You’ve probably heard of the marshmallow test. Kids are placed in the room, containing a table with a plate and one marshmallow on it. The researcher, Walter Mischel, promises the kid two marshmallows later, but only if they could refrain from eating the one in front of them for 15 minutes.

After observing which kids managed to resist, and those who ate the one marshmallow, Mischel correlated the results with the kids academic performance later in life, and found that those who resisted the marshmallow were able to lead better lives. Clearly, the kids with better self-control turned out to be more successful than those who didn’t.

But when researches re-did this 1960s experiment with more kids that were more representative of the general population, it turned out that not willpower, but affluence determined the delayed gratification capacity (via). Poorer kids had less reason to wait for more marshmallows; in their experience, the promise of future food was often broken, and eating the marshmallow now was actually the better strategy for them. It also explains why they performed worse later in life — less access due to less wealth of their families.

This is yet another example of the “replication crisis”, a term for the failure to reproduce many sociological experiments of earlier years. Why this happens is still somewhat unclear, but there are multiple factors. One is a small sample size that is not representative that leads to skewed results. And anther are simply human biases. This turns up even in other scientific fields: Even Biologists recently had to overturn a once well-established ecological law because of this.

It’s tempting to conclude from all of this that science is useless. That would ignore all the progress that science has brought us, and is continuing to. But science isn’t an absolute statement, it’s a process, one that needs refinement and retesting, and guarding against our own biases.

So, when the media headlines the newest study promising something incredible, you are probably better off being critical of it. If it turns out to be true, it will survive the test of time.

Other interesting links from around the web:

• Ejection Decision — When a pilot decides to abort, the decision was already made years before in training.
• Alton Brown Rigorously Reviews Spicy Wings (YouTube)
• Your immune system is in charge of how quickly you age
• This Is Why Understanding Space Is So Hard — It just goes against our common sense of how the world works

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