If you're going to beat someone over the head, it's best to use something harder than a marshmallow.
Also, did you explain the premise to HP? "If you eat this marshmallow you'll grow up to be a failure. Bye!"
Well, I wanted to know how hard we were going to have to work over the next 16 years.
Show her the basketball-passing plus gorilla video. If she sees the gorilla write a long blog post about how smart she is and how she thinks outside teh box.
Now it's seeming like an obnoxious thing to post. But once I was sitting on the footage and realized it was lame, I didn't have anything else planned. Obviously her birthday can go unmentioned, but I'd already staged and executed the whole dang thing.
HP did good. I would have totally eaten the marshmallow.
I've always wondered about that test: what if the kid just hates marshmallows? Then I realized: that's not possible.
I've always wondered about that test: what if the kid just hates marshmallows? Then I realized: that's not possible.
I was never a kid? It becomes possible if the kid internalises a greater than average hostility to the things on the part of one or mre parent, believe you me.
Very cute.
I wonder how the kids who are the marshmallow immediately fared relative to the ones who waited a few minutes, but not the full 15. Possibly less self-control, but a good deal more self-knowledge and common sense.
Ironically, I would eat the first marshmallow immediately to avoid being tempted with a second one.
"Kind of boring"? You do her down - it's more understated than the canonical video, but I love the waving it up and down and the dark look that sets in near the end.
It becomes possible if the kid internalises a greater than average hostility to the things on the part of one or mre parent, believe you me.
I'm intrigued. Did one of your grandparents die from marshmallowoholism?
You do her down - it's more understated than the canonical video,
Well, I admit that I found it fascinating, but I've got the whole narcissism of one's offspring going on. I especially like it when she yells at me to come back and sit in that chair!
Did one of your grandparents die from marshmallowoholism?
Not noticeably. The relevant grandparents were alive and well at the time I imbibed my mother's dislike of marshmallows. I think she found the texture mildly nauseating, as indeed do I. They're far too sweet as well, but that's a side issue and probably didn't bother me when I was a toddler.
13: Dude. You're harshing my 'mallow.
I don't really care for marshmallows, but that distaste developed once I was an adult.
think she found the texture mildly nauseating, as indeed do I.
By the way, are we talking British style Princess marshmallows, or American style ones? Because I can understand disliking the former - they are extremely sickly sweet. As for the texture, the trick (with American marshmallows) is to take one and then roll it between your palms until it becomes a dense, chewy ball of sugary goodness. Or do the whole smores thing, of course.
Greetings, fallows!
I thought it was a very interesting video. The mise-en-scene was intriguing. Is the white object with letter magnets on it in the upper left corner of the frame a small chest freezer? A dishwasher? HaPu seems to be sitting on a booster seat on an adult chair, but there also seems to be a frog-motif highchair directly behind her. Has this been outgrown, or are there other considerations that determine which chair she sits in? Also, somewhat with regard to the experiment itself, how do the colors of the two plates involved affect HaPu's decision-making process, if they do at all? Certainly my visceral reaction was that she would deprecate the marshmallow on the blue plate, as the one on the orange plate seemed more attractive and "happy".
Furthermore: If HaPu had "failed" the test and eaten the first marshmallow, and then been denied the second one, and become distraught, how many minutes would have elapsed before Heebie would have relented and allowed her another marshmallow? If she would not have relented, how much fussing was she prepared to entertain?
It's also kind of a test of how much you trust your parents. To put it in bond market terms, you aren't just testing your kid's internal discount rate for future marshmallow streams; you're also testing your kid's assessment of your own creditworthiness as regards future commitments to deliver marshmallows.
A kid could discount future marshmallowflow at a sufficiently low rate for "definitely two marshmallows in 15 minutes" to be worth more than "definitely one marshmallow now", but still reason that the adult was not very likely actually to stick to the deal, and therefore it is better to take the one marshmallow now.
further to #18, #19 correctly notes that there is also a moral hazard aspect of "too tantrummy to fail".
for #18 above, read #19 and vice versa.
18 makes a very similar argument to 19 but in the opposite direction; I didn't think of that. The payoffs are either
one marshmallow now +
(probability of whining delivering a second marshmallow)
or
one marshmallows * (discount rate of marshmallows over 15 minutes) * (probability of parent not giving second marshmallow) + one marshmallow * discount rate.
Slight amendation; there's also the cost to the child of whining, which should be deducted from the first payoff. p(successful whining) is probably quite high, though; after all, the adult has already agreed in principle to deliver the second marshmallow under certain conditions and so probably won't require much persuasion to do so even if the conditions are met.
(HP eats marshmallow)
HP: "Now give me the other one."
h-g: "No, you don't get to have it; the arrangement was that you only got it if you waited 15 minutes to eat the first one."
HP: "I am altering our arrangement. Pray I don't alter it any further."
The moral hazard here is obvious. Heebie Mae is backstopped by the full faith and credit of a bag of marshmallows somewhere in the house. The bankers babies just need to present more and more dire scenarios and some marshmallows will be found to appease them.
after all, the adult has already agreed in principle to deliver the second marshmallow under certain conditions and so probably won't require much persuasion to do so even if the conditions are met.
Said GBS to the society lady.
My experience is that in terms of real-world frequencies:
probability of whining delivering a second marshmallow (whether or not terms of the previously agreed contract have been fulfilled by child) ≈ 1
probability of parent not giving second marshmallow (even if terms of the previously agreed contract have not been fulfilled by child) ≈ 0
Another question: did Hokey Pokey have a side bet with Jammies over HaPu's ability to last the full fifteen minutes? How many marshmallows do you have on-hand for this experiment? What does quantitative easing look like with marshmallows?
26: true, which is I think why this sort of experiment works better with an unknown adult carrying it out.
I don't know about your families, but when I was a kid the 'if you don't eat your broad beans you won't get your pudding' promise was always kept. No amount of whining made any difference.
Well that's easy when "pudding" means "fried blood sausage".
I believe you colonials refer to them as fava beans.
On the other hand, isn't five minutes of two-year-old time like, five days of adult time? In which case maybe the contract was unconscionable.
I don't know about your families, but when I was a kid the 'if you don't eat your broad beans you won't get your pudding' promise was always kept. No amount of whining made any difference.
With calculated whining my kids are usually able to negotiate it down to "three more bites".
God, I love fresh fava beans. I want some right now but they're not in season yet.
re: 34
I haven't had them in years, but when I was a kid they were the only food I absolutely refused to eat. Wasn't a fussy eater, ate all veg (we were vegans anyway), but for some reason fava beans made me physically boak.
29: My childhood was like that too, but sometime between then and now human nature seems to have changed. I literally have no idea how my parents' generation managed to summon up the willpower.
30: I'm imagining adorable tots gazing forlornly at their food with urple assuring them that a little plastic in your egg makes you grow up big and strong.
Favas are definitely one of those foods that's unrecognizable if not very fresh. I don't know how you got yours, of course, but (a) fresh ones are the biggest pain in the ass ever (shell, blanch, peel, cook), and (b) taste like green heaven.
OT: woohoo, we're invading Libya.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110419/ap_on_re_eu/libya_diplomacy
Flava Flav beans come each with its own clock attached, so you know exactly how long to cook it.
A smart child is also going to be aware that marshmallows are not purchased in ones and twos, and if there's a bag of marshmallows in the house, they're going to be getting those marshmallows sooner or later anyway.
I've told heebie this directly before, but watching some of these these videos of Hawaii makes me weep and this one definitely did. Hawaii (at least in certain respects) seems to speak almost as well and more clearly than Mara, who will be three and a half in another 10 days. And yet Mara, who couldn't make three-word sentences in October, sang all seven verses of a Raffi song from memory last night and was utterly adorable about it. Kids are amazing.
They really are, and they're amazingly variable. It sounds as if Mara's making huge strides making up any deficits from her disrupted living experiences before she got to you -- I wouldn't even think about worrying about where she is compared to her peers until she'd been with you for a year or two. (Wouldn't even think about worrying doesn't mean that you shouldn't be working with her on catching her up, which you are. Just that stressing about it seems premature.)
43: Yeah, my plan has always been that I hope she'll be basically indistinguishable from non-traumatized peers by age 6, which is both when she starts kindergarten and when she'll switch from having spent more time with us than she did before us. I think she'll actually be there much sooner, but that's due to her inherent excellence and also how well she responds to our interest in her and support of her.
I think there are just moments of real poignancy or maybe I should just say grief when I see HP and think that, wow, that's what age Mara was when she left her mother's care and at that point her vocabulary was estimated at under 10 words. But hey, I'll save this for some time when Shearer wants to talk about IQ and I can argue that Mara's awesomeness is more impressive than either HP's or Halford's daughter or something, kids who come by it through nature and nurture.
re: 39
Yeah, we are at the security advisers stage.
I'm really glad that Mara is so resilient, and that she has you guys to provide what she needs to thrive.
And Hawaiian Punch was definitely always going to get two marshmallows anyway. No way am I leaving a marshmallow in sight for five minutes without eventually giving it to her. If we eventually have desserts conditionally linked to vegetables, we're probably not going to taunt them with the dessert.
Heebie, none of that is to say that your kids are not awesome! I'm glad you posted the video, which was hilarious and cool. I love seeing HP's personality shine through!
Also, productive speech is really, really, all over the place even for kids in stable upper-middle-class households. My kids were freaky early, clear talkers, and I spent the years between 1 1/2 and four trying desperately to keep the lid on my impulse to think that the slower-talking half of their peers were really stupid by comparison. And I was right to keep a lid on it, not just out of politeness but also because by the time they were all in school, the gaps were comparatively tiny -- the slowest to speak well aren't reliably the less clever kids at all.
Also, there's a huge amount of natural variability in linguistic performance, under the age of five, that evens out later on. Albert Einstein, etc.
Children have a thousand words for not speaking.
Further proof that LizardBreath and I were separated at birth.
I was never a talker as a child. Take that as encouragement or warning.
That joke about the kid who doesn't say anything until six, and then starts talking with "Please pass the salt."
"Why haven't you ever said anything before!!?!"
"Up till now, everything's been fine."
is funny because it's sort of true -- there really are kids with that sort of language-learning trajectory.
(My understanding is that you should worry, early and hard, if you've got a kid who doesn't seem to understand what you're saying -- receptive language is on a much tighter schedule. But there aren't nearly as many kids who are worrisomely slow about understanding speech.)
I think there are just moments of real poignancy or maybe I should just say grief when I see HP and think that, wow, that's what age Mara was when she left her mother's care
However, this part kills me a little. Just the enormity of having a baby, and two years later, it being the best thing for the child for the baby to be taken away, and perhaps agreeing that that's best for the child. It just belies such a hard life.
That joke about the kid who doesn't say anything until six, and then starts talking with "Please pass the salt."
"Why haven't you ever said anything before!!?!"
"Up till now, everything's been fine."
A drab descendant of Lord Macaulay's "Thank you, madam, the agony is sensibly abated."
On topic, I really enjoyed the first half of this TED talk, expecially the part where he plays a sequence of his son's attempts to say "water".
My kids have so far had dramatically different language-learning trajectories. The first was a very early clear talker with a huge vocabulary. The second is I'm sure basically normal but seems like a dolt in comparison. Although in terms of both fine and gross motor skills he's basically on par with his older brother, who's twice his age. I believe I've read somewhere credible that learning motor skills and language are sort of hard for kids to do at the same time, and their brains basically take turns in phases during their early years, so some 3 year olds are good talkers but mediocre climbers, and some are the opposite, but that everything generally tends to even out by roughly about age 6 or so.
56: You want heartbreaking, there's a fostermother blog Thorn linked to ages ago that I've been reading since: http://fosterhood.tumblr.com/ . The blogger was fostering a kid from a little over a year to just about three, and the kid was just returned to her mother, who the blogger is entirely uncertain is competent to care for her. I feel so bad for everyone involved -- the blogger's distraught, both just out of losing contact with a kid she'd emotionally adopted and out of fear for what's going to happen to the kid; the mother, given that whatever her situation was that led to having the kid removed in the first place must have been fairly awful, and it sounds as if it's still fairly awful; and the kid, who had a good stable couple of years with the blogger, but who it sounds like is in for a disrupted life.
The whole saga is just heartwrenching.
I think it's common for younger siblings to be less precocious in speaking. One possibility is that the older kids tend to do their speaking for them at first.
Urple, that was how it was with my brother and me. He's two years older and talked a blue streak, and terrifically loudly, throughout toddlerhood. I read earlier than he did, because he was there to teach me, and picked up a lot from imitating him, but I didn't find it necessary to talk much. I think it might be a second-born thing.
For Sally and Newt, the only thing where she was out ahead of him was enunciation -- she sounded like a broadcaster from her first words, and he's still kind of got kid-mushmouth enunciation. He read way earlier than she did, though, which I think is common for second kids as well -- I was certainly out ahead of my sister.
Pwned, but with an additional couple of data points.
54: The only way my mother could love Mara more would be if she declared Tristram Shandy as her favorite book, I think.
Mara's speech is typical of kids who just weren't exposed to language sufficiently at an early age. Her brain is still in sponge mode and she's learning incredibly quickly, and nothing from her prenatal situation or early environment (lead exposure, though details differ on how much and for how long) seems to have caused damage to her ability to learn. I do think this tends to be a different set of problems than kids who've been exposed to language but just can't process it or create it for other reasons have. She's definitely catching up, and along the way coming up with adorable metaphorical ways of talking about things to cover the words she doesn't know, like "mushroom" for "shank button" and "princess" for "dress." And she doesn't get frustrated the way littler kids do when she doesn't know a word; she just keeps going and finds her way around it, which amazes and impresses me.
56: Especially as we get closer to termination of her parents' rights, I really grieve for Mara's mother. She and I are almost the same age and I have a lot of empathy for her. I really hope that someday she'll be able to know Mara. I really hope that if she has children in the future, she'll be able to parent them. I've sent photos to her social worker so she can at least see that Mara's growing and thriving, but she's never picked them up.
Yeah, it's interesting. All of the younger kids in my family, were fantastic speakers, very early. Huge vocabularies, very vocal, often with very developed and adult senses of humour as kids. I don't think it's translated into any special academic or social ability as they reach near-adulthood/adulthood now, though. All of them are effectively only children [big age differences with their siblings] so I expect they all had no-one to do their speaking for them.
69: I wonder if the much-older siblings were a factor as well, just as additional steady sources of adult verbal interaction. One caregiver interacting with the same kid all day probably isn't going to generate as much chatter as multiple family-members handing off to each other.
She's definitely catching up, and along the way coming up with adorable metaphorical ways of talking about things to cover the words she doesn't know, like "mushroom" for "shank button"
I wouldn't worry too much about that; I've managed for several decades without knowing the word for "shank button".
And 'mushroom' is not just adorable, but a very clever way of getting her point across.
I've managed for several decades without knowing the word for "shank button".
Seriously. I suspect that Thorn is running a sweatshop. There can be no other explanation for concerning a toddler with different names for the various types of clothesputonnersbuttons.
An adorable sweatshop. Like Santa's toy workshop.
71: Well, she still doesn't know the word for "shank button" but I knew exactly what she was talking about. She's also in a phase right now where she does the faking-a-foreign-accent thing with English. "Ugga BUGGA bugga bugga bugga cheese ung Shauna?" with all her intonations right and the words she knows where they'd belong in the sentence. I think sometimes she's just talking to herself that way, but sometimes I can ask questions and tease out what she was actually trying to say.
Really the bigger issue right now is not what she doesn't know but what she insists she does know, where a lot of discussions end with me saying things like, "Well, I understand that you think that's a tiger, but since it has spots and tigers have stripes I'm going to keep insisting that it's a cheetah. Maybe someday we'll agree."
Okay, done with kid stories for the moment.
My sister's younger son talks a mile a minute and drowns out the older boy. Datum.
Also, I realized very, very young that marshmallows were objectively nasty.
"Well, I understand that you think that's a tiger, but since it has spots and tigers have stripes I'm going to keep insisting that it's a cheetah. Maybe someday we'll agree."
Our household today:
"I'm FOUR!" (holding up ten fingers)
"You're TWO!"
"I'M FOUR."
"Sure, why not."
By the way, the marshmallow test is probably bullshit, but you all knew that already. Nurtureshock is pretty good, btw, as far as parenting books go.
Thorn, I try to always keep in mind(but it's hard) the truth, which is that so many of these early signs of development are totally meaningless as predictors of future anything -- positive or negative. I always go back to the parents who were super-proud of how early their kid walked; yeah, great, but are there a lot of kids out there who don't figure out how to walk? No there are not, so who cares if yours did so a few months early?
Also, it's so hard not to read in huge personality traits into what are really just minor daily interactions. At preschool the other day, I spent some time hanging out with the kids and reading a book, and I noticed that my kid didn't want to join the group that was doing art. OMG, she didn't want to join the group! Maybe she's a natural loner! Or maybe, you idiot, she just didn't want to join the group this one time.
Some fully functional adults have been known to be quieter than others too.
79.1: dude, Halford, I'm not arguing in favor of the marshmallow test (I think it's interesting, but even the best predictive test is going to have very little power when it comes to adult achievement), but that article is terrible. I wouldn't trust Po Bronson to write about anything more complicated than... no, actually, no caveats. I wouldn't trust Po Bronson on any topic.
Like, in response to a scientific paper with a relatively low n (35 subjects isn't actually that low for a developmental psychology paper, but anyhow) they find another study that isn't particularly related, the author of which actually agrees with the conclusions of the paper they discredit, and then ask that author to comment on a totally unrelated, batshit crazy idea (the marshmallow test as private school entrance exam), and call that evidence?
Nurtureshock kind of annoyed me. But then I lent it out and now I can't remember why, except for the chapter on how dumb Hawaiian Punch was because most babies having nuanced conversations on their first birthday. But that was the last chapter, and I was already annoyed before then.
I won't debate clinical psychological research with you, but it's a pretty effective debunking of the popular culture use of the marshmallow test, as well as fair game to point out that it's been done once, on a tiny sample size, and never replicated. And the one test that did try to replicate it found zero correlation with any ability to predict self-control, which is the mechanism that the amazing marshmallow test supposedly used to predict SAT scores. In other words, while it may or may not be true that the marshmallow test was a somewhat interesting result in the world of academic psychology (I have no real idea), it's utter bullshit as a trustworthy result that people should think of as having any real-world consequence --which they do.
Pretend that I wrote "found zero correlation with any adult development of self-control, which is the mechanism that is posited to explain the amazing result of the marshmallow test's purported ability to predict SAT scores."
I mean, just to be clear, this marshmallow test stuff does have real world consequences; elementary schools really do try things like these sorts of tests as admissions exams, and preschools (including evil-ass preschool that kicked my kid out) used it as an example to explain their insistence on various stupid rules. In the battle of scientific righteousness, whatever the technical flaws of the Po Bronson article, debunking the notion that the marshmallow test produced a real-world useful result is unquestionably on the side of the angels.
I didn't realize the marshmallow test was supposed to be actual research with predictive claims. I thought it was just a funny kid-torture thing, like the disappearing pudding videos.
but it's a pretty effective debunking of the popular culture use of the marshmallow test
It really isn't. I mean, I understand that it convinced you.
And the one test that did try to replicate it found zero correlation with any ability to predict self-control
Well, one test (I won't say "the" one because I highly doubt that there have been no other attempts to replicate or expand on those findings), which didn't replicate the experiment, showed that the marshmallow test didn't correspond to improved results on a test of executive function (which is not exactly the same as self control). Which tells us that the real picture is unsurprisingly complicated, but the fact that the marshmallow test is the single best available predictor of future SAT scores still seems like a perfectly valid result.
it's utter bullshit as a trustworthy result that people should think of as having any real-world consequence
It's no more bullshit than any other academic result which people incorporate into their folk psychology. Which, sure, everybody is always already getting everything wrong when they do that, but you should probably expand your statement to "no academic research on developmental psychology can ever be used to make conclusions about a child's behavior by a non-expert", which is certainly fair, but then you should probably broaden that to "nothing ever written about children or their behavior can ever be used to make conclusions about a child's behavior" because popular writing is inevitably going to be less exact and empirical.
Or you might just be pushing back at the implicit scientism of treating the marshmallow test as a sort of oracular measure of child fitness, which is basically fine, although it does square with the preponderance of evidence which shows that early childhood (and prenatal) interventions are basically the only effective way to improve life outcomes in children that need services (who are obviously a subset of children who like marshmallows).
But all that aside, that article is terribly argued, and not very well written.
elementary schools really do try things like these sorts of tests as admissions exams
Merit-based selective admissions at the elementary level are an idiotic sham, yes. Support public schools!
but the fact that the marshmallow test is the single best available predictor of future SAT scores still seems like a perfectly valid result.
I'm not getting this as making sense in a world where the test has been given once to a small group of kids. If you had a bunch of four-year-olds, and really needed to predict their future SATs, and had a choice between administering the marshmallow test or looking at their parents' SATs, for example, I doubt you're saying that you'd pick administering the marshmallow test.
91: neither would work at all well, but the evidence is that the marshmallow test would work better.
90: There's something oddly creepy about intense, merit-based admissions procedures for very expensive private schools.
92: For a broadly socioeconomically mixed group of four-year-olds? I doubt that really, really strongly. Can you spell out what exactly makes you believe that?
"no academic research on developmental psychology can ever be used to make conclusions about a child's behavior by a non-expert", which is certainly fair, but then you should probably broaden that to "nothing ever written about children or their behavior can ever be used to make conclusions about a child's behavior" because popular writing is inevitably going to be less exact and empirical.
No, that's just stupid. The question is which results and at what level of specificity. For instance, I think (and I'm no expert) that there's lots of evidence that providing safe, secure, loving environments in early childhood have demonstrable, large scale effects for adult behavior, and that research can and should have significant real-world results.
That's different than extapolating from the results of a single study to make real-world decisions about what the marshmallow test does or doesn't mean.
94: it would sort of be easier for me to explain why parent's SAT scores would work really poorly (the test changes every year, there's probably going to be some interaction with the Flynn effect, many parents may not have taken the SAT, the child's development environment probably isn't predicted very well by how seriously the parents took a single test thirty years or so ago) as a predictor than to explain why the marshmallow test would probably work very, very marginally better (for one thing, you are at least testing the individuals who will be taking the test you're interested in).
For instance, I think (and I'm no expert) that there's lots of evidence that providing safe, secure, loving environments in early childhood have demonstrable, large scale effects for adult behavior
Is that based on the one experiment with animals, or has there been follow-up research?
You're the expert, you tell me. Is there no empirical evidence that providing safe, secure, loving environments in early childhood has a demonstrable, large scale effect on adult behavior? I'd be shocked if that was true, but maybe it is.
Maybe we should be using the marshmallow test to backwards dynamically model how the parents must have done on the SAT. Clearly Jammies and I did a little out-of-focus and much too short.
96: I pulled the parental SAT out of my ass as one number that would probably wrap up a bunch of stuff about parental education and SES -- not that it would predict terribly well, but you'd expect a correlation. If you're not going to hold me to one number, then parental SES, education, and income together would, I'd bet, be a better prediction of SAT scores than the marshmallow test.
As far as I know, and maybe you know different, the marshmallow time-SAT score correlation has been shown once, on one small cohort of students all of which attended the same nursery school. That really doesn't sound like something I'd count on at all.
the test changes every year, there's probably going to be some interaction with the Flynn effect
Presumably, one would correct for the mean.
many parents may not have taken the SAT
True. Also, if a child hasn't done the marshmallow test, it won't predict their scores very well.
I thought Nurtureshock was good about telling white people how and why to talk about race with their kids, but that's the main thing I remember from it. Can Unfogged tell me whether or not to read the new Peggy Orenstein book about princess culture? I'm tempted, since all of a sudden Mara's got an interest in dresses and said, "I like pink!" as if testing out the sentence, all of it some persona thing that makes it clear it's a game in certain respects.
And I don't really worry all that much about Mara's speech or other development. Her school is happy, we're happy, her social workers are happy, and she tells me every day that she's happy. This is just one place I can babble about it without getting weird and unhelpful responses.
98: I'm definitely not an expert in any of this. And I should really not get sucked into defending the marshmallow test, which I said I didn't want to do; it would require searching the literature for follow-ups, for one thing, which I don't feel like doing (but I imagine there's plenty of empirical support for the idea that something-similar-to-self-control in children correlates to some degree with the ability to do a couple of practice tests and show up sober some saturday morning as significantly older children), and anyhow I'm perfectly willing to believe that there are excellent arguments against its validity (like, actual scientific arguments) that I wouldn't be well-placed to rebut. All I was saying is that the Po Bronson article is 1. stupid and 2. fails to show anything while being 3. disingenuous and poorly written.
I'm confused by the animosity about the marshmallow test*. Nobody's saying that actual ability to withstand marshmallows is an important thing- it's standing in for general ability to delay gratification. This ability (with toys, treats, other things) is teachable/learnable, and correlates with many other desirable (and learnable) skills, and also with having a nurturing early childhood environment. The point of the SAT thing (which I'm not very convinced by, mainly because of the post-hoc methodology and my hatred of SAT scores) is that other things like parents' SES being equal, the delayed-gratification variable seemed to be a good predictor. Not that you would often/ever see the two in conflict.
I don't understand where the private school entrance exam idea came from, that seems like an egregiously straw-y straw man.
*I'm not confused by animosity towards marshmallows. Marshmallows, unless roasted over a fire, are gross, and I have known this since ever. I would have ROCKED the marshmallow test, except the actual test had the kids pick treats that they wanted from a selection, so I would have gotten the oreo probably.
All I was saying is that the Po Bronson article is 1. stupid and 2. fails to show anything while being 3. disingenuous and poorly written.
The awesome thing about this sentence is that it works no matter what the referent is for "the Po Bronson article".
100: truly, if somebody asked me to predict the relative SAT scores of a room full of four year olds, I would probably laugh at them and leave. There isn't a good test. However, based on both the results of the marshmallow test and the fact that it appears (on a really cursory examination, as well as the content of the interview inexplicably quoted to attempt to prove the opposite point in the article Halford linked) to be generally regarded as a good, valid result in the developmental psychology world, I would expect the correlation in the marshmallow study to be as likely to hold up as anything (which, again, is not at all likely).
105: it also works for "Po Bronson novel"!
Another marshmallow test: (I think, posting from iPhone)
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KyLzuf7BmbU
And I should really not get sucked into defending the marshmallow test,
If you don't want to, certainly you shouldn't. I kind of jumped on you about it -- is it possible that what's going on is that you meant by "perfectly valid result" something more like "the original marshmallow test paper is a good paper" rather than "there's sufficient evidence to conclude reliably that doing the marshmallow test on any four-year-old is likely to give important information about how successful that four-year-old will be as an adult"?
I don't have any reason to believe anything bad about the original marshmallow test paper, I just don't think that it's anywhere near enough to think of the marshmallow test as a practically useful diagnostic.
102.last: I'm feeling a little apologetic -- it seems like I've been pushy about telling you not to worry about Mara every time you've brought her up. I will attempt to remember to back off.
The actually interesting thing (to me) about the original study was not SAT scores or intelligence or anything like that, but that paying attention to the reward (by talking about it or looking at it) made it much harder across the board for the kids to successfully delay gratification. If they covered their eyes or turned around, they lasted much longer than if they were forced to contemplate the reward while they waited.
is it possible that what's going on is that you meant by "perfectly valid result" something more like "the original marshmallow test paper is a good paper" rather than "there's sufficient evidence to conclude reliably that doing the marshmallow test on any four-year-old is likely to give important information about how successful that four-year-old will be as an adult"
Definitely yes. Especially given the qualifier "important".
Right, the techniques for delaying gratification were fascinating.
109 is the point I was trying to make.
What struck me about the video is the way it showed HP's inner life. You can watch kids playing by themselves and chatting to imaginary friends and see that they're processing their experiences, but somehow watching HP think about what to do with the marshmallow while heebie was out of sight made me really notice that there's a whole little, separate person in there.
Anyhow, I'm 90% sure that Tweety (and Josh's) hatred of Po Bronson comes from his Silicon Valley book, which presumably is bad, but which I haven't read.
I liked Bronson's Silicon Valley book. I thought it was much better than Michael Lewis' book, The New New Thing, which I thought was basically stupid.
You know what's only vaguely related? For the longest time as a kid, I thought the Ghostbusters character was named the State Puff Marshmallow Man, which is clear evidence that I was being raised a socialist.
110: Don't worry about it! I get a lot of support here and I often am asking for advice or experiences from people who've gone through toddler parenting already.
99: I didn't take the SAT. West coast forever bitches!
Jammies
I liked Bronson's Silicon Valley book. I thought it was much better than Michael Lewis' book, The New New Thing, which I thought was basically stupid.
Tenuously related: I read Tracy Kidder's Soul Of A New Machine not that long ago and was surprised by how emotionally moving I found it.
There was much that he described about the mindset (and blind spots) of tech workers in the 70s that matched my experiences in my own job.
I can't tell what she's saying. Speak English god damnit.
Somehow the italicizing in 121 left me reading it as "I liked Bronson's Sweet Valley book." Would that be an exception to the rule?
I will never love any other experiment on children as much as the shut children in refridgerators research.
It was also influenced by the educational level of the parents, a higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education attained by mother and father combined.
"See how much good those two marshmallows do you when you're stuck in a refrigerator, smart guy."
"the parents were not involved in the incident, which enabled them to be calm and casual with the children.
"
Wow
An important result of the behavior study was the finding that, when entrapped, children most often try to escape either by pushing on the door through which they entered the enclosure, or by manipulating a knob release as they would a doorknob. Relatively few children pushed against the back, sides or ceiling of the enclosure.
Children do not think outside the box.
the parents were not involved in the incident, which enabled them to be calm and casual with the children.
Submitted on January 27, 1958
Wow. Anyone remember that Punky Brewster episode?
A number of children still talked about the tests, some with pleasure, a few with resentment.
I picture one of the subjects, years later, looking at her parents and out of the blue hissing "Researchers shut me into a refrigerator. What the hell was that about?"
133: that's a whole Wes Anderson movie right there.
Slightly creepier is the kid talking about the experience with pleasure. "I was in this clean, white, enamel box. I felt totally safe... like, for the first time ever. I wish I could have stayed in there forever... by the time they let me out, I think it was getting a little hard to breathe."
You don't think she'd say "They put me in a goddamned fridge. What the hell ..."?
136: I guess it stands to reason that the kid would get fresh as a result.
For reasons not known, the 2-year-old group exerted a slightly greater average force than did the 3-year-old group.
Science proves that 2-year-olds are freakishly strong.
In popular conversation, things like the marshmallow test function more as parables than evidence. A parable is a evocative reminder of something we already believe, rather than a reason for adopting a new belief. In this case, the belief is merely "teaching kids self control is important," which is hardly a controversial message.
The problem is that no one is moved by stories about ants and grasshoppers anymore, so we need to repurpose scientific studies.
Ants are completely unable to resist marshmallows.
Oh, I enjoyed that! She did really well I thought.
I spend a fair amount of time with a kid who's a month younger than HaPu (have her for a few hours most weeks) and there is no way she could have done that, her language just isn't that developed that she would really understand what you wanted I don't think. I will have to test her in a month or so! She's just starting to string two words together - last week we were in my garden and she was picking dandelions for me - "flower, asilon!" "more flower!"
the marshmallow test as private school entrance exam
"Well, my kids aced the Gom Jabbar."
Does warfarin work on non mammals?
OT: Oh Jeez, you guys. This is full of good laughs.
I also like EPG Mr. Justin MD:
"Is Storm Chasing A Job Or Is It Just A Hobby?"
profitendieu is also entertaining.
I suspect that Larry Eisenberg may have created his on Wikipedia entry.
Answer to "Can i have and example of a palindrome sentence?"
"A Palindrome Is Anything That Can Be Spelled Backwards (Example) Nebraska-Aksarben"
Great to find an answer to my dilemma:
"I DECIDED TO TRAVEL DOWN ROUT 66! THIS WAs BEFORE THE INTERSTATE HIGHWAYS! I WOULD BUY SOME ALUMINUM FOIL A POTATO AND AN ONION AND A POUND OF HAMBURGER! I WOULD SLICE THE POTATO AND ONION AND MAKE THE HAMBURGER INTO PATTIES! IN THE FOIL I WOULD PLACE THE POTATO SLICE THEN THE HAMBURGER AND THE ONION AND SEAL THEM ALL UP! I WOULD PLACE THE PACKETS ON THE INTAKE MANIFOLD OF MY DODGE AND TRAVEL FOR A HOUR! AFTER THAT I WOULD PULL INTO A PICNIC AREA AND EAT A GOOD MEAL!"
These are from distant yesteryear so likely reruns for some of you, but Leon's 4 product reviews at epinions.com and Henry Raddick's Amazon book reviews are hilarious.
To be fair to the gentleman from Omaha, there's a lot of shit in Nebraska that's labeled Aksarben, like a slogan, and it might be possible to think that's a word other people have ever seen before outside the state. It was confusing to me when I lived there at 7-8 years old. (No, it wasn't.)
I don't know why 154 makes me cry when I laugh but it does.
155:
Those are beautiful. It's like street art: creating a corpus of work for people to encounter at random.
Regarding the marshmallow test apparently the purported correlation with SAT is based on a single paper published in 1990 (with n=35 and concerning experiments conducted years earlier not originally designed to test this hypothesis) and never replicated. In my view the failure to replicate (if true, if not please cite some replications) means little weight should be given to this paper (and hence the purported correlation).
and concerning experiments conducted years earlier not originally designed to test this hypothesis
Yes, much better to give those little kids the SAT on the spot.
160
Yes, much better to give those little kids the SAT on the spot.
Much better to get more than 35 usuable results from 653 original subjects.
Maybe if you raised HP on a diet of nothing but marshmallows she could go to Amherst.
"If you eat the marshmallow we'll shoot this dog."
- S&P
All you need to know about the marshmallow test is that David Brooks loves it. It is an extraordinarily well known result, especially given the (lack of the) depth of the evidence for what it purports to prove.
I like that Heebie is reading through child psychology literature for experiments to run on her children for blog fodder. Would that all front pagers were so dedicated.
||
O, fellow Unitarians, I ♥ you so.
From a note about a relative's health care tribulations:
Your concern, support, and--from those of you so inclined - your prayers have been a great source of reassurance and comfort in the last several months and will continue to be one.|>
Now I'm all worried that someone will read 167 and think I was being mean to AWB. I wasn't!
Why are you so mean to AWB, Kraab?
Did someone bring up cannibalism again?
This would be an awkward a perfect time to announce my new memoir, Rats' Asses, Vomit and Hicks: My Life in the American Media Industry. Coming this fall from Ballantine Books.
Coincidentally, we're going to see a movie about Hicks tonight. Bill Hicks, that is.
"Well, my kids aced the Gom Jabbar."
So great. The perfect payoff.
The marshmallow test is often talked about as if it tested something innate in the children. But it could just show which ones' life experience told them that promises could be relied upon, and which ones would be right, based on their own experience, to distrust "jam tomorrow" and go for what could be depended on.
Ye olde home environment, basically. Still a good argument for early intervention - the biggest advantage of preschool etc. for deprived kids perhaps being the consistency of the "rearing" they get. Like that follow-up on the Head Start or whatever it was which shows better life outcomes even though any academic advancement disappeared over time.
174: Report back! I really want to see that.
