The DOI matches its Crossref record; 43 of the 43 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability
Open accessAbstract
Children are notoriously bad at delaying gratification to achieve later, greater rewards (e.g.,Piaget, 1970)—and some are worse at waiting than others. Individual differences in the ability-to-wait have been attributed to self-control, in part because of evidence that long-delayers are more successful in later life (e.g., Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990). Here we provide evidence that, in addition to self-control, children’s wait-times are modulated by an implicit, rational decision-making process that considers environmental reliability. We tested children (M = 4;6, N = 28) using a classic paradigm—the marshmallow task (Mischel, 1974)—in an environment demonstrated to be either unreliable or reliable. Children in the reliable condition waited significantly longer than those in the unreliable condition (p < 0.0005), suggesting that children’s wait-times reflected reasoned beliefs about whether waiting would ultimately pay off. Thus, wait-times on sustained delay-of-gratification tasks (e.g., the marshmallow task) may not only reflect differences in self-control abilities, but also beliefs about the stability of the world.
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Cites
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Cited by
Duckworth, A. L., & Yeager, D. S. (2015) · Educational Researcher · doi:10.3102/0013189x15584327 · Cited by 993
Dweck, C. S. (2017) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/rev0000082 · Cited by 683
Self-Control and Academic Achievement
Duckworth, A. L., Taxer, J. L., Eskreis-Winkler, L., Galla, B. M., & Gross, J. J. (2019) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103230 · Cited by 662
Wise interventions: Psychological remedies for social and personal problems.
Walton, G. M., & Wilson, T. D. (2018) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/rev0000115 · Cited by 617
Rethinking Executive Function and Its Development
Doebel, S. (2020) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/1745691620904771 · Cited by 517
Metadata
- Authors
- Kidd, C., Palmeri, H., & Aslin, R. N.
- Venue
- Cognition
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2013-01
- Volume
- 126
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 109-114
- ISSN
- 0010-0277 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2136697784
- Cited by
- 494
- References
- 43
- FWCI
- 43.50
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
