The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

by Raghuram G. Rajan

The famous Stanford marshmallow test and follow-up studies suggest that professional families give their children more than just learning – they give them trust and self-control. In the early 1960s, Walter Mischel and his graduate students gave little children from Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School the choice between eating a marshmallow immediately, or waiting and getting a second marshmallow after fifteen minutes or so if they could hold out. Videos of the torments children go through as they stare at the marshmallow have been an enormous source of entertainment for adults, but Mischel found something more. Those who held out typically did better later in life, with higher SAT scores, less likelihood of substance abuse, and lower body mass index thirty years after the test.14 A later study at the University of Rochester qualified Mischel’s findings.15 Those researchers conjectured that for children in crowded homes, surrounded by predatory older children and with no adults around, the ‘only guaranteed treats are the ones you have already swallowed’. In contrast, in a stable home where parents promise and deliver on treats, promises may be more credible, and children more willing to wait. To test this, the researchers divided children into two groups, one set to whom a researcher defaulted on a promise to give stickers, and the other to whom the researcher delivered on the promise. When these two groups were subjected to the marshmallow test, the group which obtai...

Drilldown of walter michel marshmallow experiment