Comments on: Marshmallow Study and class

By: dsifso

dsifso — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 20:23:00 +0000

Well, I will read more of the comments before replying next time

By: dsifso

dsifso — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 20:22:00 +0000

Significant results does not necessarily equal Valid results. If significance was the only thing that mattered, there would be no need for sampling theory.

By: ChickieD

ChickieD — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:52:00 +0000

Interesting. It makes you wonder if any of the studies have much validity at all.

By: Ito Kagehisa

Ito Kagehisa — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:31:00 +0000

I was making the opposite argument, I think, if I had any point at all.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:27:00 +0000

I’m not objecting to the size of the sample. I’m questioning the way in which the sample was chosen, which is often far from random in small prospective studies.

Small studies can certainly yield significant results but that doesn’t mean that they yield true results. The likelihood of a significant result also being true is connected to both the prior probability of the result being true and the inherent bias in the experimental set up. It’s well worth checking out John Ioannidis’s excellent paper on this subject.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

Sstatistical significance is not directly commutative to truth

By: ChickieD

ChickieD — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 15:54:00 +0000

I took a course in psychological statistics in college. It was taught by an excellent professor and has turned out to be one of the more useful classes I took because it gave me some basis to evaluate all these scientific studies that are reported on. This professor used to do a lot of consulting on studies to help people determine how big the sample size needed to be and the metrics they would use to evaluate the results. One thing he told us was that a large sample size was not needed to get significant results. He said that a study with as little as 6 participants could yield valid results.

By: ChickieD

ChickieD — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 15:13:00 +0000

My sister is a grade school teacher and when she was working on her Masters she had to read a book that I wish to God I knew what the name of it was, because it sounds SOOO interesting. Maybe someone here has read it and will give the name. The book was written by a woman whose husband grew up poor. She grew up middle class. She had a hard time understanding, for example, how her husband would just spend money the instant he got it, so she studied poor people in a kind of anthropological way to try to understand these behaviors and wrote this book about it. From what my sister told me, it was a very similar conclusion that that writer came to as to the authors of this study, that in general people were not reliable and that it drove all kinds of behaviors around money and choices.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:16:00 +0000

Importantly the observation in this study doesn’t actually preclude the previous interpretation of the experiment from being correct. Both interpretations can be correct and complimentary. Growing up in an unreliable environment will shape your psychological development afterall, neuroplasticity and all that.

Reading the full press release they state in it that having selected 28 children “The study results were so strong that a larger sample group was not required to ensure statistical accuracy” but this would only be true if the kids were genuinely selected at random from the whole population. And given how participants for small prospective studies are usually chosen at universities I’d be very sceptical of that being the case.

By: Dlo Burns

Dlo Burns — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:19:00 +0000

Work hard, eat your cabbage and hardtack, and eventually you’ll get your pie in the sky.

By: jhoosier

jhoosier — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 02:22:00 +0000

Well, something like this has been done with dogs. Wikipedia has a good description of it, better than I can do with my time-addled memory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

So learned helplessness, the idea that no matter what you do, you’re gonna get screwed, could explain why that guy steals a Pepsi. He’s learned that no matter how well you do, you’re still going to be treated like dirt, so you might as well get what little enjoyment you can out of it. That, or he’s a kleptomaniac.

By: Ladyfingers

Ladyfingers — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:03:00 +0000

I think there’s more an argument to be made about making sure the base margin of reward reduces struggling to a minimum rather than capping the rewards of the excellent.

For a given value of excellent, mind you.

By: Joshua Alexander Abbott Bouche

Joshua Alexander Abbott Bouche — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 23:16:00 +0000

this realization was the climax of the movie “The 5 Year Engagment.”

By: Bryan3000000

Bryan3000000 — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:11:00 +0000

There is ample evidence that “extremely successful” people are those who always take the shortcut to instant gratification. Wall Street. CEOs taking short-term profits. Etc. They get successful exactly by taking the short-term gains that lead to long-term pain. They typically are able to shift that pain away from themselves and onto others by leveraging the short-term gains.

It’s not so much “success by delayed gratification”, it’s just success by whatever means, often by pushing others down. ”Investment” of these short-term gains is really just another form of instant gratification – generally pushing yourself up and others down. I’ve never met a really (financially) successful person who did not have a dog-eat-dog mentality. They often distance themselves from the carnage though – again, leveraging the short-term success to do so. In this way, they often can appear quite genteel.

By: Ito Kagehisa

Ito Kagehisa — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:48:00 +0000

My Russian friends tell me the Soviet Union fell because you can’t run large groups of humans on a basis of “we reward slackers the same as hard workers”. They claim that somebody has to be visibly poor, compared to the average man, or else nobody will bother to plant the seed corn or fix the leaks in the roof and everything falls apart and we all starve.

But even the hardliners (like Jesus – see Matthew 26:11) would probably agree with you as long as you take the comma and the word “especially” out of your last sentence.

By: tft

tft — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:37:00 +0000

The implications ar actually huge. The right loves to claim that impoverished people are in their predicament due to , as Ryan said recently, lack of discipline and character.

This indicates that the poverty in which they live–a very unpredictable and unrewarding atmosphere–may indeed be the problem.

That means we need to ameliorate (end) the effects of poverty, especially on young children.

By: Amelia_G

Amelia_G — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:35:00 +0000

Excellent follow-up, thank you for pointing it out. Now that you mention it: a friend’s dad spent ages 14 to 19 in a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp (after being captured in Hitler’s last defense of Berlin) where hunger was the worst enemy. He said you learned to eat anything immediately; the best place to store food was inside you. Otherwise it could get stolen from you.
(N.B.: Other interesting stuff I remember: Anyone who wasn’t willing to steal food died early. Prussian officers weren’t as willing to steal food. Tall people starved faster. There wasn’t much of a fence–the guards relied on the remote isolation of the place–so the prisoners organized a rota to go out at night and collect turnips or some kind of root-like pig fodder being grown on the peasants’ fields. If you volunteered for absolutely all proposed tasks, even things you had no idea how to do, that helped your chances of survival. Plus when they put you in charge of a plow horse you could repurpose its oats.)

By: tempbot

tempbot — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:30:00 +0000

I propose they title this paper, “A Marshmallow in the Hand”. You’re welcome.

By: Amorette Allison

Amorette Allison — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:28:00 +0000

I don’t like marshmallows. I would have impressed the heck out of those researchers with my patience. Now, Hershey bars are another matter. . .

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:43:00 +0000

That was the purpose of the follow-up to the original study. The take-away was much as you might guess: kids who can delay gratification for greater reward tend to be more successful adults. This new study seems to show that it’s actually a little bit more complicated than that.

By: Paul Renault

Paul Renault — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:41:00 +0000

What if the kid knows that marshmallows are really bad for your teeth, and doesn’t want two marshmallows? Eh, Mr. Smarty-pants psychologist?

By: just_a_user

just_a_user — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:33:00 +0000

Have they studied how the kids do later in life? If you can delay gratification you can write a novel or learn an instrument, etc.

By: hymenopterid

hymenopterid — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:21:00 +0000

They should study whether it works with punishments in the same way it does with rewards. Seems like it should. Environments that are unreliable with rewards would also be unreliable with consequences. I’m just wondering if that could explain how a person can make the decision to steal a Pepsi even when he knows he’s on his third strike. Doesn’t seem rational, but in the context of an unreliable environment, maybe it is.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:18:00 +0000

This is also why you should always just make one wish as soon as you catch the leprechaun rather than listen to any of his deceptive talk about getting more wishes down the line.

And if it’s that “Lucky Charms” guy, I wouldn’t trust his promises on either front.