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Thanks to YouTube, the “marshmallow test” could be the most famous scientific experiment in the world. It was actually a series of experiments starting in the 1960s. The original premise was simple: An experimenter places a marshmallow (or a cookie, or a pretzel) in front of a nursery school child; before leaving, the experimenter tells the child that if she can wait until the experimenter returns, she’ll get that marshmallow plus a second one. If the child can’t wait, she can eat the marshmallow. The children were not told how long the wait would be (it was fifteen to twenty minutes, depending on age), so they just had to hold out if they wanted the maximum reward.
Psychologist Walter Mischel and his research team followed up with the children years later, and found that the longer a child had been able to wait, the more likely she was to be successful socially, academically, and financially, and the less likely she was to abuse drugs.
The marshmallow test was already a celebrity as scientific experiments go, but it became the Beyoncé of studies when media outlets and parents eager to foretell their child’s destiny started posting DIY marshmallow tests online. The videos are by turns adorable and intriguing. Nearly all kids wait at least a little. Some stare at the marshmallow, touch it, sniff it, delicately tap their tongue to it and pull back as if it were hot. Maybe they even put it in their mouth, pull it out, and simulate a big bite. Some tear a barely noticeable piece off for a micro test taste. Before the end of the video, the kids who start by touching it will have eaten the marshmallow. The kids who successfully hold out wield all manner of distraction, from looking away to shoving the plate away, covering their eyes, turning and screaming, singing, talking to themselves, counting, generally thrashing around in the chair, or (boys) hitting themselves in the face. One little boy who spent his time looking in every direction except at the marshmallow is so ravenous when the experimenter returns with his second treat that he mashes them both into his mouth immediately.
The crystal ball allure of the marshmallow test is undeniable, and also misconstrued. Mischel’s collaborator Yuichi Shoda has repeatedly made a point of saying that plenty of preschoolers who ate the marshmallow turned out just fine.* Shoda maintained that the most exciting aspect of the studies was demonstrating how easily children could learn to change a specific behavior with simple mental strategies, like thinking about the marshmallow as a cloud rather than food. Shoda’s post-marshmallow-test work has been one part of a bridge in psychology between extreme arguments in the debate about the roles of nature and nurture in personality. One extreme suggests that personality traits are almost entirely a function of one’s nature, and the other that personality is entirely a function of the environment. Shoda argued that both sides of the so-called person-situation debate were right. And wrong. At a given point in life, an individual’s nature influences how they respond to a particular situation, but their nature can appear surprisingly different in some other situation. With Mischel, he began to study “if-then signatures.” If David is at a giant party, then he seems introverted, but if David is with his team at work, then he seems extroverted. (True.) So is David introverted or extroverted? Well, both, and consistently so.
Ogas and Rose call this the “context principle.” In 2007, Mischel wrote, “The gist of such findings is that the child who is aggressive at home may be less aggressive than most when in school; the man exceptionally hostile when rejected in love may be unusually tolerant about criticism of his work; the one who melts with anxiety in the doctor’s office may be a calm mountain climber; the risk-taking entrepreneur may take few social risks.” Rose framed it more colloquially: “If you are conscientious and neurotic while driving today, it’s a pretty safe bet you will be conscientious and neurotic while driving tomorrow. At the same time . . . you may not be conscientious and neurotic when you are playing Beatles cover songs with your band in the context of the local pub.” Perhaps that is one reason Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues in the military (chapter 1) failed to predict who would be a leader in battle based on who had been a leader in an obstacle course exercise. When I was a college runner, I had teammates whose drive and determination seemed almost boundless on the track, and nearly absent in the classroom, and vice versa. Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.”
Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts. Each “story of me” continues to evolve. We should all heed the wisdom of Alice, who, when asked by the Gryphon in Wonderland to share her story, decided she had to start with the beginning of her adventure that very morning. “It’s no use going back to yesterday,” she said, “because I was a different person then.” Alice captured a grain of truth, one that has profound consequences for the best way to maximize match quality.
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Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, studied how young consultants and bankers advance (or don’t) in firms she described as up-or-out hierarchies. When she followed up a few years later, after her project, she found that some of the budding stars either weren’t there anymore, having embarked on new careers, or were hatching escape plans.
Ibarra began another study, this time adding web entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, professors, and IT professionals. The focus would be on career switching. Ibarra tracked ambitious professionals, most in their thirties and forties, in the United States, United Kingdom, and France who had traveled a linear career path for a minimum of eight years. Over the course of her work, she watched midcareer professionals move from a flicker of desire for change, to an unsettling period of transition, to the actual jump to a new career. Occasionally she saw the entire process occur twice for the same individual. When she compiled her findings, the central premise was at once simple and profound: we learn who we are only by living, and not before.
Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat. If that sounds facile, consider that it is precisely the opposite of a vast marketing crusade that assures customers they can alight on their perfect matches via introspection alone. A lucrative career and personality quiz and counseling industry survives on that notion. “All of the strengths-finder stuff, it gives people license to pigeonhole themselves or others in ways that just don’t take into account how much we grow and evolve and blossom and discover new things,” Ibarra told me. “But people want answers, so these frameworks sell. It’s a lot harder to say, ‘Well, come up with some experiments and see what happens.’”
If only you fill out this quiz, the promise goes, it will light the way to the ideal career, never mind what psychologists have documented about personal change across time and context. Ibarra criticized conventional-wisdom articles like one in the Wall Street Journal on “the painless path to a new career,” which decreed that the secret is simply forming “a clear picture of what you want” before acting.