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hen comments on A New Interpretation of the Marshmallow Test - Less Wrong
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Comments (24)
This seems like a non-sequitor.
I am not claiming that breastfeeding does increase both trust and academic performance. I am simply pointing out that it is not hard to imagine a characteristic that improves both trust and life outcome, without trust improving life outcome or life outcome improving trust. I could equally well have substituted family size, parental education, the presence of pets in the home, or any other characteristic for breast feeding. My apologies if that wasn't clear.
Until now the claim has been that the marshmallow experiment and its followup show higher self-control leads to preferable life outcomes. This study casts a lot of doubt on the causality of those conclusions. What's significant here is that it shows that "self-control" is itself a dependent variable of other causes. Once that's shown, what looked like causation is no longer so obviously causal.
Thanks for clarifying, that removes my worry.
They are referencing studies which show that breast feeding is correlated with heightened academic performance later in life.
Hmm, I think 'show' is too strong a word there. Near as I can tell, those results vanish when socio-economic status is controlled for. I was just wondering what this had to do with trust.
(As I said, correlated), although note that at this point randomized studies have been done with some women being encouraged to breast feed and others not given any encouragement. There's still a correlation. See this summary. This strongly suggests that what is going on here is not purely socioeconomic. But it is easy to connect this to a trust hypothesis: a child which is being directly exposed to their mother's body might form strong social connections, hence be more trusting.
Ah, thanks. That seems like an ambitious empirical claim to me, but at least I see the connection.
I don't think the purpose of the breast feeding example was to say that it had a high probability of being the right explanation; just that there is a lot of uncovered ground in hypothesis space.