Marshmallows & Trust
Famously the Marshmallow Experiment in the 1970s evaluated the relationship between a child's ability to delay gratification and long term "success" in their adult lives. The results of those experiments are fascinating, but in truth it falls short of being actionable.
The study successfully demonstrated a strong relationship between delaying gratification and the ability to make prudent choices later in life. Choices like:
Should I save money or spend?
Should I eat the donuts for breakfast?
Should I stay out late, or make it easier to get up for work?
But I've got two real issues:
This is not an extremely surprising result — children with more will power turn into adults with more will power.
The more important question is HOW we can use this information, and the study tells us nothing about that.
Maybe we could test for a little bit more?
Thankfully about 10 years ago the University of Rochester re-did the experiment and they added one important conditioning step that gives us a lot more information to work with.
Here is the conditioning:
The Children were divided into two groups.
Both groups were asked to create some art work
Both groups were given junky crayons (probably those really bad RoseArt crayons...)
Both groups asked the proctor for better supplies and both were promised bigger, better boxes of crayons (I assume Crayola) and wonderful stickers.
This is where it gets interesting:
For Group 1, the proctor never fulfilled those promises.
For Group 2, the proctor always fulfilled those promises.
Marshmallow anyone?
After the conditioning steps, the Marshmallow Experiment was performed and importantly, the proctor stayed the same.
What do you think the impact was?
Not surprisingly - Group 2 waited longer. Not just a little bit longer - 4X longer.
Think about it, every time the proctor told Group 2 that something would happen - it DID. And Group 1 experienced the opposite.
In one case, trust was established.
In the other it was eroded, one failed promise at a time.
This is a much more helpful result for us to think about because it gives us really important insight:
Trust is about the relationship and it can be transferred to other situations.
Remember, the Group 2 participants had no more information about the Marshmallow situation than Group 1:
They didn't know if he had more marshmallows
They had never received a marshmallow from him before
They hadn't had to delay gratification before
Yet, the Trust established by the proctor in providing better art supplies was "transferred" to marshmallows.
Our Art Supply Situations
Every day we have our own Art Supply situations:
When you tell a someone (boss, peer, team) that you'll review the email today and get back to them.
When you say "I'll get that done for your tomorrow afternoon"
When you say "Bring me bad news early"
Do you deliver on those promises? Those issues may seem small, but don't forget the proctor's performance with crayons & stickers quickly transferred over to a different context.
If your Leader doesn't Trust you to handle intricate deadline sensitive work, perhaps it has nothing to do with competence but everything to do with your demonstrated reliability in something as simple as responding to emails.
If your Team doesn't Trust you with bad news about the project, perhaps that's because you have demonstrated that you can't handle the unknowns without question bombarding.
This revamp of the Marshmallow Experiment shouldn't tell us anything too surprising:
Trust & Distrust in one context has impacts on other contexts. That's either a good thing for your, or a bad thing. It all depends on often offering the Crayola 64 box, and but leaving them with the RoseArt 8 count.
