CRITICAL NOTE · No. 10

The Marshmallow Test Was Asking the Wrong Question

On delayed gratification, and whether patience is really the virtue we think

The marshmallow test is one of psychology’s famous experiments. A child sits alone at a table, a marshmallow before them; the examiner explains that if they can wait a few minutes without eating it, they will receive two. Those who defer are said, in the follow-up studies, to succeed better in school and work. Delayed gratification is enshrined as the key to success.

But the reading deserves suspicion. To defer is not always wisdom. A child who trusts that the promised second marshmallow will actually come behaves differently from one whose experience has taught that promises are broken — the test may measure trust in the environment as much as self-control. And a life lived entirely in deferral, distrusting every present pleasure for a future reward, has its own pathology.

The Black combat arts hold a different relation to time. The game is played now, fully, in the present of the roda — not endured for a deferred prize. There is a discipline that is not deferral: presence, attention, the full inhabiting of the moment of play. Perhaps the question was never “can you wait?” but “can you be wholly here?” — and on that question the marshmallow test is silent.

RELATED NOTES

→ You Are Not Your Results

→ Reward the Risk, Not the Result

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Free Game and the Coded Sequence

→ Reading the Game from the Inside