Delayed gratification

Delayed gratification is a trade between now and later. You pass up a small good thing today, and you get a bigger one later. The opposite is instant gratification: taking the small thing now.

Here is an example. Leo and Mia both have a test on Friday. On Wednesday night, a new episode of their show comes out. Leo watches it, and then two more. Mia studies for an hour first, and then watches one.

On Friday, Mia knows the answers. And she still saw her episode. She did not give the show up. She put it second.

Examples of delayed gratification

Waiting is hard because the small thing is right here, and the bigger thing is far away and less sure.

The marshmallow test is a study in which a young child could eat one marshmallow now, or wait alone and get two. The psychologist Walter Mischel and his team ran it many years ago, at a preschool at Stanford University.

A child of about four sat at a table with a marshmallow. An adult said: you can eat this now, or you can wait until I come back, and then you get two. Then the adult left the room for up to fifteen or twenty minutes. Some children ate it right away. Some waited the whole time.

Years later, the team looked up some of the children as teenagers. Those who had waited longer were doing better at school, and they coped better when things went wrong (Mischel, Shoda and Rodriguez, 1989). The story that spread was simple: a child who can wait will do well in life.

A larger repeat found a much weaker link.

Three researchers checked this again, using records of more than nine hundred children from a long US study (Watts, Duncan and Quan, 2018). Each child had taken a shorter form of the test at age four. The researchers looked at school test scores and behavior at fifteen.

Children who had waited longer did score somewhat higher at fifteen. The researchers looked most closely at children whose mothers had not finished college. In that group, the link was about half as strong as in the first studies. It shrank by two thirds once the researchers took the family, the home and the child’s early thinking skills into account. And waiting longer said almost nothing about behavior at fifteen.

The first finding did not vanish, then, but it got much smaller.

In one small study, children waited longer when they trusted the adult.

In this study, an adult first promised each child better art supplies in a few minutes (Kidd, Palmeri and Aslin, 2013). For half of the children, the adult came back with them. For the other half, the adult came back with nothing and said sorry. Then every child got the marshmallow test.

The children who had been let down waited about three minutes on average. The children whose promise had been kept waited about twelve. So a child who eats the marshmallow may simply doubt that the second one is coming. The researchers added that this does not mean self-control plays no part.

You get better at delayed gratification by making the wait easier. The three steps below rest on newer studies than the marshmallow test.

Put the tempting thing out of sight.

In two experiments, students each set a study goal for the week. One group was told to move temptations away before they started, for example by turning the phone off. A second group was told to resist each temptation when it came.

A week later, the first group said they had come closer to their goals than the second (Duckworth and colleagues, 2016). In the second experiment, they also said they had felt less tempted. The students rated themselves, so this is a hint and not proof.

Pick a reward that is close and sure.

When an adult had kept a promise, the children in that small study waited about four times as long. The study was done with children, so this step is our own reading of it. If your reward is months away, promise yourself something small at the end of each week, and keep that promise.

Save something you enjoy for the hard thing.

In one experiment, people were lent gripping audiobooks that they could hear at the gym and nowhere else. Over the next seven weeks they went to the gym more often than people with no such rule: about eight visits each, against about six (Milkman, Minson and Volpp, 2014). After a holiday break the difference faded, so start your rule again after any break.

Waiting is one part of self-discipline. If your trouble is starting at all, see how to stop procrastinating. The page on motivation vs discipline goes with this one.

The sources are below. We read the whole text of the four newer studies, and the summary of the oldest one.

1. Mischel, W., Shoda, Y. and Rodriguez, M. I. (1989). Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244(4907), 933 to 938.
2. Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J. and Quan, H. (2018). Revisiting the marshmallow test: A conceptual replication investigating links between early delay of gratification and later outcomes. Psychological Science, 29(7), 1159 to 1177.
3. Kidd, C., Palmeri, H. and Aslin, R. N. (2013). Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition, 126(1), 109 to 114.
4. Duckworth, A. L., White, R. E., Matteucci, A. J., Shearer, A. and Gross, J. J. (2016). A stitch in time: Strategic self-control in high school and college students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 329 to 341.
5. Milkman, K. L., Minson, J. A. and Volpp, K. G. M. (2014). Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: An evaluation of temptation bundling. Management Science, 60(2), 283 to 299.