to us (no matter how much you know). The more you learn the more you realize there’s so much more you don’t know. Things do happen for reasons, but those reasons are typically morally neutral as you said. In my opinion it’s actually anti Christ to imagine that how your life turns out is due to your own behavior. That’s actually what Korihor preached in Alma 30:17. Reality is bad things and good things happen to everyone, moral or immoral, Matthew 5:45
I had an old chemistry teacher in high school. One day in class he overheard someone talking down to another student about the “gifted” program. He stopped the class and told everyone he had been teaching chemistry for over 30 years, that it was statistically impossible for all of the kids in “gifted and talented” programs to actually be that much smarter than everyone else, and that “gifted and talented” really should be called “overachievers with overachieving parents.”
He then said that in all his decades of teaching that he had taught one truly gifted student – the student was socially odd but was also thinking and asking questions on a level that was far beyond anyone he had ever taught before. Yes, some people were better at chemistry and sciences than others, but none of us was smart enough to be truly labelled as “gifted.” Then he told us that everyone in the class had the potential to achieve at the same level as the “overachievers club” if we worked hard and found our own personal talents.
I’ve always wondered how that speech to rip off labels impacted the outcomes of his students…both the ones he told that they’re smarter than they think, and the ones he told that they’re not as smart as they think.