Marshmallow, Ph.D.
How Delayed Gratification is a Recipe for Career Dissatisfaction
The marshmallow test is famous. The marshmallow test was done in the Seventies, a waste decade of bell bottoms and key parties that was also the formative moment for contemporary American culture, and as a result the various experiments became enshrined in the undergraduate and pop-psychology canon.
It fit the Malcolm Gladwell formula perfectly. A professor at a big university (Stanford, in this case, but it could have been Harvard, Yale, or even Penn) comes up with a simple idea: how much does a simple concept (delayed gratification) work? Combine that question with a clever test—have preschoolers wait to receive their preferred treat—and then see how different experimental conditions (say, distractions or incentives) affect performance.
The moral of the marshmallow test (and, with an N of 30-something, it’s really a moral rather than a finding) is that you can delay gratification successfully if you distract yourself from what you’re delaying gratification, either by diverting your attention or by doing fun things (or even thinking of fun things). To be sure, more recent replication studies have debunked the stronger claims that were based on later extensions of the marshmallow test, like how waiting longer as a preschooler predicted lower BMI as an adult.
The original studies are, more or less, politely embarrassing to a field that now cares about validity, and the later follow-ups are too. But they live a second life as hooks for essays like this one about delayed gratification. Except in my case I’m using it more specifically, because my point is that you can delay gratification too much—you can, that is, successfully distract yourself from the goal to the point that your delayed gratification will turn into immanent dissatisfaction. I’m talking, of course, about the path to tenure.
There’s a common way of embarking on an academic career, which I’ll stereotype as follows. Imagine you’re smart but you don’t like jobs that are boring at cocktail parties, you don’t particularly love 9-5 deadlines, and you aren’t particularly motivated by the thought of making money (I mean, you want money, but not enough to overcome a fear of blood or to associate with finance bros; a nice, six-figure salary will be enough for you, thank you very much). Almost by definition, you’re likely to have always been “bookish” and good at school. Anyway, you’re good at research, even if you don’t quite know what that really entails, and there’s an entire career path right over here where people like you seem to be pretty successful.
This isn’t autobiographical but it’s not not autobiographical.
Especially for anyone embarking on a path into U.S. academia before 2008, the tradeoffs between academia and other pathways seemed rather muted. Okay, so the summers weren’t really “off”, but the salaries weren’t trading at a huge discount and money always seemed to be coming in from somewhere. For those of us who decided to get a Ph.D. in, say, the exact last semester before the financial crash, we could look forward to the odds of getting a tenure-track job being (yes, really) actually in our favor. The big tradeoff was clear: you had to go back to school (not much of a burden for people inclined to Ph.D. school), spend five or so years getting trained, and then enter a stable profession.
Well, of course, the tradeoffs were a little more severe even at a 2007 baseline than that, but the real shock was the 2008 crash. It permanently affected the trajectory of entire disciplines. The crash (and its lingering effects) was a severe wound for the humanities, for instance. It gravely affected the social sciences, but less severely. It proved a boon for the more vocational disciplines. And policymakers took it (coupled with vague anti-China fearmongering) as an excuse to invest in something called “STEM”, a pretty good example of forced demand and of a reallllly broadly stretched concept.
A little turmoil can lead to big effects at the end of the distribution. Going from, say, 60 percent of qualified Ph.D. candidates getting full-time tenure-tack employment when they go on the market the first time to 40 percent may not sound calamitous, but if it lasts for a few years it’s the beginning of a new regime, not a minor bump in the road. (The numbers are, again, broad stereotypes from political science, but they’re not that far off from the initial change.) It leads to substantial weakening of labor and the strengthening of calls for, say, temporary faculty on longer-term contracts (two or three years), however they’re labeled, to meet curricular needs. But there’s also still a lot of people getting the jobs they came for, and there’s always the chance that, with a little patience, things will come back to normal. Even though, every year, the number of folks getting jobs ticks down another couple of points.
The other side of this is that the fortunate folks who got the jobs didn’t really get the jobs they envisioned. Getting a position where you had to beat out lots of other deserving candidates who now won’t have a position at all is a different experience to getting a position when your colleagues and classmates are also going to be all right. (Here’s your office, here’s your course schedule, here’s your survivor’s guilt!) You can’t even really complain about anything having to do with your job because, indeed, other people have got it much worse—even though complaining about one’s job is one of the most human things possible and also a simple acknowledgment that precarity really does, in the end, start to affect just about everyone in an industry.
Delayed gratification also means delayed action. If you’ve already set aside five years to get a job, what’s a sixth? If six, what’s a seventh? If you’ve already sunk ten years into a profession, why not wait for an eleventh to see if things change? Sophisticated readers are muttering about the “sunk cost fallacy”, but the reason we gave the fallacy a name is that everyone does it—it’s a heuristic, it’s a pattern, it’s practically a law of human behavior. So what if it’s illogical, Spock? It’s what we are.
And academics are good at delayed gratification.
So you can end up, relatively young but not really youthful enough to change careers, and suddenly things are … stuck. (This is even less autobiographical, but again it’s not not autobiographical.) And, what’s worse, maybe you recognize, after waiting for a marshmallow—you don’t really like marshmallows!
(Ok, this part is autobiographical. Not the career dissatisfaction part per se but the actual dislike of marshmallows. The only kind I like are the super-expensive kind, the kind that the original Dylan’s Candy Bar would sell, the kind you’d read about in How To Spend It that cost ten pounds each. But normal marshmallows? Oh my god, if you made me wait a minute to eat one I still wouldn’t because the only good marshmallow is one that’s aflame and about to melt Hershey’s chocolate on a Graham cracker.)
We only get one go-round at all of this. If career success requires a decade of distraction and endurance, then maybe the game isn’t worth the mallow. And maybe the solution isn’t so much tinkering at the edges but making the experience before the reward the point in itself.
Endnotes
Space colonization is a literary sub-genre in its own right, and it has made the reputation of many otherwise serious scientists. But science, it is not. And neither is it science-fiction. And while broadly philosophical, it is definitely not philosophy in the usual sense. Maybe a right term for space colonization’s stylings would be something like non-science non-fiction.
In a way, viewed from orbit as it were, space colonization is a myth, a narrative repository of shared meanings and values, the understanding of the world that binds a community, a clan, a kin or a society together. “We are born explorers and adventurers” / “we must work for our own salvation”. You can tell that it is a myth precisely because it pits against each other these two clashing and contradictory accounts of our role in the universe, burden against destiny.
“Burden and destiny,” from Against Mars, by Manu
I too dislike marshmallows