Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our normal comment rules still apply to other comments.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

It might help if kids aren't snapped at, and punished for every failure, or even for simply being a child.

This message brought to you by the Research Center for the Painfully Obvious.

It might help if poor people werent so underpaid and overstressed they are always ready to snap at a moment's notice.

A big problem in the US is we will divert money for the children, but not for the adults, whereas in say Europe adults have access to lots of social programs, the number one being nationalized healthcare, but also rent assistance/low income housing. If lower income parents had a solid roof over their head and health care insurance they would have far more energy and patience for parenting.

Painfully obvious to whom? That’s a bold assumption to say that everyone already knows this.

In some ways, it only seems like poor judgment from the standpoint of someone who is not poor. My wife and I have worked with distressed families through our church, and one of the things that we observed is that, for their children, there is so much uncertainty in life that they have nothing to lose if a gamble comes up craps.

So what if an action might put their family on the street? They experience evictions and homelessness regularly. They may as well take a chance on something that will bring them something good, because the disastrous consequences of failure are things that happen as a regular feature of their lives.

In addition, their parents often make promises or projections of better things in the future. These promises may be sincere projections and hopes, or they might be total fabrications in order to induce particular behavior. In the end, though, the promises usually come to nothing. A child who has lived with this all their lives might hear the researcher telling them that if they do not touch the marshmallow they will get two later on, but what they know in their heart is that later on there will be no marshmallows. Even the one that they left on the dish might be taken away from them. That is the way life works.

The lives of the poor are very different from the lives of developmental researchers. And the assumptions made by researchers when designing these experiments and interpreting the data maybe entirely inappropriate indie life of a child growing up in poverty.

More money wouldn't have stopped my redneck stepdad, and teachers from being bullies. I agree with idea of the working class getting a better cut though.

There seems to be an increasing gap between what scientists expect/recommend vs what is possible considering the reality of life as we know it.

I am an everyday person, and it’s to the point that I feel like it’s creating a class division.

Like “we recommend breast feeding for the first 2 years of the child’s life. “

Someone who has money could make that happen. Otherwise, there’s no way in hell.

I’d really enjoy it more if researchers realized what kind of life the disadvantaged live. They live such a different life that they are creating tests and data that is completely unattainable for most of the population.

Your comment is so accurate and really important for researchers to consider.

I have worked in public education for twelve years and second all of your observations.

[removed]

[removed]

It's proven through sociological studies to actually stop all of that though. Crime, abuse, drug use, suicide, and many other behaviors drop significantly with sufficient social safety nets in place.

This is an important point. Thanks.

I've lived a mostly middle-class life, and were out not for volunteer work I would have no idea about the realities of poverty. It's like a different world.

I'm reminded of "Snowpiercer" sometimes.

Been feeling this a lot lately. I thought it was maybe just me getting older and more cynical, but a lot of studies these days do seem to suffer from biased, or overall thoughtless experimental design. Even many of the questions as a whole that seem to get funded feel like they lack empathy, or that their answers are obvious or trivial. There’s definitely a dangerous counterculture against science these days that doesn’t need any further feeding, but also scientists don’t seem to be doing their fields a ton of favors.

Scientists don't get to choose which research gets grant money. Don't go judging them for trying to make a living too - and if you think researchers are making bank either, you'd be mistaken.

The study without article for those interested would be beneficial to see if the same causation is present in high recidivism individuals not addicted to drugs

That’s a mindblowing take to me that children eat the marshmallow not because they don’t have discipline, but because these children learned to view the world as cruel and untrustworthy and that actively abandoning long-term thinking is to their advantage. Thanks for sharing, now I’m sad.

>I am an everyday person, and it’s to the point that I feel like it’s creating a class division.

Friedrich Engels would like to join the conversation.

This is basically a reduced form of social murder. "Social battery", perhaps.

[removed]

[removed]

More criticizing their recent work than judging, and I definitely understand that the processes behind funding and grants have more than their fair share of blame here.

Mom told me we’d eventually get that Mercedes.

Never did so I don’t trust any one in my life.

Good / bad I worked my ass off to get my own but it’s made me not like my parents because I don’t trust anything they say. Sad but how it goes

[removed]

Where does the second clause of the title come from? I don't really see that discussed in the article or paper, though I haven't read the whole thing in detail. Is that just editorializing by OP? I didn't see anything in the paper that could be used to infer that SES causally affected willingness to gamble with stickers.

You literally have no idea what this study was actually about, do you?