Abstract
How well do pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation predict mid-life capital formation? We surveyed 113 participants of the 1967–1973 Bing pre-school studies on delay of gratification when they were in their late 40’s. They reported 11 mid-life capital formation outcomes, including net worth, permanent income, absence of high-interest debt, forward-looking behaviors, and educational attainment. To address multiple hypothesis testing and our small sample, we pre-registered an analysis plan of well-powered tests. As predicted, a newly constructed and pre-registered measure derived from preschool delay of gratification does not predict the 11 capital formation variables (i.e., the sign-adjusted average correlation was 0.02). A pre-registered composite self-regulation index, combining preschool delay of gratification with survey measures of self-regulation collected at ages 17, 27, and 37, does predict 10 of the 11 capital formation variables in the expected direction, with an average correlation of 0.19. The inclusion of the preschool delay of gratification measure in this composite index does not affect the index’s predictive power. We tested several hypothesized reasons that preschool delay of gratification does not have predictive power for our mid-life capital formation variables.
Highlights
The capacity to self-regulate matters for a wide array of life outcomes
The preschool delay of gratification task is measured using a diagnostic variant of the task for 34 of our 113 participants; the remaining 79 participants experienced a non-diagnostic variant of the pre-school delay of gratification task
Considering the predictive power of the RNCCQ index on its own, we find that its mean correlation with the capital formation measures is 0.20 (SE = 0.04) whether we control for rank-normalized delay (RND) or not; see OA Sections V-B-2 and V-C-14 for more details
Summary
The capacity to self-regulate matters for a wide array of life outcomes. A critical component of self-regulation is the ability to delay gratification. Follow-up investigations beginning in the 1980’s reported that preschool waiting time predicted better self-regulation as teenagers, especially among children who participated in certain experimental variations of the preschool delay task (Shoda et al, 1990). The network of documented longitudinal relations of preschool delay of gratification are extensive Both media and academic accounts of the research commonly exaggerate the scope of the actual findings (Watts et al, 2018). We revisit 113 individuals from the original Bing cohort, roughly 45 years after they participated in the original experiments Within this sample, we examine associations between measures of self-regulation based on multiple assessments during the first four decades of life (including preschool delay) and a comprehensive array of mid-life measures of capital formation. The Online Appendix (OA) contains further details about sample recruitment, survey design, and analyses, as well as a number of additional and robustness analyses that we conducted
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