Cohort Effects in Children's Delay-of-Gratification

Stephanie Carlson (), Yuichi Shoda, Ozlem Ayduk, Lawrence Aber, Catherine Schaefer, Anita Sethi, Nicole Wilson, Philip Peake and Walter Mischel
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Stephanie Carlson: University of Minnesota
Yuichi Shoda: University of Washington
Ozlem Ayduk: University of California at Berkeley
Lawrence Aber: New York University
Catherine Schaefer: Pennsylvania State University
Anita Sethi: The Happy Montessori School
Nicole Wilson: University of Washington
Philip Peake: Smith College
Walter Mischel: Columbia University

No 2017-077, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: In the 1960s at Stanford University's Bing Preschool, children were given the option of taking an immediate, smaller reward or receiving a delayed, larger reward by waiting until the experimenter returned. Since then, the "Marshmallow Test" has been used in numerous studies to assess delay-of-gratification. Yet, no prior study has compared the performance of children across the decades. Common wisdom suggests children today would wait less long, preferring immediate gratification. Study 1 confirmed this intuition in a survey of adults in the U.S. (N = 354; Median age = 34 years). To test the validity of this intuition, in Study 2 we analyzed the original data for average delay-of-gratification times (out of 10 min) of 840 typically developing U.S. children in three birth cohorts from similar middle-high socioeconomic backgrounds, tested 20 years apart (1960s, 1980s, and 2000s), matched on age (3-5 years) at the time of testing. In contrast to popular belief, results revealed a linear increase in delay over time, such that children in the 2000s waited on average 2 min longer than children in the 1960s, and 1 min longer than children in the 1980s. This pattern was robust with respect to age, sex, geography and sampling effects. We posit that increases in symbolic thought, technology, and public attention to self-regulation have contributed to this finding, but caution that more research in diverse populations is needed to examine the generality of the findings and to identify the causal factors underlying them.

Keywords: delay of gratification; Marshmallow Test; executive function; cohort effect; preschool (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-edu and nep-his
Note: IP
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http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Carlso ... ay-gratification.pdf First version, October, 2017 (application/pdf)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Carlso ... ication_update-2.pdf Third version, March 1, 2018 (application/pdf)

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