The Marshmallow Test Is Bunk - The Atlantic

Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s guide to making everyday life vivid again. You’ll receive the first edition of the limited-run newsletter course in early July.<br>Eating a pint of ice cream instead of improving a difficult relationship with your partner is easy. So is scrolling social media instead of completing a cardio workout at the gym. Simple and accessible delights seem like lures that drag you away from a better life, rather than tools to help you achieve a more meaningful one. Seeking gratification, we have been told, feels good in the moment but worse in the long run.<br>But gratification is good—even though it gets a bad rap. People find the enjoyment that gratification offers suspicious, because it became associated with indulgence. And, yes, people sometimes do pursue pleasures such as food, alcohol, drugs, porn, social media, shopping, and gambling to their detriment. Those temptations offer an easy rise that can distract pleasure-seekers from engaging in more spiritually fulfilling long-term pursuits.<br>Indulgences distract us from our goals—or even become sources of harm or destruction—when they are selfish pursuits undertaken only to please ourselves. But gratification can be pointed toward the world—the sensory enchantment of everyday life. The world is full of ordinary stuff with which you might yet commune. Doing so is easy, and free. Simple pleasures are readily available and can overturn the bland monotony of our overly optimized, anodyne world. The more you allow yourself to accept the weird, wonderful gifts that life constantly offers, the more their offerings will feel desirable, even transformative.<br>Gratification is considered dangerous because it is “instant,” offering immediate pleasure at the cost of future benefit. We have been indoctrinated into the cult of “delayed” gratification. Psychologists and economists have spent decades demoting gratification to a sin. They were wrong to do so, and the time has come to reclaim a gratifying life as a virtuous one.<br>The story begins with marshmallows. Beginning in the late 1960s, a group of researchers conducted a series of experiments on children at a local preschool. In a typical study, a researcher would invite a preschool-age child to visit a “surprise room,” a prospect that could have sounded delightful rather than creepy to children of that age and of that era. The surprise room was plain, with two chairs and a table. A tin was placed at the center of the table, and some toys sat on the floor near one of the chairs. The researcher would then show the child the toys and explain how they worked, promising that the child would get to play with them later.<br>Read: Self-control is just empathy with your future self<br>Then the man would offer the tot a small treat—a marshmallow, all white and plush. He’d declare that he was going to leave the room but that the child could make him come back whenever they wanted—although the child would then have to settle for a lesser snack, such as a pretzel.<br>This essay is adapted from Ian Bogost’s forthcoming book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.<br>After the child understood the process, the experimenter would reveal what was under the tin: more and bigger treats, sometimes bigger pretzels and animal crackers. In one test, the researcher announced his intention to leave again, but this time the child had a choice: eat the smaller treat and make the researcher come back, or summon him to return. If the kid waited, he or she would be rewarded with a treat. The man didn’t tell the children how long they had to wait, but he planned to return in about 15 minutes—a long time for someone of any age to just sit there in front of a marshmallow. No matter the child’s choice, the pair would still get to play with the toys afterward.<br>The researchers were Stanford psychologists carrying out an experiment on impulse control devised by Walter Mischel. Their experiment, which became widely known as the marshmallow test, came to represent the levers one might pull to encourage delayed gratification and to quell its presumably dangerous opposite, immediate gratification.<br>That Mischel would hatch the marshmallow test shows just how skeptical our culture is of gratification—and was even more than half a century ago. The psychological and cognitive principle that humans are hardwired to want things, and socially enculturated to desire them immediately, had connected gratification with indulgence long before Mischel set out to measure temptation.<br>Decades earlier, Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, had developed a theory of the “pleasure principle”: Our basic human drives, which Freud called the id, seek immediate gratification for needs such as hunger, thirst, sex, diversion. And conversely, they seek to avoid the pain that comes with failing to fulfill those needs.<br>As psychoanalysis gave way to behavioral science, the pleasure principle evolved...