Quote: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.”

(August 29, 2024 at 12:58 pm)Fireball Wrote: ^ Zevon is funny. Springsteen is meh, for me.

(August 31, 2024 at 7:51 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: