[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And let's get on with it.

JAD: Yeah. Okay. So to get things started since fate is our topic, let's just mend the word. Shall we?

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: 'Cause fate is not a word a scientist would ever use.

ROBERT: No, they don't.

JAD: They'd get laughed out of their peer reviewed parties.

ROBERT: [laughs] 

JAD: They use words like "genetic predispositions," "genes-based" ...

ROBERT: Although there'd be another scientist in the room who would say, "Well, it isn't really the gene. It's the environment."

JAD: "The environment." Another guy would walk in and be like, "No it's nature."

ROBERT: "Nurture ..."

JAD: "... nurture, nature." Really this argument, on some level, when it's a very old argument is about choice versus fate.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: And that tension gets really fascinating when you talk about something like willpower ...

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: ... in candy. Let me introduce you to a guy. His name's Walter.

WALTER MISCHEL: Walter Mischel.

JAD: He's a psychologist.

WALTER MISCHEL: At Columbia University in the psychology department.

PRODUCER: So what's gonna happen is ...

JAD: He has done a remarkable study.

JAD: So are we ready to go?

PRODUCER: Yeah. I think we're good.

JAD: And the marshmallow study.

WALTER MISCHEL: Ah, the marshmallow study.

JAD: At the start of the study, how did you come up with the idea?

WALTER MISCHEL: Well, I had three little girls who, at that time ...

JAD: We're talking now, late '60s.

WALTER MISCHEL: ... were going from being these sweet sometimes and happy often, you know, little creatures.

JAD: How old were they at that point?

WALTER MISCHEL: Well, they—they ranged an age from two to five. And what I was—what any parent immediately knows is that when kids start going into the fourth year of life, a lot happens to them.

JAD: Like he noticed that one of his daughters who had just hit four, suddenly she could delay gratification.

WALTER MISCHEL: Yeah.

JAD: Almost all of a sudden. If he—if he told her, "Look, I know you want that," I don't know, "pack of bubblegum. But don't whine, don't complain. When we get home, I'll give you something better." Suddenly she could wait.

WALTER MISCHEL: This was in the late 1960s, and there was almost no work on quote "willpower," "self control," "self-regulation." It just wasn't a topic.

JAD: So he thought he would jump in. Here's what he did: to test this hypothesis "something happens to kids around the age of four," he went to a nursery school ...

WALTER MISCHEL: A big nursery school at Stanford University.

JAD: ... gathered up a bunch of kids at different ages. And one by one, he put them in a room ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Small room, off the playroom.

JAD: He'd bring the kids in, sit them in a chair, and then he would give them a choice which had to do with marshmallows.

WALTER MISCHEL: Yummy.

JAD: What kid doesn't love marshmallows? And he would say to them, "Here's your choice. You can either have one ..."

WALTER MISCHEL: One marshmallow.

JAD: ... now. Or if you wait, you can have two ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Two marshmallows later.

JAD: ... later.

WALTER MISCHEL: Now that creates a lot of dilemmas.

JAD: Yeah, it does. Especially because, you know, the researchers leave the room to give the kids a chance to think. And right there on the table, in front of the child, were the marshmallows. Calling them!

WALTER MISCHEL: There are no distractions in the room. There are no pictures. There are no toys.

JAD: [laughs] The child is left to stare at the marshmallows.

WALTER MISCHEL: So it's basically an isolation chamber.

JAD: Pure agony.

WALTER MISCHEL: I can show you a video of what they're doing and you can see it.

JAD: Can we watch?

WALTER MISCHEL: Sure. Let's turn it on. And ...

JAD: He walked over to a TV and pulled up a video of the marshmallow experiment. And I must tell you, it is some of the greatest video ever shot, particularly because the round he showed us, the researchers had replaced the marshmallows with something even more enticing.

WALTER MISCHEL: Oreo cookies.

ROBERT: Mmm, Oreos.

WALTER MISCHEL: So what you're seeing over here is a tortured looking adorable little girl, wearing a blue sweatshirt.

JAD: About five years old. Pigtails.

WALTER MISCHEL: Kind of sniffing at it.

JAD: She puts her face right up to the cookie.

JAD: She's weighing. "Do I want this badly enough?"

WALTER MISCHEL: That's exactly what she's doing.

JAD: She picks up the cookie, puts it down.

WALTER MISCHEL: Weighing and re-evaluating her choice.

JAD: She knows she can have this one now, but if she waits, she can have more. But ...

WALTER MISCHEL: "I've had—had it."

JAD: She gives in after just a few minutes.

JAD: Okay. Now we have a—a sort of a doughy-face boy in a yellow t-shirt who's kicking 'cause he's so antsy.

JAD: This kid's strategy is not to confront the cookie directly, but to kick the table that holds the cookie. Kick it, kick it, kick it!

WALTER MISCHEL: And it's a very male response. I mean ...

JAD: But remarkably, he holds out way longer than the first girl. And of course, there were the cheaters.

WALTER MISCHEL: Here we see a guy looking at the two cookies.

JAD: [laughs] He picked one up!

WALTER MISCHEL: He's taken one—which is against the rules. He's licking the inside. He's licking out the cream, replacing the licked cookie and putting it back on the tray.

JAD: Anyhow, we watch kid after kid after kid being tortured by the gravitational pull of Oreo cookies. Some, to avoid the pull, went under the table, some turned their backs and started singing a song. All in all, Mischel and his team tested 500 kids in that initial study. And they found that yes, four year olds are dramatically better than younger kids at resisting temptations. So something does happen at around four years old, but within that—and here's where the plot thickens—there was a huge range. Some kids gave up after a minute, others could last 20 minutes. And most fell somewhere in the middle where they could resist the cookie for about ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Seven minutes, eight minutes.

JAD: That's the average.

WALTER MISCHEL: All depending on age and what the goodies are and so on.

JAD: Now in and of itself, there's nothing too surprising here. He basically confirmed his hypothesis, but what is amazing, truly amazing is what happens next.

WALTER MISCHEL: I just was sitting around the kitchen table with my kids about five, six years after the studies began.

JAD: He was talking with his kids and he knew that they still went to school—this is now five or six years later—with some of those kids from the initial study. So he is asking them ...

WALTER MISCHEL: You know, "How is Jenny doing? And how's, you know, "How's Cecily doing?" This was just totally informal.

JAD: And his kids told him, "Well, Cecily's doing fine. Jenny, not so good." And he began to realize a weird pattern: the kids like Cecily, who he remembered had been good at waiting for the marshmallow back in the study. Well, they ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Seemed to be the ones who were doing better.

JAD: ... they were doing better at school.

WALTER MISCHEL: And suddenly on a very small end, you know, very small sample, it looked like there were differences here. Could there be a relationship between the number of seconds these kids waited when they were four, and how they're doing when they're—when they're 10 and 11 and 12? So what we did beginning when these kids were 15 years old, 14 to 17 years old, was the first follow-up wave.

JAD: So he tracked down as many of those original kids as he could find. And just for starters, he looked at their SAT scores. Now keep in mind, this is 10 years later, and some stupid little test that a kid takes when they are four that has to do with resisting a marshmallow and how many seconds they can resist should not, I repeat, not have anything to do with how they do on their SAT scores, which is one of the most important tests they're ever gonna take. But ...

WALTER MISCHEL: We found remarkable correlations between the actual SAT scores and seconds of delayed time.

JAD: In other words, the kids who waited the longest when they were four, staring at the Oreos, did better on the SATs ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Yes.

JAD: ... than the kids who just gave up immediately?

WALTER MISCHEL: Yes.

JAD: How much better?

WALTER MISCHEL: Significantly.

JONAH LEHRER: The differences are so big.

JAD: That's Jonah Lehrer, science writer, often a guest on this show, who's also reporting about these follow-up studies.

JONAH LEHRER: You know, the difference between a kid who can wait one minute for the marshmallow and a kid who can wait 20 minutes, the difference from the SAT scores is 210 points.

JAD: No way!

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah. This isn't, you know, fiddling at the margins. This is a profound difference.

WALTER MISCHEL: Well above what one would expect by chance.

JAD: And as they dug into the data, it turned out it went way beyond SATs. The kids who waited back when they were four now in their late teens ...

JONAH LEHRER: Parents reported they were better behaved.

JAD: And on the flip side, the kids who hadn't been able to wait back in that initial study, they were more likely now to be suspended from school, to be classified as "problem kids," to be, you know, the kind of kids who ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Were most likely to wind up as the bullies.

JAD: The results were so odd and strong that Mischel and this team decided to keep following those kids up through their teens, into their 20s and 30s and beyond.

WALTER MISCHEL: So this is now roughly 40 years, because they're about 44—45 at this point. We're still in touch with over 250.

JAD: And they've expanded the kind of data that they're keeping track of. Everything from ...

WALTER MISCHEL: How well they're able to stick to goals at work. How far they go in school.

JAD: Even their health.

WALTER MISCHEL: For example, body mass index.

JONAH LEHRER: A huge amount of data. They really wanna, like, amass a—an FBI file, so to speak.

JAD: And the more data they collect, the worse it gets. The kids who could wait back when they were four, now in their 40s have better jobs, they've gone farther in their education, they're even skinnier ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Yeah, yeah.

JAD: ... than the kids who couldn't wait. Now think about this: how much willpower you exhibit as a four year old in something so insignificant as trying to resist the pull of a marshmallow could predict this frightening amount about your life?

WALTER MISCHEL: There's no question that there was something predictive about it and that it wasn't a fluke.

JAD: Here's what I'm wondering.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

JAD: If I have a four year old, and I informally give them this test and they fail ...

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

JAD: ... should I be worried? Do you know what I mean?

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, me, I've got such a bias against these kinds of rigid predictive variables when it comes to the brain.

JAD: Yeah.

JONAH LEHRER: But I think these experiments have to give you pause.

JAD: Because one interpretation of Mischel's work, and it's one we unfortunately cannot rule out, is that maybe self-control is hardwired. You either have it by the age of four or you don't. And if you don't have it, statistically you're screwed. But there's another way to interpret this—thankfully. If willpower gets its start when you're four, which is a big if, but let's just assume for the moment it does, then you gotta ask, what exactly happens at age four that separates the willful from the rest of us?

WALTER MISCHEL: So what you're seeing over here is a tortured looking, adorable little girl.

JAD: Walter Mischel would say go back to those videos and really look at them. If you do, much of what you'll see has very little to do with nature.

WALTER MISCHEL: She's looking at it. She's withdrawing from it and she's holding her breath.

JAD: The first thing you notice, he says, is that every kid is in agony. Even the good kids, they are not models of strength. They are suffering too. 'Cause Oreo cookies, man. They're good! Second, the very simple difference between the good kids and the bad kids seems to be that the good kids just found ways to distract themselves. They had strategies.

WALTER MISCHEL: And she's holding her breath.

JAD: Like this girl ...

WALTER MISCHEL: She's saying "Shhhhh" to herself and stopping herself.

JAD: ... shushing. That seemed to work. Or ...

WALTER MISCHEL: Kicking.

JAD: ... kicking the table. That's actually a good strategy, he says. Or making up a tune.

WALTER MISCHEL: You know, kids composing new songs.

JAD: Or just turning around in the chair.

JAD: Okay. We're back to girl number one now. She has her back completely turned to the cookies.

JONAH LEHRER: Some kids actually pretended the marshmallow was a cloud.

WALTER MISCHEL: I mean, the kinds of things one sees are extraordinary.

JONAH LEHRER: Or the cookie was a UFO. They turned this hot stimulus into, as Mischel puts it, a cold stimulus.

JAD: And that might be all that separated the kids who could wait from the kids who caved.

JONAH LEHRER: The best kids simply had a better bag of tricks.

JAD: And if that's all we're talking about, tricks, well, you can teach a trick.

JONAH LEHRER: You know, I think one of my favorite twists on his experiment that he did was he found that you could take kids who had trouble delaying gratification, so kids who had really had a tough time waiting for the marshmallow, and you simply say to them, "Put a picture frame around the marshmallow, pretend it's a picture and not a delicious piece of candy." All of a sudden, you gave kids this little trick and you could turn low delayers into much higher delayers.

JAD: Oh, so he could help these kids.

JONAH LEHRER: Absolutely. You can teach—just—just, so that simple suggestion "Why don't you just pretend it's the picture frame?" So he's got these bar graphs and it's dramatic. All of a sudden, the low delayers are performing just like the high delayers.

JAD: Really? And is there any evidence that if you teach these kids, these low delayers, and you give them these tools, that you can send their life in the right direction in some way?

JONAH LEHRER: There—there's—there's no evidence of that yet. You know, he hasn't shown that simply teaching kids how to draw a picture frame around a marshmallow leads to a balloon in SAT scores. And that's where I think even Mischel admits that it's—it remains unclear how valuable these tricks are. Because you can teach obviously, a kid a trick to deal with a marshmallow in a lab setting, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be able to go home and—and, you know, you can't go around drawing picture frames all day long.

JAD: But that's kind of the crux of it, no? I mean, you kind of have to know that these tricks are useful.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

JAD: Otherwise you're just picking your interpretation. You could say, oh, it's learned tricks, or it's hardwired.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah. So—so I think the answer to that remains completely unknown. If they're just beginning to fly all these subjects out, you know, do—it's a couple days' worth of brain scans. I mean, this is a big, big project. No one quite knows what they'll find.

WALTER MISCHEL: I mean, I think it's—it's highly likely to be like most things in life are turning out to be.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

WALTER MISCHEL: Which is yes, the wiring makes a difference and yes, the experience makes a difference and the wiring and the experience are interacting and changing each other.

ROBERT: So Jad?

JAD: Mm-hmm?

ROBERT:  I, who have never been able to withhold my fierce desire to eat all the chicken. When seven pieces of chicken are served to three people, I will eat four pieces of the chicken.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: And yet somehow I have gone through most of my life holding a job.

JAD: Doing quite well.

ROBERT: So, you know, I think before people take Mr. Mischel's views too close to heart, remember there are outliers. There are people who have grabbed the marshmallow early and yet who have somehow thrived.

JAD: [laughs] We'll be right back.

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

 New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.