The marshmallow test.
You might know about this iconic social experiment —
there are many references to it in pop culture.
But what if I told you that what you've been
told is the point of the marshmallow test
is actually completely wrong?
So, here's the basics of how it works.
You sit a kid in front of a delicious marshmallow
and tell them that you're gonna leave the
room, and if they can resist the marshmallow
until you come back,
they will get two marshmallows instead of one.
It's a test of delayed gratification: controlling
immediate desires
in the service of long-term interest.
A small test, seen as having huge implications.
"The kids who successfully delay gratification
at this age do much better later in life.
They make more money, they are happier, they
have better relationships, and they're less
likely to get into trouble."
So that idea caught fire.
The marshmallow test seemed to prove that
we have these static personality traits deep
inside us, and those traits determine the
rest of our lives.
There is only one tiny problem with this interpretation.
"That iconic story is upside-down wrong, that
your future is in a marshmallow,
because it isn't."
That's Walter Mischel, the guy who actually
created the marshmallow test, and he told
me that literally the point of the original
marshmallow study was to demonstrate not how
fixed but how flexible people are, how easily
changed, if they simply reinterpret the way
that they frame the situation around them.
"The same little girl who can't wait for even
a half minute for two little Oreo cookies
— if she tries it, and I tell her ahead
of time, 'You can make believe that they're
not really there, it's just a picture in your
head,' the same child waits fifteen minutes."
Though of course, that's not the moral that
our culture drew.
" 'It's your destiny, your future's in a marshmallow!'
And it's far from your destiny."
"People can use their wonderful brains to
think differently about situations, to reframe
them, to reconstrue them, to even reconstrue
themselves."
All that stuff in your mind — your beliefs,
cultural expectations, family upbringing,
friendships — that stuff, Mischel explains,
profoundly influences how you see the world.
Your brain uses it as a filter to interpret
everything around you.
So when the stuff in someone's mind changes,
they change.
This is why Mischel sees people as fundamentally
flexible.
He tells me that is the single most important
thing that he has stood for
in his whole professional life.
"What my life has been about is in showing
the potential for human beings to not be the
victims of their biographies — not their
biological biographies, not their social biographies
— and to show, in great detail, the many
ways in which people can change
what they become and how they think."
