It’s not just about 4 year olds and marshmallows
I heard about this study ages ago: the Stanford psychology professor who tested the self control of 4 year olds by leaving them alone in a room with a marshmallow. He told them that if they could wait 15 minutes before eating it, he’d give them a second marshmallow. What I didn’t realize was that this psychologist followed up his research at different stages of these children’s lives and noticed that those who lacked self control in early life, tended towards it in later life:
Thirteen years later Mischel did follow-up research that found dramatic differences between the two groups (the gobblers and the resisters). The gobblers, now high school students, were more likely to have behavioral problems and low attention spans, and they found it difficult to maintain friendships.
Read the full summary at Adbusters.org
Self control is not something we praise in our culture, unless it comes to sports personalities or the extremely wealthy, and I think we’re poorer for it. Our media continuously overloads us with the message that: if we don’t respond to our every urge, there’s something wrong – we’re boring, frigid, or “restrained” (with a negative intonation of the voice).
This is incredibly ironic, considering that self control could play a major role in combatting the ills that plague our various societies: environmental degeneration, slavery, obesity, violence against women, to name just a few.
(image source: Adbusters.org)
