The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

In a classic psychology experiment, Walter Mischel and E. B. Ebbesen gave children the option of having one marshmallow immediately or, if they were able to wait fifteen minutes, two marshmallows.10 Left alone with the marshmallow at hand, some broke down and gobbled it immediately, others after a brief struggle. But about a third of the children succeeded in deferring gratification and getting the bigger payoff. Those who did so were those who distracted themselves from the marshmallow by playing games under the table, singing songs, or imagining the marshmallow as a cloud, for example. In a follow-up study of the same children a dozen years later, their initial performance on the self-regulation task was more predictive of life success than any other measure, including IQ and socioeconomic status.