When to Eat the Marshmallow

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the classic children's film, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, a group of children win a private tour of a whimsical candy making plant. There are massive gummy bears hanging from the branches of trees and larger than life mushrooms stuffed with whipped cream. The centerpiece is a decadent river of chocolate.

(Willy Woka clip):

A chocolate river.

That's the most fantastic thing I've ever seen.

(Willy Woka clip):

10,000 gallons an hour.

Shankar Vedantam:

The children's eyes grow wide, but their appetites are even bigger. So many temptations are within easy reach. The kids become greedy and self-indulgent.

(Willy Woka clip):

Hey, she's got two. I want another one. Stop squawking you twit.

(Willy Woka clip):

Everybody has had one and one is enough for anybody. Now come along.

Shankar Vedantam:

Yielding to temptation comes at a cost. One of the children falls down a trash chute. One turns into a blueberry, another is carried away in the chocolate river.

(Willy Woka clip):

He can't swim.

(Willy Woka clip):

There's no better time to learn.

(Willy Woka clip):

There's his coat going up the pipe.

(Willy Woka clip):

Call a plumber. He's stuck in the pipe there, isn't he, Wonka?

Shankar Vedantam:

From Hansel and Gretel, to the story of Ulysses tying himself to the mast of his ship, countless fables and stories have told us about the importance of self-control and the dangers of giving into temptation. These ideas have entered the world of science, too. Psychologists have explored how temptations shape our minds and how self-control can mold our lives. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore a crucial and often overlooked ingredient of self-discipline. We'll also consider when it makes sense to exercise self-discipline and when it might be better to set it aside.

In the early 1970s, a Stanford psychologist named Walter Mischel conducted a series of very simple experiments that would become famous around the world. The subjects in the experiments were children from a nursery school in Palo Alto. Walter Mischel wanted to know how can children develop the ability to exercise self-discipline? He called the experiment the marshmallow test.

Celeste Kidd:

This is how the typical marshmallow test works.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is psychologist Celeste Kidd who works at the University of California Berkeley, 50 miles up the road from Walter Mischel's old lab.

Celeste Kidd:

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.

Shankar Vedantam:

And the thinking here is that there is a treat right in front of the child, presumably the treat is delicious. And the child has to make a choice between eating the delicious treat right now or waiting to eat the delicious treat and then potentially getting a larger treat in 15 minutes.

Celeste Kidd:

That is correct. And when you do this, there are a lot of spontaneous strategies that emerge while a child is waiting there. It's common for kids to do things like physically cover the marshmallow with their hands so that they don't see it, to try to avoid the temptation of grabbing it and eating it. Children will sometimes try to look away from the marshmallow, so they'll look up at the sky or something like this. They're in a room, so I guess it's the ceiling. It's not a sky. Other strategies include trying to distract themselves by doing things like singing or making up a little story. Kids are very creative in coming up with ways to try to distract themselves.

Shankar Vedantam:

Even though these are small kids, it sounds like the kids pretty quickly understood what was being asked of them, understood why it was difficult to do, and almost instantly came up with strategies to help them do this difficult thing.

Celeste Kidd:

They did. I will also say though that the strategies that kids between the ages of three and five spontaneously come up with don't end up being very effective. So most of the kids end up eating the marshmallow very quickly. Kids wait about five or six minutes, something like that. So they're not lasting very long.

Shankar Vedantam:

Walter Mischel, who died in 2018, said that children who were able to hold off eating the marshmallow demonstrated a capacity for something he called delayed gratification. He sensed it was an important skill in all sorts of domains, and he wanted to see if he could teach kids strategies to exercise better self-control. He started to look for mental hacks that could help everyone, children and adults, stave off temptation.

Celeste Kidd:

A lot of the strategies that were introduced were attentional manipulation, so teaching kids to imagine something like the later reward. So imagine what you're going to get later. He found that there were longer wait times when you introduced visualizations that didn't highlight the deliciousness of the marshmallow. So picturing the marshmallow as a picture, for example, picturing a frame around it was something that caused kids to be able to wait for longer. Whereas emphasizing the deliciousness, the chewiness of the marshmallow, imagining that was not helpful in helping kids wait, I think that tended to result in less long wait times.

Shankar Vedantam:

And do you have a sense on Walter Mischel's thinking on why he thought this trait would be useful? Not just in the trivial game of waiting for five minutes to get the second marshmallow, but more generally in life?

Celeste Kidd:

I think that Walter Mischel's reasoning was largely intuitive. I think part of why people were very captivated by the marshmallow test and the video is because they can relate to that. Everybody has been in a circumstance where they have something that would be better later if they could just resist some temptation now. Everybody can relate to that.

Shankar Vedantam:

What transformed the marshmallow test from a fun experiment with cute preschoolers to a cultural phenomenon with enormous implications for social and public policy is what came next. In the decades that followed, Walter Mischel checked in on the kids from the original experiments. He measured everything from their health outcomes to their academic performance. The point of all this tracking was to explore whether the kids who were better able to resist temptation at the age of three had different life outcomes than the kids who ate the first marshmallow right away.

Celeste Kidd:

There were a lot of findings suggesting that a child's ability to wait early in life, their ability to delay gratification went on to predict a whole host of positive life outcomes. Ability to delay gratification was associated with lower body fat. So if you're the kind of kid who cannot eat this first marshmallow in the interest of getting two, maybe you grow up to be the kind of adult that cannot eat the piece of chocolate cake at a dinner party in the interest of achieving the physique that you want down the road. The ability to delay gratification in the marshmallow test specifically was predictive of social things and also bigger, higher stakes outcomes. So not abusing drugs was associated with ability to wait for a second marshmallow.

Shankar Vedantam:

In another follow-up, Walter Mischel found that kids who waited for the second marshmallow had higher SAT scores. Celeste, what was Walter Mischel's hypothesis about why delaying gratification at the age of three or the age of five could have effects on someone's body mass index or their SAT scores or their career outcomes 15, 20, 25 years down the road?

Celeste Kidd:

The conceptual hypothesis was that self-control is causally responsible for the child's performance on the marshmallow test. And self-control is causally responsible for how well you do on all of these other factors in life. You need self-control to make friends, you need self-control to do well in school, to do well on your SAT, to avoid jail time and to stay thin.

Shankar Vedantam:

Give me some sense of the impact of this test. Not so much specifically on it led to this policy or it led to that policy, but how people came to understand the test at a very broad level, not just researchers, not just scientists looking at peer-reviewed journals, but ordinary people.

Celeste Kidd:

This test is commonly referenced in all sorts of pop culture formats. It's on sketch comedy shows and sitcoms and things like this. It's also commonly cited in unexpected places like books on business management and how you should run a company. And then from a policy perspective, I think it also was attractive because it offered a sort of magic bullet for how you could combat poverty. How you could combat all of the challenges that face kids that are at the highest risk for the negative life outcomes. If it's self-control that is causally responsible for these negative life outcomes, all we have to do is train up their self-control and things will work out for them.

Shankar Vedantam:

I want to play you a little clip here, Celeste. This is Walter Mischel on The Colbert Report.

Stephen Colbert:

You think that one who doesn't eat the marshmallow first, you found were more successful in life?

Walter Mischel:

The longer kids waited to get the two, generally the more successful their lives turned out to be if they were consistent in how they continued in self-control over their life course.

Stephen Colbert:

Do we even need the SATs anymore if we've got the marshmallow test? Just get all the kids in the room, the kid who waits for the two marshmallows right to the Ivy League.

Shankar Vedantam:

So you could see how this really captured the popular imagination here, Celeste.

Celeste Kidd:

I somehow hadn't heard that before, but that's bringing back what I remember feeling the first time I heard about the marshmallow test. Those claims are big. The claim that it predicts your future, your ability to achieve the dreams that you want in life, those are big claims. Those are big claims from a 20-minute experiment.

Shankar Vedantam:

All of us have grown up hearing stories about the importance of self-control, and most of us have seen the effects of self-control and a lack of self-control in our own lives. As I write these words, I'm regretting I had an extra large lunch two hours ago. It was delicious at the time, but now I feel uncomfortably full and sluggish. Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiments brought these lessons to life. They produced data that demonstrated a truism. Patience is a virtue, and those who practice patience will be rewarded. Not only with more marshmallows, but with better health, better careers, better lives. As we have seen so often on this show,a however, human nature is exceedingly complex. Sweeping claims about human beings can fail to capture the nuances, the context, the situations where rules break down. That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Before Celeste Kidd became a psychologist, she was a determined high school student, living in a small town east of New Orleans. Her dream was to graduate high school and attend college across the country in California. To make this happen, Celeste had to go through her own version of the marshmallow test.

Celeste Kidd:

I'm from a community that is literally on the swamp. There's alligators in the backyard. It's everything you imagine, and I really wanted to go to college. I spent a lot of time in high school skipping out on things that my friends were doing in the interest of saving up money for college.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of Celeste's challenges had to do with restricting how much she indulged herself when it came to a particularly delicious New Orleans treat.

Celeste Kidd:

Communal eating is very important in New Orleans, and so it's common for you to be with a group of people and they say, "Okay, we're all going to order po' boys from..." My favorite place is Parasols...and they're very delicious sandwiches. But when my friends would order, I would always say that I was not hungry and actually I was hungry, especially for po' boys. I was just eating peanut butter sandwiches on day-old bread because it was cheap. I didn't want to spend the money on the po' boy. I didn't want that to make the difference. And the people who were very close to me who noticed this questioned whether or not I was being too restrictive with myself, whether I was putting all my hopes too far into the future when it wasn't even clear it was going to work out. And I had moments of wondering if that was true too.

I had a boyfriend who said, "Is it really going to make a difference? Is this $20 going to make the difference between you getting to go to college or not?" We had a big fight over it actually, and I said, "It's not the $20, it's the $20 and the $20 and the $20." It adds up, and I know that it's not this one sacrifice, I have to make a lot of them for it to work out. And what if it is? What if it is this $20 that makes the difference between I can pay the tuition bill or not? I would be so sad if I was $20 short. I was like, "The closer it is, the more painful it'll be if I don't make it."

Shankar Vedantam:

The most difficult thing Celeste had to give up was the annual Mardi Gras festival. Every year in New Orleans, social clubs come together and plan themed parades with elaborately decorated floats and costumes.

Celeste Kidd:

All of the parades are thrown by, they're called Krewes, which are essentially social clubs. That get together and plan for most of the year what the parade theme is going to be, what each of the floats is going to look like. Obviously that takes a lot of time. It's very intricate work, and each parade is a one in a lifetime experience that you're there for or you're not.

Shankar Vedantam:

In her junior year of high school, Celeste was offered a babysitting gig for a bunch of families attending a big party called the Mardi Gras Ball, but all her friends were going to the parade that night. Celeste wanted desperately to go to, but...

Celeste Kidd:

Junior year I was thinking about not having enough for college, and it was very important that I get as much as I could. So I chose to babysit for the families that were going to the Mardi Gras Ball. I love babysitting, but sitting there after the kids went to bed that night, I was wondering about what I had missed as one does when one skips out on something very exciting. I was feeling a little bit sorry for myself. But then when the families came back, they had had a really, really good time and they tipped me a few hundred dollars. They tipped me enough that I had to check the next morning to make sure that that's the amount that they meant to tip me. And yes, I actually don't think it was, but I think it was too, they were graceful and they didn't want to say, "That was actually an accident. Give that back." They knew I was saving for college.

Shankar Vedantam:

So you eventually get to UC Santa Cruz for your undergraduate studies, and I'm wondering when you got there, did you have a sense that the things that you had foregone, that it was worth it to actually be at UC Santa Cruz? Did it meet your expectations?

Celeste Kidd:

I could not believe when I first arrived at the campus and I saw the giant redwoods, the campus is beautiful. I could not believe I had gotten that far and it had worked out. Then when I started taking the classes and I could take as many as I wanted, and there were so many ones that were interesting and I had all of my day to take the classes, I was delighted with my life choices up until that point. So that was worth it. That was worth it in the long term. It was painful in the short term.

Shankar Vedantam:

Now as you listen to Celeste's story, you might conclude she is the poster child for Walter Mischel's marshmallow test. Forego delicious and tempting treats? Check. Do the hard thing now in exchange for the better thing tomorrow? Check. Delay gratification and do well in life? Check and check. But not long after she arrived in California, Celeste had an experience that changed the way she thought about self-control. She was working at a family emergency center, a place where parents and their children could access resources during difficult times. Celeste, of course, liked to spend time with kids.

Celeste Kidd:

It's hard to explain what the culture of an emergency family shelter is like. There's a lot of hard stuff that's going on. There's parents that have substance abuse issues. There are parents that are incarcerated unexpectedly. Working at an emergency family shelter also means that you are opting into getting sick a whole lot just because people are living in harsher conditions. So in some senses you would think that it should be hard, but working there was a delight because the kids are so cool.

Shankar Vedantam:

Celeste had a job tutoring some of the older kids at the shelter, but she developed a special bond with a preschooler named Jojo.

Celeste Kidd:

One of the first interactions I had with Jojo, she had a lollipop. And just as she was about to put it in her mouth, I was turned towards the kids that I was about to tutor. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another kid come bounding down the stairs and grab the lollipop from her hand right before it goes into her mouth. I had worked in a daycare before, and I was expecting her to burst into tears. So I instinctively whipped around expecting that she would need some comfort for this upsetting thing happening. And to my surprise, she didn't have any reaction at all. She continued walking like she had not had a lollipop in her hand at all.

Shankar Vedantam:

Celeste was struck by Jojo's reaction. The fact she didn't need comforting was worrisome.

Celeste Kidd:

I thought, "Oh no, that's a sign of something that's gone wrong." I was like, "She should have an emotional reaction. Maybe she has some sort of psychological damage, some emotional stunting or some dissociation or something." I was like, "Maybe there's something wrong with her emotionally, or maybe it's a memory problem. Maybe she didn't remember that she had the lollipop." I thought something was wrong with her.

Shankar Vedantam:

But within a short time of working at the shelter, Celeste realized why Jojo had not been upset.

Celeste Kidd:

I never had a discussion with her about the lollipop because it didn't take long before I figured out that it was me that made the error. It wasn't upsetting because it was very expected. It's very, very common for a bunch of kids that don't have a lot of adult supervision around to steal stuff from each other. Jojo was little and she knew she was little, so she knew that there was a timer on her putting that lollipop in her mouth, and she took a little too long. And so it wasn't upsetting to her in part because it wasn't unexpected. It was me that made the reasoning error, and I will remember that forever.

Shankar Vedantam:

Shortly after that moment with Jojo, another incident occurred that made a powerful impression on Celeste.

Celeste Kidd:

I was there for a church group coming and giving out toys to the kids. They lined them up. They gave many of them toys one at a time, and a common response that the kids at the shelter had to getting these new toys was to immediately break them. And the church volunteers that were giving them out, I heard them talking about how these kids, they were not grateful. I mean, some of the things that were said were so awful that I've opted not to encode them, but the suggestion was that these kids deserve the situation they're in. That they're the offspring of people that are like this that aren't grateful and that's why they're here. And I found that really upsetting because being there and spending time with these kids and understanding what their daily life was like, it was very clear to me why they were breaking the toys.

At this shelter, each family got just one basket that they could use to store things, and it was about the size of a shoebox. If you imagine that you are in that situation, you have one shoebox worth of storage for your whole family. What's going in that box? It's paper documents that you need, it's IDs. It's maybe some hygiene things. It's toothpaste and toothbrushes and its medications. It's not a big doll. A big bulky doll is not going to make it into that box at the end of the day, and these kids knew that. And so all kids I think have thoughts like, "What would this doll look like with its head pulled off? What'll it feel like to pull off the head of this doll?" And what prevents some kids from pulling off the head of their doll is the expectation that they're going to be able to play with it tomorrow. And these kids just didn't have that expectation.

So hearing these moralistic judgements of these kids from people that didn't understand, they weren't going to get to play with the doll tomorrow so there's no point in preserving it. You should play with it hard. You should make decisions that give you satisfaction right now. If you can't count on what's going to be available to you tomorrow, then to see these kids get judged for them was upsetting and also influential in shaping my understanding of human behavior at large.

Shankar Vedantam:

The summer after Celeste graduated from college, she decided to take some linguistics courses at Stanford. She became friends with a graduate student who was in several of her classes. One day they took a walk through campus.

Celeste Kidd:

So we were walking through the halls and discussing things like the Stanford Prison experiment and the marshmallow test came up and I had never heard of it before. He was surprised I hadn't heard of it before. And he explained that the marshmallow test as being something that you could administer to a kid early in life that could tell you whether or not they were going to achieve great things. He described it as a test where you give kids a very simple choice between one marshmallow now or if they can wait for the researcher to leave and then come back, then they can have two marshmallows if they don't eat the first marshmallow. My response to that initially was thinking, "Oh no." I was thinking about Jojo. I was thinking about the other kids at the shelter.

And the first place my head went is knowing that these kids I was working with would eat that first marshmallow right away. I don't think I'd even be able to get my hand up. And that made me sad because I was there trying to help them avoid all of these negative outcomes he was saying were predicted by waiting for that second marshmallow.

Shankar Vedantam:

Celeste was training to be a psychologist. Her experience at the shelter prompted her to ask herself a provocative question. Was it possible that Walter Mischel, one of the giants in the field of psychology, had missed something very, very important? One of the core ideas in social psychology is that the social and the psychological are inextricably tied up with one another. We think we are the captains of our ships and the masters of our own destiny. We think we choose to be good or bad when confronted by an ethical situation. Now, there is certainly truth in that, our thoughts and preferences and choices do shape our behavior in powerful ways. But what most of us underestimate is the extent to which the social world shapes the thoughts inside our heads. Walter Mischel's study looking at the kids of well-to-do families at Stanford was being used to explain the behavior of kids growing up in very different contexts. Was that fair? Even more importantly, was that accurate?

Celeste Kidd:

The crux of the marshmallow test interpretation that is most popular, which is that self-control is causally responsible for your success or failure to achieve success in life hinges on the individual and whether the individual has a particular ability or not. And if they don't have a particular ability, the implication is they're not going to do well in life. And also there's an implication that it's their fault. If they were a different way, they would deserve to do well. If they are not that way, they get what they get. I recognized that there was an alternative hypothesis that I thought there was good evidence for even in Walter Mischel's own data. And the alternative hypothesis is it's not that marshmallow test is measuring self-control and self-control is causally responsible for the long-term outcomes. The alternative is what the marshmallow test is testing is a child's expectations about how stable and reliable the world is.

Shankar Vedantam:

Put another way, your 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. As Celeste pursued a PhD at the University of Rochester, she designed a marshmallow test of her own.

Celeste Kidd:

We've recruited three to five year-old kids and then we randomly assigned them to one of two conditions. They were either assigned to the reliable condition or the unreliable condition. And in advance of them doing the marshmallow test, we gave them an experience, a set of evidence about whether or not they could count on future promise rewards being delivered.

Shankar Vedantam:

Celeste and her colleague, Holly Palmeri, told the kids they would be doing an art project. They could choose to use some regular crayons and begin that project immediately, but if they waited a few minutes, Holly would run out and come back with markers and some fancy art supplies.

Celeste Kidd:

When we presented kids with this choice, just like in the marshmallow test, kids always chose that they would like the second bigger set of art supplies instead. Holly then left them alone in the room under the premise that she was going to get the bigger set of art supplies instead. And then whether or not she came in with them depended upon the condition that the child was assigned to.

Shankar Vedantam:

For kids assigned to the reliable condition, Holly reappeared in a few minutes with a nicer art supplies. The kids received the lesson that waiting did produce good things, but for the kids in the unreliable group?

Celeste Kidd:

Holly would leave the room and then when she would come back, she would apologize to the kid and say, "I'm very sorry. I thought I had a big set of art supplies, but it turns out I don't. But let me help you use these crayons instead." And she would help them open the container to get out the crayons and use that art supply.

Shankar Vedantam:

And conceptually, what were you trying to do here, Celeste? With these two conditions, of the kids who basically waited for the better art supplies and got it, and the kids who waited for the better art supplies and didn't get it.

Celeste Kidd:

Conceptually, we wanted children to generate different expectations depending upon what they had experienced in this specific context. So we wanted the kids in the reliable condition to generate the expectation that, "If I wait, it is worth it. It will pay off." And we wanted kids in the unreliable condition to have the expectation that, "If I wait, it is not worth it. It will not pay off." So that we could tell what the impact of expectations was on the marshmallow test that we did after the art project task.

Shankar Vedantam:

The marshmallow test was part two of the study. After the kids finished their art project, Holly announced that it was snack time.

Celeste Kidd:

Holly would say, "You can have this one marshmallow now, or if you want to wait for me to go into the other room, if you don't eat this one, you can have two marshmallows instead." And with that premise, that's the classic marshmallow test, she cleared all of the art supplies out of the room and left the child alone with the single marshmallow on the table. And just like in the classic marshmallow test, we measured and waited to see how long they would wait before they ate the marshmallow.

Shankar Vedantam:

And what did you find?

Celeste Kidd:

We found that there was a big difference between the kids in the unreliable condition versus the reliable condition. In the unreliable condition, kids were much more likely to eat the marshmallow. They waited an average of about three minutes. That's very different from what happened in the reliable condition. In the reliable condition, kids waited four times as long. They waited on average 12 minutes before eating the marshmallow. They were less likely to eat the marshmallow in the end in that condition as well.

Shankar Vedantam:

At one level, you could say the results were entirely unsurprising. If someone tells you to wait five minutes and there will be a wonderful treat at the end and you wait five minutes only to be told no treat is forthcoming, how would you respond if this person told you to wait another five minutes for a new treat? You might say something along the lines of, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Celeste Kidd:

It only makes sense to wait for the second marshmallow if you expect the second marshmallow to arrive. If you don't expect for the second marshmallow to arrive, you should eat the first marshmallow.

Shankar Vedantam:

In fact, it would almost be foolish for you not to eat the first marshmallow because if you don't eat it, someone else might come along and eat it while you're waiting for the second marshmallow.

Celeste Kidd:

That's right. The Jojo thing might happen, if you don't put the lollipop in your mouth right away, somebody else might come along and take it. You should eat that first marshmallow if you think there is no point in waiting for a second.

Shankar Vedantam:

I've always wondered what Walter Mischel would make of the way his test has come to be received in the world today, Celeste. I'm not quite sure he anticipated it would take off the way it did and that people would draw the implications that they did. I mean, at various points, he would say, "This is a 15-minute test. You can't draw too much into a 15-minute test." Now, he did do the longitudinal studies finding these long-term effects, but I'm wondering, do you feel like your test has been a corrective, not just to the marshmallow test, but the impact the cultural valence of the marshmallow test in the larger world?

Celeste Kidd:

I don't know if I can speak to that. Walter Mischel was invested in the idea that self-control is an important virtue to develop. That's also largely the point of the book that he wrote about the marshmallow test. At the same time, I don't disagree with any of the premises in the original studies, it was inherently acknowledging that children's delaying gratification or not is a flexible system that can be changed depending upon the attentional strategy that you hand them. So I don't think that work captured the minds of people in the same way that the promise of the predictive power of the marshmallow test from the longitudinal correlations did later. But Walter Mischel, to my knowledge, wasn't opposed to the idea that the system is flexible.

Shankar Vedantam:

There are certainly times where delaying gratification pays off, work hard and save your money and you improve your options when it's time to go to college. Study hard today and you're likely to do better in your exams tomorrow. Tolerate the discomfort that comes with learning a new musical instrument and you might produce beautiful music in a few years. Patience and prudence can be virtues. But in the popular understanding of the marshmallow test, many people concluded self-control was a purely personal virtue. You had it or you didn't have it. It was about you, the individual. Celeste's reconception of the test underscores that core idea and social psychology. That context matters. Self-control is not just about what happens inside our heads.

Our capacity for self-control is shaped by whether we live in a safe and predictable world or a dangerous and unpredictable world. Take the kids from the Stanford nursery that Walter Mischel was studying and put them in an unpredictable environment for a few weeks and they too might behave in ways that would appear impulsive and shortsighted. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Jacqueline Rifkin is named after her grandfather, Jack. We don't know for sure how Jack would've performed on Walter Mischel's marshmallow test, but we can't take an educated guess. He would not have eaten that first marshmallow.

Jacqueline Rifkin:

He fought for the US in World War II. He actually helped liberate some of the concentration camps. And his story, I think, was really instrumental in sort of how I was raised and how I see the world, even though I never got to meet him. So when he got back from the war, he met my grandmother and they got married. And their plan was to be really frugal, save up a lot of money, be sort of conservative financially. And then when he retired, they would travel the world. And so my mom grew up with this very sort of low-risk, frugal kind of way of living with this plan for ultimately my pop-pop's retirement.

The sad part of the story is that they never really got to bear the fruits of all of this saving because my pop-pop was diagnosed with cancer in his sixties and he actually passed away just a few months after the diagnosis. And so my mom sort of told me that over the years, her mom, my mom-mom, who lived for many years after that, always kind of regretted the way that they had structured their lives. And my mom was always really vocal when I was growing up that obviously responsibility and frugality and prudence are great virtues, but also not to save everything for later all of life's pleasures.

Shankar Vedantam:

It's a lesson that Jacqueline has tried to take to heart. And yet, despite her mother's warnings and her grandmother's regrets, she regularly notices that she is very much her grandfather's granddaughter.

Jacqueline Rifkin:

So I bought a white blouse from Old Navy several years ago, and if there's something about Old Navy, it's that it's casual and it's not super expensive. I think it was probably $19.99 and I didn't wear it right away, which is something that I am absolutely kind of a chronic delayer of new clothes. And so I didn't wear it for school. I didn't wear it to run errands. And somehow over time, it became a date night shirt that I didn't wear. And then it became a job interview shirt that I didn't wear. And I think after a few years, the shirt was essentially no longer in style and I just had to donate it. And it goes back to zero, right? The person who buys it now for them, it's like a workout shirt. But for me, we had gone on this whole journey together where this simple Old Navy shirt had sort of transformed into a fashion talisman.

Shankar Vedantam:

You've likely experienced some version of this in your own life. If it's not a new shirt hanging in your closet, maybe it's an unused gift card to a local restaurant. Jacqueline is now a marketing professor at Cornell University. She and her colleague Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania have examined what keeps people from enjoying the things they own.

Jacqueline Rifkin:

We were really interested in these things that we all own around the house that we like and we're not trying to get rid of, but we're also not using them. So I think a bottle of wine is an example that can resonate with everyone. Jonah had socks that he always thought about. I had a blouse that I always thought about. They were perfectly fine. They weren't special. They were kind of just normal, but for some reason, they kept sticking around. We weren't using, but we weren't donating. And so what we found through a series of experiments there was that sometimes people forego usage. They say, "I'm not going to open the wine tonight. I'm not going to bust out the candle and light it for the first time tonight." And even though it's not our intention, we kind of feel like we're saving it. So it goes from not now to not now and later.

And the more that we feel like we're saving, the more special that product becomes. And so we enter this spiral, we call it a specialness spiral in the paper, whereby people are foregoing usage for something normal. It feels a little bit more special. So now we want to find a slightly better occasion for it. So then we forego usage again, becomes a little bit more special. "Okay, now I need to find an even better occasion for it." And over time, this perfectly normal pair of socks becomes a treasure that is only worthy for your wedding night.

Shankar Vedantam:

Notice that the specialness spiral works like a ratchet. Each time you forego using the shirt, the specialness of the shirt reaches a new threshold. The next time you think of using the shirt, the bar is now even higher than it was the last time.

Jacqueline Rifkin:

That's exactly what happens. And we even asked people flat out what is the right occasion to use this thing? And I think the example that we used in that study was just a $10 bottle of wine, nothing special. For our folks that had never passed up the opportunity to use it. And we said, "When would you use it? When works?" They said, "A Tuesday night after dinner, nothing special." For the folks that we had had them imagine that they passed it up once or twice. They did ratchet up that threshold. They said maybe a Friday, maybe a date. And for the people that had imagined passing it up over and over and over, they were saying, rehearsal dinner, 50th wedding anniversary. "The moment I land my dream job." They were ratcheting up this threshold of something that was always a $10 bottle of wine. But in their mind, it had sort of been accruing and accruing in specialness to the point where when is that perfect night? How many of us do see our 50th wedding anniversary? Now we're dreaming of an occasion that maybe most people don't even get to experience.

Shankar Vedantam:

Call this, if you will, the reverse marshmallow test. The challenge here is not in resisting temptation, but in having the ability to indulge in everyday pleasures. Another example from Jacqueline's life is a time she went on vacation and decided to bring home some spices as a souvenir.

Jacqueline Rifkin:

And it's not a very long story because I never used the spices. I brought them with me from move to move. They were always there. They took up space in my cabinet, and it ultimately got to the point where I had to Google "when do spices go bad?" And to the point where those spices were almost definitely bad, and so they just sort of became a souvenir. They weren't really functioning as spices anymore. I wasn't really getting out of them what I should have been by putting them in my food and enjoying them with loved ones.

Shankar Vedantam:

What Jacqueline is saying is that if some people have trouble with being impulsive, others have a problem with giving themselves permission to be indulgent.

Jacqueline Rifkin:

I think the typical way that we like to think of ourselves is almost as sort of impulse laden hedons. We see a candy bar and we can't stop ourselves from taking it, or we have the opportunity to play hooky from work and do something irresponsible, and we just take it. We can't stop ourselves. So there's incredible work from Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz. They sort of challenge that assumption and think, "Well, maybe instead of being these sorts of impulsive hedons, a lot of us are actually too controlled. A lot of us are too serious and afraid of indulging." So there's a lot of us that don't take any time off, let alone playing hooky from work. Where we're so fixated on being virtuous and being good and staying true to our values and self-control, that we actually don't indulge nearly as much as we should.

Shankar Vedantam:

Can you talk about one challenge with the specialness spiral, which is we want to wait for the perfect moment to use something, the bottle of wine, the expensive spices, but we don't quite know exactly when that moment's going to arrive. We tell ourselves, "When that moment arrives, I'll know it." But in fact, at every given moment we say, "Is this the moment?" And we say, "No, not quite."

Jacqueline Rifkin:

That's exactly what happens. So there's a lot of research on what's called sequential search, which is in contrast to simultaneous search. So simultaneous is when all the options are in front of you. You've got your five flavors of jam in front of you, you can see them all and so you pick one. Sequential search on the other hand is if each jam was presented to you one by one. And so even though it's the same jams, the decision becomes a lot harder because you can only evaluate one at a time, and maybe you don't know what's coming next. You probably can't go back and get one that you already passed on. You can't really evaluate all of your options at once. It's just not possible. And jam is a mundane example, but there's really big meaty versions of this decision that we all deal with. Who do you marry? Who do you hire? You can really only evaluate one of these things at a time.

And so what the research suggests is that when we're having options presented to us one at a time, it's hard to compare, right? You don't have all those jams in front of you. And so what a lot of us do is we come up with a reference point in our mind of, "Well, what would the best jam be?" And that jam may not even exist. We come up with this sort of idealized, aspirational, perfect match, and now we're comparing every option against that ideal. And so it becomes really hard to pull the trigger because we're comparing against this perfect, potentially unbeatable ideal. When we do pull the trigger, we may feel disappointed. We may pull the trigger much later than we ought to because we're stuck into this, "When I see the ideal person I'll know, or when I see the ideal job candidate, I'll feel it." And it creates a lot of complications in decision making that ultimately lead to not only poor quality decisions, but less happy people.

Shankar Vedantam:

So you are not necessarily saying that the ability to save for your retirement or the ability to exercise or eat the right diet. Or the ability to say, "I'm going to quit smoking today even though it gives me pleasure today because in fact, 20 years from now my health is going to be better." You're not necessarily saying those are bad things. You're not saying that deferring gratification is always a bad thing. You're just saying sometimes it can be a bad thing.

Jacqueline Rifkin:

That's exactly right. So by no means is delaying gratification a bad thing to do. And especially when it comes to pursuits that we're doing for our own health and trying to make sure that we're setting ourselves up for success in the future, financially or physically. That's all great stuff to be doing and things that I work on and I think everybody should work on. My fear comes in where that becomes the only mode of behaving and at the cost of doing things in the moment for ourselves. We have to start to retrain ourselves to seek out things that make us happy. Not necessarily negative things like smoking, but just a moment out in nature, journaling, having a really nice conversation. Healthy things that are really just for us and not for our future self and not for anybody else.

Shankar Vedantam:

Jacqueline Rifkin is a psychologist at Cornell University. Jacqueline, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Jacqueline Rifkin:

Thank you.

Shankar Vedantam:

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Patrick Cherry at Apple. Patrick works on Apple's partnerships with podcasters, and he played a central role in helping to launch our new podcast subscription, Hidden Brain+. Thank you, Patrick, for keeping us moving through our to-do list so seamlessly. We really appreciate your help. If you haven't yet checked out Hidden Brain+, it's where you'll find even more of the ideas and insights that we feature on the show. You can try it for free and listen to our recent conversation about how to find hope even during tough times. Find Hidden Brain+ in the Apple Podcasts app or go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.