Mark Manson

So the conclusion that Walter Mischel himself came to was that delayed gratification and self-discipline as we know it, it's not a personality trait.

It's not something you're born with or not born with.

It doesn't necessarily determine your future the way that the big five do.

He saw it as an environmental adaptation.

His argument was that the children in Trinidad who are not able to wait for the second piece of candy, on some level, they were being rational because they had grown up in a chaotic environment where things were not dependable, where they didn't trust people, where they didn't know if future rewards were actually going to come or not.

And so they were justified in taking the original piece of candy.

Whereas if you go to Palo Alto, California, and you bring in a bunch of professor's children from Stanford, which is what he did,

Kids growing up in very wealthy families and extremely stable environments.

And then you offer them double the reward if they can wait.

They're growing up in a high trust environment.

They've only known on dependability of what is promised today versus what they get tomorrow.

And so, of course,

they're going to be more likely to be able to wait for the second marshmallow.

I feel like there's two takeaways from the debunking of the marshmallow test.

The first is, is that what we largely consider self-discipline is very dependent on the external variables around us, which we're going to come back to that in the next chapter.

When we talk about behavior and behavioral change, I think people vastly underestimate how much the factors around them play into how well they're able to change their behavior or not.

But the second piece of this is, is like you said, a lot of this is, is simply happening on an unconscious level.

These kids are not sitting down and like calculating the expected value of waiting five minutes from a scale from one to 10.

How trustworthy is this adult?

Like, oh, a seven.