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Thought this was a very interesting article
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In a rural village on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, cultural developmental psychologist Suzanne Gaskins placed pillowy marshmallows in front of a half-dozen Yucatec Maya children and gave them a simple choice: eat the treat now, or wait and get two.
For decades, the eponymous Marshmallow Test has taken on almost mythic meaning. The test, originally developed to measure children’s ability to delay gratification by tempting them with a fluffy, gooey sweet was later shown to be a potent predictor of success in school and beyond.
Gaskins, a professor emerita at Northeastern Illinois University, has studied independent, autonomous and capable children from this Indigenous community for nearly 50 years. She predicted they would hold out, sitting in their seats waiting for the second treat while she left the room.
Instead, two children ate the marshmallows. Four walked out of the room.
Their puzzling failure led her to try 16 other traditional psychology tasks that measure a suite of essential cognitive skills called executive function.
These abilities underpin human existence, helping people to stay focused on tasks, think flexibly and achieve goals. By age 3, self-motivated Maya children begin to dress and bathe themselves, organize their daily activities independently and help with chores. But the children failed more than half of the tests.
A researcher who didn’t know this community might assume they lacked crucial mental abilities. But the disconnect between Gaskins’s knowledge of the children and their performance on these tests was the start of an uncomfortable revelation that challenges a long-standing paradigm in the field.
Developmental psychology aims to elucidate the “universals” in how the human mind develops, but has often gleaned those insights by studying White, middle-class children from Western countries.
The tests are intended to measure how core cognitive skills flicker on over the course of human development and to identify children who may be falling behind — with a degree of objectivity, similar to a blood test in medicine.
But Gaskins and a growing group of researchers have found cultural biases and assumptions embedded in the tests.
The researchers raised a pointed question: If a child from a poor family or a child from a different culture doesn’t perform well, is the fault in the child or the test?
Following up with the children, Gaskins learned that those who walked away weren’t trying to avoid temptation to eat the marshmallow. They simply saw no good reason to sit in a room by themselves, doing nothing.
“Just because children in different communities perform differently in our tasks, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong and we need to fix it,” said Lucía Alcalá, an associate professor of psychology at California State University at Fullerton and Gaskins’s collaborator.
Alcalá grew up in a rural town in an Indigenous region of Mexico and studies Indigenous children in Mexico and first- and second-generation Latino children in the United States.
“We, as U.S. scholars, feel we have to fix everyone. … People don’t need us to save them and fix them.”..................
Other studies began to poke holes in hallmark findings. Yuko Munakata, a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Davis, conducted a variation on the Marshmallow Test that showed that children’s ability to wait for a treat wasn’t like a muscle that was strong or weak, but changed markedly depending on the context.
Japanese children, culturally accustomed to waiting for food, were able to hold out for a food reward, but not for a present.
American schoolchildren, on the other hand, used to waiting to unwrap gifts under a Christmas tree or at a birthday party, were able to wait for a gift, but not food.
Miller-Cotto, who is Black, wondered whether even the way the tests were administered could influence how children performed.
Being taken into a quiet room by a White researcher to solve a set of puzzles and games might be a novel, uncomfortable experience for Black or Latino children.
With Andrew Ribner at Chatham University, she is conducting a set of experiments to test whether matching the racial identity of the researcher to the child or changing the location where a test is given changes children’s performance.
Jaime Chi Pech, a linguist who is Maya, still shudders at the memory of administering a psychology test that requires children to sort cards by category in a small village in Mexico’s Quintana Roo state.
The task required lengthy, repetitive verbal instructions, and the children got bored. They asked why he kept repeating himself.
Maya children, Chi Pech said, typically learn by observing rather than by constant feedback from adults. Chi Pech gave an example from his own childhood: When he was around 5 or 6, he learned to chop wood by watching.
The researchers discovered other cultural gaps, too. Some tasks required children to give long verbal responses, in a culture where turn-taking and silences are more normal.
Timed tests required children to answer as quickly as possible, failing to account for a culture in which people are motivated to work methodically and accurately.
Other tasks required children to say the opposite of what they saw, going against a norm of not saying things that aren’t true.
“I was very surprised at my own lack of insight,” Gaskins said. “I did not recognize the bias built into the test until I sat in the room with the kids. As soon as I asked them to do them, it became obvious what was wrong.”
The Maya children aren’t alone. Matthew Jukes, a developmental psychologist at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute, recalled observing an assessment in Gambia in which girls who hadn’t been to school were asked to recite numbers backward. The children, he said, looked at the assessor as if they were “from another planet.”
“There are all these assumptions you make if you’re sitting in a lab in the West,” Jukes said. Even the setup, in which an adult quizzes a child in a one-on-one interaction, may be unfamiliar.
Stephanie Carlson, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota who developed a test of executive function with Zelazo, said that this line of research is eye-opening but that it would be unfortunate for the field if the idea of standardized measurements was thrown out.
“I did not recognize the bias built into the test until I sat in the room with the kids. As soon as I asked them to do them, it became obvious what was wrong.”
Suzanne Gaskins, professor emerita at Northeastern Illinois University
“We wouldn’t develop a different cardiac machine that is just for one cultural group, even if there’s a higher incidence of cardiac arrhythmia in that group,” Carlson said.
“We need to think about the benefits of some standardization, so that comparisons can be made, so that disparities can be uncovered and inequalities can be uncovered as well.”...................
============================
In a rural village on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, cultural developmental psychologist Suzanne Gaskins placed pillowy marshmallows in front of a half-dozen Yucatec Maya children and gave them a simple choice: eat the treat now, or wait and get two.
For decades, the eponymous Marshmallow Test has taken on almost mythic meaning. The test, originally developed to measure children’s ability to delay gratification by tempting them with a fluffy, gooey sweet was later shown to be a potent predictor of success in school and beyond.
Gaskins, a professor emerita at Northeastern Illinois University, has studied independent, autonomous and capable children from this Indigenous community for nearly 50 years. She predicted they would hold out, sitting in their seats waiting for the second treat while she left the room.
Instead, two children ate the marshmallows. Four walked out of the room.
Their puzzling failure led her to try 16 other traditional psychology tasks that measure a suite of essential cognitive skills called executive function.
These abilities underpin human existence, helping people to stay focused on tasks, think flexibly and achieve goals. By age 3, self-motivated Maya children begin to dress and bathe themselves, organize their daily activities independently and help with chores. But the children failed more than half of the tests.
A researcher who didn’t know this community might assume they lacked crucial mental abilities. But the disconnect between Gaskins’s knowledge of the children and their performance on these tests was the start of an uncomfortable revelation that challenges a long-standing paradigm in the field.
Developmental psychology aims to elucidate the “universals” in how the human mind develops, but has often gleaned those insights by studying White, middle-class children from Western countries.
The tests are intended to measure how core cognitive skills flicker on over the course of human development and to identify children who may be falling behind — with a degree of objectivity, similar to a blood test in medicine.
But Gaskins and a growing group of researchers have found cultural biases and assumptions embedded in the tests.
The researchers raised a pointed question: If a child from a poor family or a child from a different culture doesn’t perform well, is the fault in the child or the test?
Following up with the children, Gaskins learned that those who walked away weren’t trying to avoid temptation to eat the marshmallow. They simply saw no good reason to sit in a room by themselves, doing nothing.
“Just because children in different communities perform differently in our tasks, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong and we need to fix it,” said Lucía Alcalá, an associate professor of psychology at California State University at Fullerton and Gaskins’s collaborator.
Alcalá grew up in a rural town in an Indigenous region of Mexico and studies Indigenous children in Mexico and first- and second-generation Latino children in the United States.
“We, as U.S. scholars, feel we have to fix everyone. … People don’t need us to save them and fix them.”..................
Other studies began to poke holes in hallmark findings. Yuko Munakata, a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Davis, conducted a variation on the Marshmallow Test that showed that children’s ability to wait for a treat wasn’t like a muscle that was strong or weak, but changed markedly depending on the context.
Japanese children, culturally accustomed to waiting for food, were able to hold out for a food reward, but not for a present.
American schoolchildren, on the other hand, used to waiting to unwrap gifts under a Christmas tree or at a birthday party, were able to wait for a gift, but not food.
Miller-Cotto, who is Black, wondered whether even the way the tests were administered could influence how children performed.
Being taken into a quiet room by a White researcher to solve a set of puzzles and games might be a novel, uncomfortable experience for Black or Latino children.
With Andrew Ribner at Chatham University, she is conducting a set of experiments to test whether matching the racial identity of the researcher to the child or changing the location where a test is given changes children’s performance.
Jaime Chi Pech, a linguist who is Maya, still shudders at the memory of administering a psychology test that requires children to sort cards by category in a small village in Mexico’s Quintana Roo state.
The task required lengthy, repetitive verbal instructions, and the children got bored. They asked why he kept repeating himself.
Maya children, Chi Pech said, typically learn by observing rather than by constant feedback from adults. Chi Pech gave an example from his own childhood: When he was around 5 or 6, he learned to chop wood by watching.
The researchers discovered other cultural gaps, too. Some tasks required children to give long verbal responses, in a culture where turn-taking and silences are more normal.
Timed tests required children to answer as quickly as possible, failing to account for a culture in which people are motivated to work methodically and accurately.
Other tasks required children to say the opposite of what they saw, going against a norm of not saying things that aren’t true.
“I was very surprised at my own lack of insight,” Gaskins said. “I did not recognize the bias built into the test until I sat in the room with the kids. As soon as I asked them to do them, it became obvious what was wrong.”
The Maya children aren’t alone. Matthew Jukes, a developmental psychologist at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute, recalled observing an assessment in Gambia in which girls who hadn’t been to school were asked to recite numbers backward. The children, he said, looked at the assessor as if they were “from another planet.”
“There are all these assumptions you make if you’re sitting in a lab in the West,” Jukes said. Even the setup, in which an adult quizzes a child in a one-on-one interaction, may be unfamiliar.
Stephanie Carlson, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota who developed a test of executive function with Zelazo, said that this line of research is eye-opening but that it would be unfortunate for the field if the idea of standardized measurements was thrown out.
“I did not recognize the bias built into the test until I sat in the room with the kids. As soon as I asked them to do them, it became obvious what was wrong.”
Suzanne Gaskins, professor emerita at Northeastern Illinois University
“We wouldn’t develop a different cardiac machine that is just for one cultural group, even if there’s a higher incidence of cardiac arrhythmia in that group,” Carlson said.
“We need to think about the benefits of some standardization, so that comparisons can be made, so that disparities can be uncovered and inequalities can be uncovered as well.”...................
The Marshmallow Test and other predictors of success have bias built in, researchers say
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