Life Skills and Adolescent Mental Health by Ole Jacob Madsen

Author:Ole Jacob Madsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2024-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Self-control is seemingly perfect as a methodological individualistic explanation for complex social problems, even to the point of being substantiated by social psychology experiments. If only the current and future population learn to make use of the science of self-control, these problems will gradually diminish or disappear.

Don’t eat the marshmallow yet!

The belief in self-regulation is apparently also strong in the Ludvigsen Committee, but in 2013, Celeste Kidd and colleagues published a study in the journal Cognition in which they recreated Mischel’s original marshmallow experiment, demonstrating why the common explanatory models based on individual differences in self-control were inadequate.88 Instead, they point to a characteristic of trust as central, as the experience of children in trusting the outside world seems to have a major impact on whether or not they want to wait for something good. Kidd allowed the children to go through two different courses before they were tested. One group, consisting of 14 children aged three to five years were exposed to an unpredictable learning environment, while the other group of the same size and age were exposed to predictable conditions. In this one group, the children were told that they could get a nicer tin of paint if they waited until the investigator returned from the warehouse. The same course of events was repeated with a collection of stickers. In both cases, the investigator kept to what he promised. In the second group, exactly the same thing was done but with a significant difference. Both times, the investigator came back empty-handed, equipped only with excuses such as “Sorry children, but the warehouse was empty”. This pilot study is designed to establish or undermine the trust the children have in the investigator. Kidd then conduced a copy of Mischel’s marshmallow experiment. On average, the group of children who had been subject to a credible investigator managed to wait an average of twelve minutes and two seconds, while the group in which the investigator could not be trusted waited on average only three minutes and two seconds. The researchers also saw whether the children were able to wait until the maximum time of 15 minutes had passed and in the group with a credible investigator, nine out of 14 children managed to do so while in the group with an untrustworthy investigator, only one child waited out the time.

Our results do not show that self-control is irrelevant in explaining differences in the waiting times of the children in the original marshmallow study. However, they provide strong evidence that it is hasty to conclude that the observed difference [between children] and the long-term relationship between waiting times and later outcomes in life are due to differences in the individual capacity for self-control. Instead, an unreliable worldview, in addition to self-control, may be causally associated with later outcomes in life, as is already suggested a number of existing facts.89

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