I expect you’ve heard of the Marshmallow Test. It’s the one where you leave a four-year child alone for a few minutes in a room with a marshmallow on the table, promising further rewards if they can restrain themselves from eating it. After initially trying to hold out for the reward, most four-year-olds find the immediacy of the marshmallow too much to bear. The interesting part of the original Marshmallow Test, carried out in Stanford in the late 1960s, is that the children who gobbled up the marshmallow generally went on to do worse in life according to various measures. Like many psychology experiments, there is a fair amount of controversy around what the Marshmallow Test actually shows. It could demonstrate that an ability to be patient and exercise self-control is a crucial life skill, or alternatively it may be that some other unobserved factors were at play (e.g. socioeconomic background, intelligence, trust). I don’t think it takes a huge leap of faith to believe that patience is an important life-skill. One area where I’m pretty confident that gobbling up marshmallows is likely to cost you is in investing. Continue reading →
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