James Andreoni and others write,
We find that time preferences evolve significantly as children age, with younger children displaying more impatience than older children. This is in line with related work that finds a similar association with age (Bettinger and Slonim, 2007; Angerer et al., 2015; Deckers et al., 2015; Sutter et al., 2015). We also find a strong association with race: black children are significantly more impatient than white or Hispanic children, even while controlling for socio-economic status, cognitive skills and executive function skills.
. . .We do not observe a correlation between preferences of parents and their children. We might have expected such a correlation due to genetics or social learning.
. . .The fact that our early interventions, which were quite broad, did not lead to durable changes in time preferences suggests that such preferences may be difficult to change with education programs for 3-5 year-olds.
. . .the experiment was conducted one-on-one with a trained experimenter and each decision was accompanied by physical containers holding the number of rewards that would be earned by the child for each alternative. The rewards were always candies
Thanks to a reader for forwarding the paper to me.
The rewards were candies, with more offered if the child would wait a day. Frankly, my inclination is to be skeptical of the whole study. You are telling me that interventions do not matter, parental inclinations do not matter, but race matters? I can come up with a clever story to explain such an outcome (perhaps the children of different races reacted differently to the race of the “trained experimenter”), but I would put most of my chips on “results fail to replicate.”
I kind of feel like all of these “weird artificial situation with low stakes run by grad students” scenarios don’t mean much despite making up an awful lot of “studies show”.
I’m just going to re-iterate that even as a racist shitlord, I find these kind of contrived studies totally useless. We’ve got better stuff for answers on that kind of stuff. Let’s not lend credence to this kind of “research”.
Oh, great. More fodder for the alt-right. Thomas Sowell can write dozens of works of pure genius, but *I* can put off eating candy until tomorrow, proving my “racial superiority.” Sigh.
I think this a silly reason to get upset at the study. Plenty of studies show Caucasians tend to be taller than East Asians, I don’t think that convinced many Caucasians they can beat Yao Ming at basketball.
Oh, I’m not upset. I was thinking about an article about young alt-right men swilling milk to prove their superiority. Apparently, some non-whites have issues with lactose intolerance. It seems to take very little in the way of achievement for people to consider themselves superior these days.
If there was an objective way to categorize “results fail to replicate”, I would be willing to take you up on a bet Arnold. Facts about racial differences have certainly been used to justify morally horrendous actions in the past, but to believe that no such differences exist, particularly when it comes to tendencies to save and delay gratification, I think is wrong. Just look at the inter-racial differences between median savings account size.
It is weird that they didn’t find any parental influence. I would like to see exactly how they are measuring parental influence, but I don’t have access to the paper.
They also control for socio-economic status, cognitive skills and executive function skills. So, they are finding that race matters even when the children have the same socio-economic status, cognitive skills, executive function skills, and parental patience preferences. It’s not enough to point to “inter-racial differences between median savings account size”. The finding here is that, even when there are no inter-racial differences along the other dimensions (socio-economic status, cognitive skills, etc.), there remains an inter-racial difference in patience. What’s special about patience that’s independent of cognitive skills?
I can think of an obvious explanation. As some critics of the marshmallow test have argued, depending on one’s expectations of whether the marshmallow is likely to be there tomorrow, it might be smarter to take the marshmallow today. In other words, poor kids might seem more impulsive, but maybe they’re just trained by their environment to be more sceptical of claims that there will be more marshmallows tomorrow. Promises of future rewards often turn out not to be true.
In this instance, it could be that the black children found the (possibly white) experimenter less trustworthy, so they were less likely to believe that they would actually follow through on the promise of more marshmallows tomorrow.
I don’t think it’s necessarily obvious that children’s racial prejudices would affect the study, though it’s possible. I wonder if an IRB would approve of varying the race of the marshmallow distributor as a variable of interest.
I don’t understand what you’re asking. Patience is a cognitive skill. One that likely differs, by at least some amount, between races.
You can’t say that a test designed to measure patience has statistical controls for patience. I think clear indicators of inter-racial differences in patience (like savings accounts) should absolutely make us skeptical to claims that race has no predictive value in measuring patience.
And as I said, I would expect parental preferences to be seen in their children. I suspect this has a lot more to do with difficulties in comparing adult patience preferences to child patience preferences, than the claim that parents have no effect on their children.
The marshmallow test as operationalized is a bit artificial, arbitrary, too far from real life.
This entry at West Hunter shows one decent natural experiment: randomized lottery winnings. The author is far more sarcastic and irascible than Prof. Arnold is here at the askblog.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/the-lottery/
don’t miss the comments!
An interesting example for the impact of culture is the difference between Black Africans and African Americans with regard to getting through high school if possible. Imagine an impoverished Ghanian or Nigerian or Ivoirien who had to pay school fees and wear a threadbare uniform asking African Americans why they dropped out of high school here where there are no school fees and you get a free meal as well.
That’s not to say that dropping out in the USA is inexplicable–only to say that the interaction of culture and the incentive structure can make a big difference.
Well, the paper does say preferences evolve significantly as children age. So one explanation could be that the rate of maturation is different for different races, even if they all end up in a similar place in adulthood.
I believe Steve Sailer has a theory along similar lines as to why there are more foreign-born white professional basketball players as compared to white American players. That the white player’s physical development lags a little behind African-Americans. Not a huge amount, but enough that at certain critical points in childhood, the white players are unable to compete and drop out. Foreign players, on the other hand, don’t face that competition, and keep playing until their physical development catches up.
I’m not sure about genetic differences, but there’s considerable evidence that family structure influences maturation: children raised by single mothers tend to mature faster (even physically to some extent) than those raised with both or a male parent. Another thing that could explain the results. I have not read the study so I don’t know if they mention this at all.
Steve’s other theory is that there is a marginal advantage to be had if you can pick out proper white talent at black dominated positions and put it to good use.
His biggest example being the New England Patriots, one of the whitest teams in the NFL. For years the patriots ran an offense based on taking tiny white receivers that would not look like physical specimens at the NFL combine and throwing tons of short passes to them and having them run for a few more. It seems to me that they took a low IQ physically dominate position (the more a position involves running, the lower the IQ tends to get) and made it a higher IQ smart one. The Patriots used smarts and strategy to trump athleticism, which is the only way to stay on top when you draft last every year.
It’s clear that you can’t just draft these players either, when they leave the Patriots the other teams don’t necessarily know how to utilize them as well.
IIRC Taleb mentions credit risk as a factor. How sure are these children that they’ll get the later candy?
Perhaps the white children trust the (white) grad students more.
I agree with Kling: it will fail to replicate.
Do they say the grad student is white? I don’t think that can be assumed; I think about half the grad students I know are Asian.
Some people will never, ever, no matter how much evidence, accept that different population groups have different means due to genetic causes in IQ alongside a plethora of other (height, BMI, hip width, aggressiveness, avg age menarche, life expectancy, eyesight, blood groups, predisposition to diseases, eybrow ridge, epicanthic folds, skin color, hair color, hair texture, sweat glands, …….)
It’s really bizarre. Oh well. Reality will continue to be reality even if you refuse to accept it.
I wonder if they have data on parents’ and/or grandparents socioeconomic (and education) status for any of these kinds of studies. I wouldn’t be surprised if some bourgeois habits took a generation or two to fully accrue.
From the pdf (I got access to 59pp no problem?)
Only one other paper has had been able to explore this race relationship, and it found a similar association for adolescents (Castillo et al., 2011).
I think it will replicate, but the replications will be attacked methodologically, so might not even get published.
US black culture has degenerated to supporting sub-optimal (bad?) behavior, and opposing “white” behavior, like studying too much. This is terrible.
Changing this is made harder by the fact that identifying any such differences is considered by the PC-Klan to mean you’re a racist. So your professional & private lives can be ruined.
To get interventions that work, if that’s possible, we need to be able to follow where the data actually lead.
Of course, if this finding of black difference is considered too anti-PC, studies won’t be funded to be run, thus won’t be allowed — so then it won’t replicate. (I don’t think this is the reason Arnold bets it won’t replicate.)
US black culture has degenerated to supporting sub-optimal (bad?) behavior, and opposing “white” behavior, like studying too much.
I don’t know if that is an accurate characterization of black culture. It could be that studying hard is actually pointless or impossible since the schools are so substandard. You hear these horror stories like teachers that don’t even show up to class, or where there is little to no homework, or the teacher just writes out the answers on the board. In such an environment, it might take positive effort by the student to learn anything, like going out of their way to get a textbook from the library and read it on their own. Something only a very motivated student is likely to do. And you can see how some students might just tune out and stop bothering to show up to class, especially if their parents don’t care either. It’s easy to see how people might conclude that formal schooling is a waste of time.
This could be tested by looking at whether children who do study in black communities do better in life and achieve any returns to education.
I do think that if there’s anywhere one can justifiably question the assumption of rational self interest among consumers, it’s when the consumers are children.