Delay of Gratification

Delay of gratification is the capacity to voluntarily resist the pull of an immediately available, smaller reward in order to hold out for a larger or more highly valued reward that will only arrive later, a core component of broader self-regulation and considered an important marker of developing self-control in early childhood. The psychologist Walter Mischel and his colleagues at Stanford University conducted the research most closely associated with the concept beginning in the late 1960s, in a series of studies that became popularly known as the marshmallow test, in which a preschool-age child was presented with one desirable treat, such as a marshmallow, and told that if they could avoid eating it while the experimenter briefly left the room, they would receive two treats instead of one upon the experimenter's return. Mischel and his collaborators found substantial individual differences in how long different children could wait, and identified specific cognitive strategies, such as deliberately looking away from the treat or thinking about it in more abstract terms rather than focusing on its immediate sensory appeal, that reliably helped children wait longer, while Mischel's later long-term follow-up studies on the same children reported correlations between how long they had waited as preschoolers and various better outcomes reported years afterward. More recent replication research, notably a large 2018 study, found that once factors such as family socioeconomic background were statistically accounted for, the strength of the original correlation between early delay ability and later life outcomes was considerably smaller than the earlier studies had suggested, making the precise long-term predictive power of the original marshmallow test findings an actively debated question in current research even as the underlying construct of delay of gratification remains a well-established and heavily studied aspect of self-regulation.