By Kira Taniguchi

Imagine this: you are a four-year-old, and someone sets a marshmallow on a table in front of you. The person then gives you two options:  eat the marshmallow and receive instant gratification or leave the marshmallow untouched with the promise of receiving a second one when 20 minutes is up. What would you do?

Ross Otto, psychology graduate student, and Bradley Love, UT psychologist.

This study on delayed gratification, conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the ’60s, paved the way for modern day research on short-term satisfaction and long-term benefits conducted by University of Texas psychologist Bradley Love and psychology graduate student Ross Otto.

Mischel’s study found that children who could successfully forgo the marshmallow and wait a few more minutes to have two, were actively engaged in distracting themselves by covering their eyes or looking away. On the flipside, the children who focused on how great it would be to eat the tasty treat immediately, ended up eating the marshmallow. This idea, the more you pay attention to gaining immediate satisfaction, the worse your ability is to make optimal decisions in the long term, was the engine behind Love and Otto’s study.

The results of their study entitled “You don’t want to know what you’re missing: When information about forgone rewards impedes dynamic decision making,” appeared in the February edition of the journal Judgment and Decision Making.

When Otto and Love began conducting their study they sought to prove that when given more information about forgone rewards, people are more likely to make poor choices in the long term. Both Otto and Love use the “Friday night” example to illustrate this.

Say you have a ton of research papers to grade, and you need to stay in on a Friday night to get them finished and back to your students in a timely manner. To add insult to injury, your spouse goes to a party. Although you made the right choice to stay in on that specific night to grade papers because you will be happy you did so in the long term when your spouse comes back and tells you how great the party was, you make up your mind to go to the party next time, and you will, and you do — even if it means putting your students’ grades on hold a little longer.

The same works for the adult version of the marshmallow study. Say someone places a big, moist slice of chocolate cake in front of you. But, you’re on a diet. The long-term option to abstain from eating it would further your goal of health and weight loss. But the short term option to eat the slice of chocolate cake, which would set you back in the long term, would be immediately rewarding. What would you do? Say you abstain from eating cake, Otto said, which would be optimal for your health in the long term and someone tells you, ‘oh, that cake was good.’

“We found that when you compare people who don’t get that information [that the cake was good] and they only see the outcomes [of their choice] versus people who saw the outcomes of what they chose and didn’t choose — the extra information actually hurts people in their ability to optimally decide.” Otto said.

It was these delay of gratification scenarios that Otto and Love simulated in their study. Seventy-eight participants — all undergraduates from the University of Texas — were asked to sit in front of 17-inch monitors armed with two choices: option A or option B. Over the next 20 minutes, participants were asked to make approximately 250 choices.

“It’s about linking a bunch of decisions together and getting behaviors to sequence correctly,” Love said. “ It’s about sticking with a plan and making the right choices repeatedly to get from point A to point B.”

The test went like this: option A and option B appeared on the screen. There was a point value to accompany each option. One of the values was slightly less than the other. Over the long term, if the participant consistently chose the higher option, they lost point values in the long term. If they consistently chose the lower option, which gained value over time, they won in the long term.

The participants were not told ahead of time the reasoning behind the values, they were simply asked to choose option A or option B and figure out for themselves which choice benefitted them most in the long term. At the end of the study their points translated to money, which the participants walked away with.

There were three conditions tested in the study, with 26 participants assigned to one of the three conditions. The first group was known as “No Foregone Rewards.” Otto said this group had only one source of information, which was the payoff, or point value, that resulted only from the option they chose. The second group was known as “True Foregone Rewards.” These participants were presented with the payoffs, or values, for both the option they chose and the option they did not choose. The last group was known as “False Foregone Rewards.” Love and Otto decided to trick this group to make the short-term option appear worse in order to determine if people were using information in the way that Love and Otto predicted. They return to the “Friday night” example — only this time, when you ask your spouse how the party was, they say it was horrible.

Otto said you would think that if you got this false information, that the party was bad, that you would continue to make the positive decisions, such as staying in to grade papers, which would benefit you in the long run. But, it turns out that people do not and are more apt to make poor choices, like going out to the party, the next time.

What they found is that when people receive more information — positive or negative — about their previous decisions, they actually make poor choices in the future. Typically, more information given to people would be considered positive. But Love and Otto found that when people were given additional information about what could have been in the study, they performed worse when choosing between short- and long-term rewards.

Love and Otto were not surprised by the results.

“What surprised me if anything, was how strong the results were,” Love said. “How bad people were when they were given information about forgone rewards.”

Otto and Love have plans to expand their study. In a play on Mischel’s marshmallow study — where the only children to successfully forgo the treat were distracting themselves — they will track people’s eye movements using a camera that follows the pupils and position information based on where people are looking..  They have already collected the data for the eyeball tracking experiment, said Otto, so now it is only a matter of sifting through the results.