What is delayed gratification and how is it related to success and self-control?
About 40 years ago, a psychologist named Walter Mischel conducted a famous experiment: he chose a group of 4-year-old children who, individually, had to remain seated in front of a cake. The instruction they were given was “If you wait 15 minutes, instead of one cake, you will have two.” The results were that two out of three children succumbed to the torture of remaining motionless without eating the cake and lost the fight against their impulses. 15 years after this, Mischel studied these children again when they were already in college and concluded that those who had waited patiently had better grades, job prospects and greater self-control
What is delayed gratification?
With this experiment, this famous psychologist coined a concept called “delay of gratification” or “delayed gratification “, which denotes a person’s ability to wait in order to obtain something they want. What if we were to repeat this experiment today? Surely, Mischel would discover that the odds of finding a child, adolescent, or adult capable of waiting more than 5 minutes before making a decision, reasoned or not, are the same as finding a partner who lasts more than a month, a politician committed to his voters and not to himself or a permanent job: very few.
Our frustration resistance becomes smaller and smaller and our ability to control impulses sometimes, and depending on each person, can tend to tend to 0. We think, more and more, about our partner, friendships, achievements, etc. like something prepared to consume quickly. Along the way, we have lost patience and reflection.
We live fast, we want to have everything “now”, we don’t want wait We consume life quickly, barely giving ourselves time to enjoy each bite. Always thinking about all the things we want to achieve and how happy we will be and how satisfied we will feel when we have eaten all the cakes on the plate. But we always have the feeling that there are not enough cakes to fill our stomach, or that the cakes we ate were not as good as we expected.
Years later, a new group of researchers gave a twist to the experiment: before sitting the child in front of temptation, they made him talk to an adult. There were two types of adults in the experiment: some represented trust, they promised the child things that, after 15 minutes, they gave him. The others were the opposite, they promised a lot of cakes after the first one but, after waiting, they always had empty hands: they lied.
What conclusion do we draw? The key is the hope If a child (or an adult) lives in an environment where promises are kept, he will wait to get the reward because he knows that patience has a purpose. On the other hand, if he lives surrounded by people he does not trust, the child (and the adult) will eat the cake in front of him without thinking, even for a moment, about the future.
