Fifty years ago, in the early 1970s, two researchers at Stanford University did an experiment noteworthy for its clever design. Salut, c'est John de Glasgow en Écosse et vous écoutez un épisode spécial des archives d'Akimbo. That's right, I want to talk for a couple minutes about the marshmallow test, the Stanford marshmallow test, and then I want to get to a really important question, the marshmallow experiment.
It took place at the preschool that was run at Stanford University. It was done several times in the early 1970s. The conceit of the experiment is super clever. First, find out if a kid prefers pretzels or marshmallows. Mais pour la sake de cette conversation, et parce que c'est plus plus plus fun de dire, nous allons parler de marshmallows. Vous dites à un enfant, 3 ans, 4 ans, peut-être même 5 ans, « C'est le cas. Je vais vous laisser dans cette maison.
This library filled with toys and books. And I'm going to put a marshmallow in this box. If I come back in 15 minutes and the marshmallow is still there, I'll give you two marshmallows. On the other hand... And what they found is that some kids ate the marshmallow. There's actually a very amusing video. Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada That kids that didn't eat the marshmallow did better on their SATs decades later. They got into more famous colleges. They had better physical fitness.
By almost everything that one could measure, it seemed like the kids who had enough self-restraint to wait for the second marshmallow ended up being better at life.
They even did a brain scan on some of them, hoping to look for some sort of magical mystery advantage. But in the 1980s and 90s, they redid the experiment. And what they found is this, that when you do the experiment... with a variation of people in it, based, for example, on income, on how they were raised, on race, suddenly many of the benefits of waiting seem to go away.
And suddenly it's not as cut and dried. I think what's missing from the original experiment is this. There's an analysis that says, kids who can wait do better. But what's missing from that is maybe that kid grew up in a home where it wasn't easy to trust that an adult would keep their promise. Maybe that kid grew up in a household. where there wasn't dinner served that night, even though they expected it would be. Maybe normal is different for different people, which leads to this question.
Hey Seth, love your podcast. You've spoken at length about greenlining yourself, shipping your product, and grit. You haven't touched on race much. This episode of Science vs Belief seems an opportune time. The myth is, if you innovate enough, work hard enough, and are a little lucky, you'll be successful. But this is a pitch from folks who only wanted white men voted, who only wanted white baseball leagues. When I see a doctor, I'm exaggerating my pain.
When I see a judge, I'm more guilty than others. When I see a cop, I'm dangerous and scary. What happens when I apply for a programming job? When I seek venture capital? Sure, the most brilliant... Bold and gritty should absolutely be celebrated. But what are your thoughts when better than average is overshadowed by belief, tradition and superstition? Thank you. And he's right. He's right. ... ... ... ...
is we remember or decide about things based on how the person we are interacting with might be different than who we expected. So that if you do a business deal with someone from, I don't know, Bolivia... et il ne va pas bien, vous allez décider que vous ne devriez pas faire des problèmes avec les Boliviens. Alors, peut-être que vous ne devriez pas faire des choses avec les gens qui ne gardent leur word et Bolivien est juste une distraction.
again and again over the last couple hundred years, we have decided, we being in quotation marks, meaning the dominant voices in our culture, that women, people of color, people who are disabled... Get an asterisk next to their name, that they're an exception, that we have to look at something through a different lens when we're talking with someone who isn't, quote, like us.
But what we're really doing is saying, not like us in an easily noticed way. Because everyone is not like us. And then we have the problem, on top of this, of... What happens when income is also added to the mix? Because our desire, and it is a desire, our instinct, to separate people based on how they look. C'est-à-dire que les gens sont souvent payés moins. Donc, nous parlons de white privilège. Et beaucoup de gens, comme moi...
qui benefit from white privilege often don't hear it. They don't hear it clearly because in their eyes, it might be that no one has actually put their hand on their back and pushed them forward. But what is definitely happening, without a doubt, is that the people that you are competing with to get into that institution, to get that gig, to be treated fairly, the other people are being held back.
They're being held back all the time. And it's not something that someone who has privilege notices. Because we, they, privileged people, aren't being deliberately held back. And so back to the idea of the marshmallow test. The marshmallow test, when it was redone, found that the effect went down at least 50%. I have no real insight as to whether they discovered anything about... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Symphony orchestras used to audition people watching them play. As a result, the vast majority of people in every symphony orchestra were male. When they started doing blind auditions... which are simple to do in classical music, you just put up a screen between the judges and the people who are playing, suddenly, overnight, the percentage of women that got into orchestras went up.
Dramatically. But it couldn't go up enough because women had been trained from an early age to expect that they weren't going to be in an orchestra. They were trained. Et donc, oui, votre question est exactement correct. C'est ce que c'est que c'est ... ... ... ... ... or a government official, and have the benefit of the doubt held out against you. These tiny slights, some not so tiny, some that impinge on our health and our liberty, they compound.
They compound in a way that undermines our ability to wait for a second marshmallow. And then we get to this idea of asset utilization. Asset utilization is easy to understand if you're running a farm.
C'est facile à comprendre si vous êtes en train d'un factory. Non personne n'est en train d'un culture, mais nous pouvons penser à ce qu'on était. Il y a des millions de personnes sur la Terre. Il y a des millions de personnes sur la Terre. Il y a des millions de personnes sur la Terre. Il y a des millions de personnes sur la Terre. Il y a des millions de personnes sur la Terre. Il y a des millions de personnes sur la Terre. Il y a des millions de personnes sur la Terre. Sous-titrage ST' 501
Pushing themselves. Well, then we've just wasted that asset for them, for us, for all of us. So, yeah, there's a crisis. And the crisis isn't organized from a central agency. The crisis is endemic, a pandemic. It is everywhere we look. Even in places, locales, where everybody is of the same race. Even in clubs where everybody is of... C'est la même génération. C'est la même génération. C'est la même génération. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Pour minutes à une fois. C'est difficile pour me imaginer cette personne si il était un gars. Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada So, rather than litigating and arguing about the specifics of one case, because we know most of the time when there's a scuffle on an airplane, it probably could have been avoided. The point remains.
And the point is, we make judgments. There's another problem with the marshmallow test, not with the test itself, but with the story it encourages us to tell ourselves. And it's this. que il y a des branches, irrevocable branches, dans les lives. C'est ce que vous faites dans un laboratoire, à Stanford, quand vous avez trois et demi, a une sorte de impact.
on what you're going to be like when you're 25 that going to a school where maybe there are one standard deviation more suspensions than at a school down the street will have a significant impact ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... They have to stay in that category. Because in addition to being immoral and unfair, it's also a lousy use of assets to sort people based on how they look.
or how we interacted with them once, or how the world interacted with them once, or based on a choice they made years ago, deprives all of us of the chance to make things better. Now... Even if we strive to be perfectly fair at all times, our instincts are going to kick in because we label categories of objects. We label categories of people. And so...
If we want to undo this, we have to realize it's going to take a while. But we also have to start now. We have to start where we are, right in front of us. And it has to do with the benefit of the doubt. Just like that four-year-old needed to give the investigator the benefit of the doubt and believe that two marshmallows were going to be forthcoming if he didn't eat the first one, we need to figure out how to give others
Others who don't have the same experience that we had. Others who don't look like us. How do we give them the benefit of the doubt? Because it's easier than ever in so many areas of our life. Is it possible to set aside our bias Just long enough to wait for the second marshmallow. Just long enough to help others get where we have gotten. Through hard work. Through trust. Through people.
I hope we can. I hope we can get there more quickly than we are. Because the progress we've made in the last hundred years is tremendous. But it is nothing compared to what it could be or should be. Thank you for listening to my rant about marshmallows.
Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan. ... ... ... ... ... If you've got a question, please visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K and press the appropriate button. While you're there, you can see previous episodes and the show notes.
When it comes to pseudoscience and basing all we believe on the facts, what do we do if we think the facts are being misrepresented? Then do we default to our belief? If our belief is based on certain foundational principles can we default to our belief? I believe we live in a culture right now that purposely misrepresents facts.
And then we're quoting facts to the accepted narrative, but we're being tricked. I would like your opinion on this, because I do feel we live in a time where we have more access to the facts. But the facts are being misrepresented to us. Thank you, sir. We could probably make eight podcasts about this, but I want to talk about two things when it comes to facts. And I'm putting the word facts in quotation marks.
The first one is this. Facts are usually related to our culture, to our definitions. Is it a fact that the Earth is a planet? Well, it depends on what you mean by planet. Is it a fact that I can get in a car and drive from here to Cleveland? Well, it depends what you mean by car and Cleveland. Something like mathematics isn't based on much in the way of culture.
There are a series of fundamental principles and rules. And after that, facts are facts. Two plus two in our version of math always equals four. Pi is an irrational number that starts 3.14159. No matter what a legislature decides to do, no matter what a textbook publisher changes, pie is pie. But it gets way more complicated when we start to talk about complexity, things like opinion.
Things like eyewitness reports. What actually happened back then? And now it's getting even more confusing because we have people who can bend statistics to their will. We have fake videos, fake audio. You get the idea. So when we talk about a fact, I think it's important to begin with, there really are facts based on our shared understanding of the world. Some things really did happen. Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
The inquisitive researcher, the scientist, who says, wait, that thing we thought was a fact might not be a fact. If you drop two balls off the leaning tower of Pisa, it is not a fact. que le heavy one hits le ground first. Ils both hitent le ground au même temps. Et bien, après Galileo a fait l'experiment, au moins dans le myth, plein de gens... ... ... ... ... ... en leadership, en organisations. As we learned in George Orwell's classic 1984.
If you can blur the facts, if you can make up into down and in into out, if you can keep changing the way people see reality, folks will look... pour firm ground to stand upon. And what they might choose to stand upon is belief and authority and power because belief, authority and power are threatened by reality.
Because reality sticks around for a long time. Reality is there right in front of our nose. If we can blur reality, then what we can do is get people to realize that their only choice... is to follow power and authority. That's why it's so important in whatever field we're in to embrace the universe as it is, to look for, celebrate. Facts. ... ... ... ... ... a relentless progression toward utility toward fairness toward justice toward making things work better
And the way we do that is not because we are following one demagogue or another. The way we do that is because the facts are compounding. And so we have the germ theory of disease. You can deny the germ theory of disease if you want to make money selling your fancy make-believe medicine or being some sort of quack, but the fact is disease is caused by germs. It's a fact. Knowing that... ... ... ... ... ...
de façon que nous engageons avec le built world. Les buildings ne fallent pas encore parce que c'est un fact que vous ne devriez pas faire un building de sticks si vous avez le choix de faire un de bricks. And on and on we go. So, that's the beginning of a rant about facts and why they may or may not be in dispute. Thank you for your question. We'd love to hear from you.