You know, the Marshmallow Test is really not about the supposed character of the child, but more or less a direct measure of the environment in which they have been growing up. Does their world have a future? Can people be trusted?
At age 4 kids really don’t have any long term habits at all. What they have are life experiences. Those life experiences will in most cases go on to inform–as their emotional water, or atmosphere–their entire lives.
It seems obvious that kids who grow up in stable homes, where people can be trusted, will be better able to trust that that second marshmallow will show up, and thus find it less hard to wait fifteen minutes.
Children who grow up in abusive, unstable homes, will find it impossible. I personally highly doubt I would have passed that test, and in some respects my adult life shows it. I was shattered, and have spent the time since trying to find a way into a health I have never truly known.
But here is my point: I suspect that most members of the black community who grow up in the ghetto would not pass this test. This has NOTHING to do with race, but the test IS a valid predictor of future behavior. I don’t doubt for a moment that those how pass do better in every way, but this is because they grew up in healthier, more nurturing environments, in which planning for the future was logical, because their worlds were not being overturned and disrupted by unexpected chaos every day.
And I reference black folks specifically, knowing that the numbers of messed up whites are vastly larger, simply because of the volume of noise generated by the Left, in which they claim to care, to care more, and to want to help. They don’t want to help. They don’t care about analysis of this sort. It does not have enough THEM in it. Leftist thinkers care about leftist thought. Actual human beings are cockroaches to them, outside small token contingents that grant their lies superficial plausibility.
As I have commented, but some time ago, Ayn Rand had her own version of the Marshmallow Experiment. Her mother, who seems to have been crazy (most likely a narcissist) told her that if she surrendered her Teddy Bear (or something like that) that she would get something much better in a year. She did it. A year later, her mother could not even remember the deal, and told her in effect to shut up and quit whining.
Her entire subsequent life and philosophy may depend emotionally on this one incident, at least as it stands in for her entire early childhood.
As I have said often, but not recently, most of us have what I call “Rosebud Moments”, and not infrequently, we cannot even recall them. But they stand on altars in our inner caves, unlit, but transforming everything. No conscious life is possible until we find them and integrate them.