Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

by Sendhil Mullainathan

We know many ingredients go into the manufacturing of self-control. It depends on how we weigh the future. And we appear to do it inconsistently. Immediate rewards (a marshmallow now) are salient and receive a heavy weight. Rewards in the distant future (two marshmallows later) are less salient and thus receive lower weight. So when we think about one versus two marshmallows in the abstract future, two is better than one. But when one marshmallow is right in front of us now, it suddenly beats two. Self-control also depends on willpower, a resource whose functioning we do not fully understand, but which is affected, among other things, by personality, fatigue, and attention. Self-control relies heavily on executive control. We use executive control to direct attention, initiate an action, inhibit an intuitive response, or resist an impulse. In fact, a less publicized but often replicated part of Mischel’s study is highly instructive here. The children who were most successful in resisting the marshmallow temptation did so by focusing their attention elsewhere.