I read Cory Doctorow’s latest column for Locus Magazine last week, when I browsed through my advance PDF copy of the September issue. It’s a fascinating piece that considers the difference between the political left and the political right in terms of a classic experiment in child psychology. The column has now been posted on the Locus website, so I can link to it, and discuss it.
(photo copyright Julia Galdo & Cody Cloud)
Locus Magazine, Cory Doctorow, September issue, posted 2 Sep 2024: Cory Doctorow: Marshmallow Longtermism
The classic experience is the Stanford marshmallow experiment, and is about delayed gratification.
Put a child in a room and offer them one marshmallow now, *or* two marshmallows in 15 minutes. The researcher leaves the room leaving one marshmallow, then returns in 15 minutes. If the child has not eaten the first marshmallow, they get a second.
Over the years psychology experimenters have tracked children through their lives, and compared their professional success to their performance in the marshmallow experiment. The evidence has suggested that those better at delayed gratification were more successful in life.
Cory has the insight to understand that correlation may not indicate causation. Why would some children eat the first marshmallow right away?
Cory begins thusly:
There are many ways to cleave the views of the political right from the political left, but none is so science fictional as the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. Dip into any political fight about crime and poverty and you’re sure to turn up someone confidently asserting that these social ills are rooted in impatience. Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness to save, which is to say, in the childish inability to defer gratification.
…
Conservative ideology assumes that the causal arrow runs from “personal defects” to “poor outcomes”: Poverty and debt are the result of innate failings.
Cory summarizes the marshmallow experiment and the conclusions drawn from it, as I did above. Then:
This experiment is widely heralded as vindication for the conservative hypothesis about self-control and life-chances, and those brain images are the clincher: “Look, some of us are born with better brains, and we do better. Our superior position in society reflects our superior neurological makeup, which allows us to vividly imagine the future and plan for it accordingly. You can’t argue with science.”
Well, you *can* argue with simplistic interpretations of scientific experiments.
But the marshmallow test is a tricky one. Replication studies reveal important details that are missing from Mischel’s triumphant analysis. On average, the kids who “fail” and eat the marshmallow rather than waiting and doubling their haul were poorer, while the “patient” kids were from wealthier backgrounds. When the “impatient” kids were asked about the thought process that led to their decision to eat the marshmallow rather than holding out for two, they revealed a great deal of future-looking thought.
And here’s Cory’s insight:
The adults in these kids’ lives had broken their promises many times: Their parents would promise material comforts, from toys to treats, that they were ultimately unable to provide due to economic hardship. Teachers and other authority figures would routinely lie to these kids, out of some mix of overly optimistic projection about the resources they’d be given to help the kids in their care, or the knowledge that the kids’ poor, time-strapped, frantic parents wouldn’t be able to retaliate against them for lying.
So the kids had carefully observed the world they operated in and concluded, on balance of probability, that eating the marshmallow was the safe bet. …
Cory spells this out in some detail. Then transitions to politics. Evoking the Koch brothers.
Koch is one of the leading proponents of the theory that one’s position in society reflects one’s merit. He is a true believer in power of foresight, self-control and delayed gratification, and views these traits as at least partially innate. He deplores publicly traded companies, attributing to them a marshmallow-scarfing impatience driven by the need to produce short-term returns for footloose stockholders who will not hesitate to sell their shares if a company’s leadership has the gall to reinvest in superior capital instead of strip-mining the business to fund lavish dividends.
… I’m no fan of Charles Koch, but I agree that his performance at the helm of Koch Industries demonstrated impressive discipline and self-control, and that his enormous economic and political power stems in large part from his ability to resist temptation and reinvest patient money in patient technologies.
And more insight.
But Koch’s foresight is extremely selective. Much of Koch’s fossil-fuel fortune has been spent on funding climate denial and inaction. Koch claims that he sincerely believes that the climate emergency isn’t real or urgent, which is awfully convenient, given the centrality of fossil fuels to Koch’s power and wealth.
In reinvesting his father’s company’s earnings Koch passed one marshmallow test, and it made him a very wealthy man. But in choosing not to believe climate science and instead risking the end of a habitable Earth and the human race he belongs to, he failed a much more important marshmallow test.
More to read in Cory’s article; it’s free to read. The gist is, in my terms, that conservatives are selfish, taking advantage of current opportunities to become wealthy while forswearing the future — including their own grandchildren’s future. Or perhaps it’s the inability to foresee the future consequences of their current decisions; they’re stuck in shorttermism.
