What Christmas gifts and marshmallows tell you about your bad habits

You’ve probably heard people talk about the “Marshmallow Test” before. 

If not, here’s a quick primer: a scientist named Walter Mischel gave a bunch of kids a marshmallow in the 1960s. There was a catch. They could either eat the marshmallow immediately, or wait a few minutes for him to return, and he would bring them a second marshmallow if they didn’t eat the first one. 

Then, many decades later, he studied the kids from the Marshmallow Test. “It turns out that a kid's performance on this willpower test predicts far-reaching outcomes such as SAT scores, relationship satisfaction and even body-mass index later in life,” says Clara Moskowitz of the Scientific American. 

Case closed, right? 

Not exactly. 

Psychologist Yuko Munakata found something intriguing when she moved to Japan with her young children. In their early days at their new Japanese school, the Munakata children received their cafeteria lunch. They sat down and started eating, only to be stopped by their classmates. 

“The other students quickly began shaking their head and waving their hands,” Munakata writes. “My children didn’t speak Japanese, but the message was clear; they stopped eating. After every student in the classroom sat down with their food, the students called out in unison, “Itadakimasu”—literally “I humbly receive” and akin to “bon appétit.” Then they began eating together. The next day, my kids waited to eat along with all their classmates.”

This got Munakata thinking. Are Japanese children more self-controlled than American children? 

She ran her own version of the marshmallow test, with 144 children, both American and Japanese. The American kids flunked—only waiting four minutes on average before eating the marshmallow. But most of the Japanese kids waited nearly 15 minutes for the second marshmallow! 

“If we had stopped there, we might have simply concluded that Japanese kids have better self-control,” says Munakata. 

But she decided to run another test, just to be sure. 

This time, with presents. 

“We presented children with a wrapped gift and told them that they could open it now or they could have two gifts if they waited. The pattern flipped. Most children in Japan waited less than five minutes before unwrapping the gift, while most children in the U.S. waited the maximum 15 minutes or close to it.”

What does this mean? 

It tells me that culture runs deep. It tells me that the things I struggle to accomplish may be rooted in the culture of my upbringing. I rarely had to wait for a snack, but my parents left wrapped presents under the Christmas tree for weeks when I was a kid. 

Habits are interesting things. Habits make hard things much easier. But if we have habits that push us the other way, they might make hard things even harder. 

I’m going to take a hard look at my habits in the next few weeks, and try to trace them back to where they came from. Maybe this can help me leverage the good ones and break the bad ones.  

Won’t you join me?