Psychology's Joseph Kable Re-examines Longstanding Self-Control Test

For decades, a psychological experiment known as the marshmallow test has captured the public’s imagination as a marker of self-control and a predicator of future success. In the test, a researcher presents a child with a marshmallow and leaves him or her alone for a few minutes. If the child can resist eating the marshmallow until the researcher returns, he or she can have two marshmallows instead of one.

Joseph Kable, Baird Term Assistant Professor of Psychology, studies how people make value-based decisions, especially when they require valuing something in the present with something else in the future. When trying to replicate the marshmallow test in his own research, he found that a key fact had been glossed over in both popular and academic discussions: The participants don’t know how long it will be before the researcher returns.

“Our intuition is that when we are waiting for something, the longer we wait, the closer and closer we get to that thing, which is what we see when we ask people about familiar things, like how long a movie will last,” Kable says. “But what we’ve found is that if you don’t know anything about when the outcome will occur, the longer you wait, the more you think you’re getting farther and farther away from that outcome.”

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