In this video I introduce the concept of delay of gratification and the famous Marshmallow Test. Mischel, Shoda, and Rodriguez found that the ability to delay gratification at age 4 was associated with higher social competence, coping skills, and even SAT scores later in life. Next I consider ironic effects of punishment including the idea that different levels of threats can influence desirability and that extrinsic punishments can actually increase the frequency of a behavior. Finally I consider the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and management and leadership.
Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez (1989): https://bingschool.stanford.edu/sites…
Demonstration of children completing the marshmallow test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo4WF…
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video I talked about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and I ended with the idea that we can’t always be intrinsically motivated because sometimes we have to do things that we just don’t want to do. And this means that we might want to have a system of extrinsic rewards and punishments to help to motivate our behavior. And sometimes we have to put in effort now and we don’t get those rewards or benefits until much later, and this brings us to the idea of delay of gratification. So this is where we make a sacrifice, we put in effort now, we do something difficult in order to get some reward in the future.
And one of the best-known tests of the ability to delay gratification is known as the “Marshmallow Test“. In the marshmallow test a young child is given a marshmallow and told you can eat this marshmallow right now, or if you wait a few minutes while I go to the other room, when I come back you can have two marshmallows. So this is testing the child’s ability to delay the immediate gratification of eating the marshmallow right now and seeing if they can wait in order to get twice the reward in the future. One study of this marshmallow test by Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Monica Rodriguez published in 1989 looked at four-year-olds who were able to delay gratification and outcomes later in life.
And what Mischel, Shoda, and Rodriguez found was that those children who were able to delay gratification, this was associated with higher social competence later in life. It was associated with better coping skills for dealing with frustration and stress, and it was even correlated with later SAT scores about 0.4 with their verbal SAT score and about 0.5 with their mathematical SAT score.
Now this idea that we have external rewards that can influence our behavior means we should also consider the effects of external punishments. In the previous video I talked about the overjustification effect where we can see how external rewards can have an ironic effect on intrinsic motivation.
And so now I’d like to look at some ironic effects of punishment and the first of these is what we might call the “Forbidden Fruit Effect” and this is based on a study by Elliot Aronson and J. Merrill Carlsmith in 1963. What Aronson and Carlsmith did was they gave children a bunch of toys and then they gave them a threat related to one of the toys. They told them not to play with that toy. But the threat was either a mild threat or a very severe threat. So the children first looking at the toys were asked to rank the desirability of all the toys. so the children rank the toys and then they received this threat; either the mild threat “please don’t play with this toy” or the very severe one “if you play with this, you’ll be severely punished. It’s very bad to play with this toy” and then the researcher left. Then when they came back the children were asked to re-rank the toys.
And what Aronson and Carlsmith found was that if the children received a mild threat, the toy was reduced in its desirability. When they re-ranked the toys, in other words, they fell in the ranking after a mild threat. But if they were given a severe threat not to play with that toy, it actually increased in the desirability rating. So what’s going on here? Well what Aronson and Carlsmith proposed was “insufficient justification” and this relates to another topic that I’m going to talk about in a future video on cognitive dissonance in a famous paper co-authored by J. Merril Carlsmith along with Leon Festinger. But the basic idea of this insufficient justification is that when the kids are given the severe threat saying “ok, don’t play with this toy, you’ll be punished very severely” then that’s sufficient to keep them away from the toy. So when the researcher leaves the room, they don’t play with the toy and then after when they asked themself “why didn’t I play with this toy” they said “well because I got this severe threat, so that’s the only reason why I didn’t play with it. And it’s actually a desirable toy, I wish I could have played with it, but I didn’t because of the severe threat”. And so that actually makes the toy seem more desirable.
Whereas in the mild threat they have this insufficient justification what that means is they don’t play with the toy while the researcher is gone and then when the researcher comes back and asked him to rank them, they think “why didn’t I play with that toy? I mean the threat was actually mild, I could have gotten away with it. It wouldn’t be so bad if I had played with it. So why didn’t I play with it?”. And the answer that the child sort of comes up with is “well it’s not that good of a toy. You know, the mild threat wasn’t the reason I didn’t play with it. I didn’t play with it because I don’t like it. It’s, it’s not a good toy. It’s lower in the ranking and that explains why I didn’t play with it even though I only received this mild threat.”
Now another example of an ironic effect of punishment comes from a study by Yuri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini published in 2000 and Gneezy and Rushtichini looked at pickup of children from a daycare center and what they found was that when this daycare center instituted a late fee for arriving late to pick up your children, the amount of tardiness by the parents actually increased.
Now this wouldn’t make any sense to a pure behaviorist psychologists. They say “instituting a punishment, how could that possibly increase behavior?” So it doesn’t make much sense from a behavioral point of view. But if we start thinking in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, I think we can make some sense of this result. So the idea is before the late fee is instituted the parents are arriving on time because of intrinsic motivation. They want to avoid the guilt of being late, but they feel like “if you arrive late you’re kind of saying that your time is more valuable than the workers at the daycare. And you should feel guilty about that. You should be a little bit of shame. You should try a little harder to get there on time.” And you want to follow the social norms, right? If everybody shows up late and you know that’s, that’s a real problem. “In order to be a good parent, I want to make sure I’m on time and that’s the correct thing to do.”
So we have this intrinsic motivation for getting there on time but once the late fee is instituted now we’ve replaced all that intrinsic motivation with an extrinsic motivation. We’re saying “well, you have to arrive on time to avoid the fee.” But what that also means is if you pay the fee then you don’t have to arrive on time. There’s no longer this sense of guilt because the guilt is sort of priced into paying the late fee. And you don’t have to think about following the social norms, right? That “Oh, you’re a good parent if you arrive on time.” No, you just pay the fee and that absolves you of this sense of wrongdoing and this sense of guilt. And this is why Gneezy and Rustichini titled their paper “A Fine is a Price”.
Now, we can see from overjustification, insufficient justification, this idea that fines are prices, this brings us to consider well, how often should we use, how should we rely on intrinsic motivations or extrinsic motivations? Might we get some ironic effects that are not what we anticipated would happen? Unintended consequences? And this brings us to the idea of Management Theory. We might wonder, is it better to have people being extrinsically motivated or intrinsically motivated? Maybe it depends on the situation? So we can broadly categorize managers as being Type X managers meaning they’re focused on extrinsic motivations; rewards and punishments for their workers. Or we could categorize them as Type Y managers, and these are people who are more focused on intrinsic motivation of their workers. A similar division could be between what’s called “task-oriented leadership” which is focused on the things that need to be done and “relationship-oriented leadership” which is focused on building a sense of loyalty, cooperation amongst team members, and things that maybe would be more intrinsically motivated. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
