Marshmallow

Mention the words "skipping class" and you're likely to conjure images of Holden Caulfield, whining rants about "phony" lectures. As a matter of fact, all students have skipped class - some teachers, too.

One of the best-kept secrets about skipping class is that we don't always tell people we skip class. You know, teachers don't take attendance most of the time. When a medical student was recently caught skipping class for one whole week, little did he realize his classmates told the teacher he skipped classes because of preparatory work for the freshman orientation camp. We could not help laughing when we heard the excuse of camping - yes, camping, a pretty lame one - and skipping class. I was to find out later that this student explained to his lecturer that he skipped class simply because he rated the camping more important than the class.

But wait: can we stop laughing and make sense of it? The answer: I can. This remarkable student illustrates very well the fundamental steps of human decisions. The three steps of deciding to skip classes is worth recounting. First, he perceived a situation. Second, he used his power of reason to calculate whether skipping classes is in his best interest. Third, he used the power of will to execute his decision. A test of willpower indeed! The implicit importance of the second and third steps - reason and will - is so pervasive. Such were the kinds of issues taught by moralists for much of the twentieth century. Students have been reminded that candies and soda decay the teeth, smoking chokes the lungs, unsafe sex heralds unwanted pregnancy and bad disease. The list goes on and on. When things went wrong, we gave longer lectures and sermons.

Admit it. We failed. We failed because we forgot the crucial step. What does that mean? The first step is actually the most important one. Self-discipline and self-control can't replace the hidden process of perceiving. The emphasis should really be on how the student perceives the camping. Which brings me to the famous marshmallow psychology experiment. A group of four-year-olds were sitting in a room, with a marshmallow in front of them. They were instructed that they could eat the marshmallow right away, but that the psychologist was going to leave the room and if they waited until he returned he would give them two marshmallows. Try imagining it. How can we, as parents, teach our kids to resist the temptation to pop the marshmallow in the mouth? Should we ask them to calculate the marginal cost (second step)? And how about biting the lip to control their impulse (step three)? Nope. In the experiment, children could wait three times longer when they were able to perceive the marshmallow in a new mental frame. Say, children who were told to imagine the marshmallow was a fluffy cloud could do much better. With just a shift in the frame of reference, the change in human decisions has never been bigger.