Delayed Gratification

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column deconstructs the "science fictional" idea of "the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. . . . Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness to save, which is to say, in the childish inability to defer gratification." Likewise, a career of crime is attributed to poor self-control, resulting in the inability to make a legitimate living, on the assumption that "the causal arrow runs from 'personal defects' to 'poor outcomes'."

Marshmallow Longtermism

The title refers to the famous (or, as Doctorow says, infamous) Stanford marshmallow experiment on delaying gratification. Children were left alone in a room with a marshmallow for fifteen minutes. The experimenter told them if they didn't eat the marshmallow, they would get two instead of just the one. Follow-up studies showed that the vast majority of the kids who ate the marshmallow instead of waiting had poor futures socially and economically, whereas the "patient" kids grew up to prosper. Hence the value of self-control in predicting life outcomes was supposedly validated.

Personally, in my opinion the experiment was intrinsically flawed. How many people, even little kids, consider a boring old marshmallow an irresistible temptation? I would have held out for chocolate. But that's beside the point. Later replications of the study revealed that most of the "impatient" children came from poor backgrounds, while the "patient" ones belonged to secure, well-off families. In short, the "causal arrow" ran in the other direction. The "impatient" test subjects, having experienced numerous disappointments and broken promises from the adults in their lives, decided quite rationally to take no chances and chose the treat in front of them, a bird in the hand being preferable to any number of imagined birds in a future bush. "Which means that the 'patient' kids weren’t demonstrating 'self-control' -– rather, their willingness to wait for a second marshmallow reflected a charmed life in which adults came through with the goodies they promised." That same "charmed life" resulted in their adult success. Doctorow concedes that of course self-control and hard work have positive effects on one's chances in life. On their own, they don't guarantee success, though.

As he summarizes the issue, "Self-control is a virtue, one that we could all stand to cultivate. The difference between the rich and the poor isn’t who has self-control. It comes down to whether your life has such thin margins that single lapse kicks off an avalanche of devastating consequences, or whether you have the kind of cushions that allow you to recover from your slips."

I first encountered the concept of "discounting the future" in Steven Pinker's HOW THE MIND WORKS. People tend to heavily discount the future in their decisions when they lack any certainty of having one. If you see many of your contemporaries dying young, you don't have much incentive to avoid risks or accumulate wealth for a hypothetical old age. You might as well live fast and hard, enjoying the fun while it lasts. What looks from outside like a "childish" habit of pursuing instant gratification might be a logical choice in terms of that person's experience.

In Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD, instant gratification is a way of life. Conditioning its people to think of a carefree, pleasurable existence as the highest good, this society views delayed gratification as purely negative. A character in the opening scene asks a group of young adults whether they've ever had to wait for anything they wanted. The responder who admits having endured that experience describes it as horrible, and everybody else agrees with him.

Growing up, most of us learn to put off some pleasures in anticipation of greater rewards in the future. To persist in that habit requires that we have a sound basis for trusting in the future reward. College students who witness seniors only a few years older graduating and moving on to financial security and fulfilling jobs can believe in their own prospects of similar success. The connection between some kinds of delayed gratification, though, such as dietary changes and weight loss, is less obvious, especially given seemingly random day-to-day fluctuations in the number on the scale. Dropping enough pounds to notice a real difference takes a long time. Abstaining from favorite treats long enough to achieve that goal often feels futile. With our brains fighting us at every step, we fall back on strategies to trick ourselves. Don't keep the treats in the house at all. Or if we're eating them but strictly rationing ourselves, store them in a location where impulsive consumption isn't easy, forcing ourselves to stop and think first. In the financial realm, we trick ourselves into accumulating money for the future by setting up automatic transfers into a savings account or withdrawals directly from our salaries into retirement funds. However, before people can devise or implement such strategies, in whatever area of daily life or long-term planning, they have to make a rational decision that the desired outcome is worth the short-term deprivation.

Margaret L. Carter

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