If you can hold off on eating marshmallows now if you were promised more later, then you meet the requirements for delayed gratification. This ability to hold off smaller, immediate rewards in order to gain larger rewards in the distant future was initially explored by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel, who tested children’s ability to delay their desire for the sake of a future reward. An adult version of this test was recently administered to a group of low-to-moderate income earners by two economists from the Federal Reserve’s Center for Behavioral Economics and Decisionmaking in Boston. The experiment posed scenarios such as whether participants would rather have one dollar now or ten dollars six months from now, with variation in the amounts and timeframes offered. Participants who were poorer at delaying gratification, meaning they took the immediate reward when it made rational sense to take the larger reward in the future, also had lower credit scores. These results suggest that people who have difficulty in building and maintaining good credit might be worse at resisting their impulses.
Source: Science Daily
