Summary-response

Delay of gratification in children

By Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Monica Rodriguez

Born in Vienna in 1930, Walter Michel fled the Nazi occupation with his parents when he was eight years old. He spent the remainder of his childhood in Brooklyn, NY. After receiving a PhD in clinical psychology from Ohio State University, he taught at Colorado University, Harvard University, Stanford, and Columbia University, where he worked until his death in 2018. Ironically, the advocate of delayed gratification was a smoker of three packs of cigarettes a day throughout his life.

ABSTRACT: To function effectively, individuals must voluntarily postpone immediate gratification and persist in goal-directed behavior for the sake of later outcomes. The present research study analyzed the nature of this type of future-oriented self-control and the psychological processes that underlie it. Enduring individual differences in self-control were found as early as the preschool years among children. Those 4-year-old children who delayed gratification longer in certain laboratory situations developed into more cognitively and socially competent adolescents, achieving higher scholastic performance and coping better with frustration and stress. Experiments in the same research program also identified specific cognitive and attentional processes that allow an individual to effectively self-regulate him or herself early in the course of a child’s development.

Condensed version of the original research article

For almost a century, the infant has been characterized as impulse-driven, unable to delay gratification, oblivious to logic and reality, and ruled entirely by a desire for pleasure and immediate satisfaction. The challenge has been to clarify how individuals, while remaining capable of great impulsivity, also become able to control their actions for the sake of future consequences and goals, managing at least sometimes to forgo more immediate gratifications to take account of possible future outcomes. The nature of this future-oriented self-control, which develops over time and then coexists with more impetuous behaviors, has intrigued psychologists studying childhood development, who have made it central in theories of socialization and in the very definition of the "self." Such goal-directed, self- imposed delay of gratification is widely presumed to be important in the prevention of serious developmental and mental health problems, including those directly associated with lack of resilience, behavior disorders, poor social responsibility skills, and a variety of addictive and antisocial behaviors.

To explain how people manage to exercise self-control, concepts like ''willpower'' or "ego strength" are common, although these terms are labels that do not explain the phenomenon. Some people adhere to difficult diets, or give up cigarettes after years of smoking them addictively, or continue to work and wait for distant goals even when tempted to quit, whereas others fail in such attempts to better regulate themselves in spite of affirming the same initial intentions. Yet the same person who exhibits self-control in one situation may fail to do so in another, even when it appears to be highly similar.

Two complementary methods were used to investigate delay of gratification in the research. Initially, preferences for delayed, more valuable versus immediate but less valuable outcomes were studied as choice decisions. In this approach, individuals choose under realistic conditions among outcomes that vary in value and in the expected duration of time before they become available. In one study, young children were given the choice to eat one marshmallow immediately (a less valuable option) or wait until the experimenter’s return to receive two marshmallows (a more desirable outcome). These choices were given to people from a wide range of sociocultural backgrounds, family structure, and economic circumstances. As expected, these choices are affected predictably by the length of the delay time and the subjective value of the alternatives. For example, preferences for delayed rewards decrease when the required time for their attainment increases and increase with the expectation that the delayed outcomes will occur. In addition, choices to delay were related significantly to a number of personal characteristics assessed at about the same time. For example, children who tend to prefer delayed rewards also tend to be more intelligent, more likely to resist temptation, to have greater social responsibility, and higher achievement strivings. The obtained concurrent associations are extensive, indicating that such preferences reflect a meaningful dimension of individual differences, and point to some of the many determinants and correlates of decisions to delay.

As efforts at self-reform so often attest, however, decisions to forgo, or delay, immediate gratification for the sake of later consequences (for example, by dieting) are readily forgotten or strategically revised when one experiences the frustration of actually having to execute, or perform, them. Because intentions to practice self-control frequently dissolve in the face of more immediate temptations, it is also necessary to go beyond the study of initial decisions to delay gratification and to examine how young children become able to sustain delay of gratification as they actually try to wait for the outcomes they want. For this purpose, a second method to research this question was devised and used to test preschool children in the Stanford University community

In this method, the experimenter begins by showing the child some toys, explaining they will play with them later (so that ending the delay leads to uniform positive consequences). Next, the experimenter teaches a game in which he or she has to leave the room and comes back immediately when the child summons by ringing a bell. Each child then is shown a pair of treats (such as snacks, small toys, or tokens) which differ in value, established through pretesting to be desirable and of age-appropriate interest (for example, one marsh­ mallow versus two; two small cookies versus five pretzels). The children are told that to attain the one they prefer they have to wait until the experimenter returns but that they are free to end the waiting period whenever they signal; if they do, however, they will get the less preferred object and forgo the other one. The items in the pair are selected to be sufficiently close in value to create a conflict situation for young children between the temptation to stop the delay and the desire to persist for the preferred outcome when the latter requires delay. After children understand the contingency, they are left on their own during the delay period while their behavior is observed unobtrusively, and the duration of their delay is recorded until they terminate or the experimenter returns (typically after 15 minutes). With this method, "self-imposed delay of gratification" was investigated both as a psychological process in experiments that varied relevant features in the delay situation and as a personal characteristic in studies that examined the relation between children's delay behavior and their social and cognitive competencies.

A recent follow-up study of a sample of these children found that those who had waited longer in this situation at 4 years of age were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were more academically and socially competent than their peers and more able to cope with frustration and resist temptation. At statistically significant levels, parents saw these children as more verbally fluent and able to express ideas; they used and responded to reason, were attentive and able to concentrate, to plan, and to think ahead, and were competent and skillful. Likewise they were perceived as able to cope and deal with stress more maturely and seemed more self-assured. In some variations of this laboratory situation, seconds of delay time in preschool also were significantly related to their Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores when they applied to college. The demonstration of these enduring individual differences in the course of development, as well as the significance attributed to purposeful self-imposed delay of gratification theoretically, underline the need to understand and specify the psychological processes that allow the young child to execute this type of self-regulation in the pursuit of desired outcomes.