You may have heard of the marshmallow test. Back in the late 1960s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel sat preschoolers down with a marshmallow and made them an offer—eat it now, or wait fifteen minutes and get two. Then he left them alone and watched what happened.
The kids who waited, the story goes, went on to have better life outcomes. Higher SAT scores. Lower BMI. Better jobs. The ability to delay gratification, it seemed, was the secret ingredient to success.
When I became a parent, I thought here’s something I can use. I could become a better parent through science. I tried it on one of my sons, running my own informal experiment. I told him the rules. Here’s a marshmallow. If you can wait 15 minutes, I’ll give you two. I set a marshmallow down in front of him and waited to see what would happen.
He looked at the marshmallow. Acknowledged its existence. Then went back to whatever he was doing.
Fifteen minutes passed. The marshmallow sat there. An hour. He liked this game. He asked, “How many marshmallows do I get now?” It wasn’t that he didn’t like marshmallows—he did. He just happened to be weirdly good at ignoring them. I could probably have left that marshmallow there for days.
I thought this is it! This kid is destined for great things.
And look, I still think he is destined for great things. But here’s what I learned pretty quickly. His supernatural ability to resist marshmallows didn’t translate to resisting video games. Or ice cream. Or the urge to hit his brother when his brother was being annoying.
Turns out self-control isn’t one thing. It’s not a trait you either have or don’t have, like eye color or left-handedness. And that famous marshmallow experiment? It’s a great story. But like so many great stories in psychology, it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as we’d like to think.
When Stories Become Science
Here’s the thing about the marshmallow test. When researchers tried to replicate it with larger, more diverse samples, the whole thing kind of fell apart. The correlation between childhood marshmallow-waiting and adult success basically disappears once you control for family income and education. The original study had a small sample, mostly kids from Stanford’s campus community. What looked like a profound insight into human nature was actually just a story about privilege.
But we love these stories. We love them because they’re clean. Simple. Scientific-sounding. They give us the illusion that human behavior can be reduced to a single variable we can measure and optimize.
This is the world we live in now. Science gave us cars and houses and antibiotics and smartphones, and we’re grateful for that. We should be. But somewhere along the way, we decided that everything should be scientific. That everything should be able to be measured, studied, and reproduced in a lab.
Science has become our religion. It’s where we turn for answers, for certainty, for legitimacy. We have faith that science works, and we apply it to everything, whether it belongs there or not.
In the physical sciences, this works great. Chemistry, physics, biology—we see the results immediately and they’re consistent. But when we get into fields like psychology, things get messier. This is what led to what psychologists called their reproducibility crisis.
Basically, a lot of the famous experiments that had been taught for decades, that had shaped how we understand human behavior, turned out to be flukes. They were interesting one-offs with compelling narratives. These stories seemed too good to be true. And they were.
When Sensational Stories Become Scientific Truth
Consider Kitty Genovese. In 1964, she was murdered outside her Queens apartment while, according to the New York Times, 38 witnesses watched and did nothing. The story became the foundation for understanding the “bystander effect”—the more people present, the less likely anyone is to help.
It’s a hell of a story. It shaped decades of psychology research. It became the go-to example in every intro psych textbook.
There’s just one problem. It wasn’t true.
Later investigations revealed that far fewer people witnessed the attack. Several did call the police. At least one person held Genovese as she died. The Times story was sensationalized—probably to sell papers—and then that sensationalized version became the basis for scientific conclusions about human nature.
Then there’s the Stanford Prison Experiment, where Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned students to play prisoners and guards, then watched as the “guards” became sadistic and the “prisoners” broke down. The experiment seemed to prove that situations, not character, drive behavior. That any of us could become monsters given the right circumstances.
Decades later we learned that Zimbardo actively coached the guards to be harsh. That many participants were basically acting what they thought was expected. That the most dramatic incidents involved just a few individuals, not some universal dark side of human nature.
These experiments became famous because they’re stories. They have protagonists, conflicts, dramatic reveals. They’re the kind of thing you remember from Psych 101 twenty years later. They’re too good not to be true.
Which is exactly why we should have been more skeptical.
The Tyranny of Analysis
This impulse to make everything scientific extends way beyond psychology. Look at how we teach poetry.
The whole point of a poem is that it can mean different things to different people. You can hold it up to the light and see something I don’t see. You can turn it around, look at it from another angle, feel something unexpected. That’s not a bug—it’s the entire point. Poetry is about feeling, about creation, about letting something resonate in ways the creator might not have even intended.
But we don’t teach it that way. We teach students to analyze creative works—to dissect metaphors, identify literary techniques, interpret symbolism. And more than that, we teach them that there’s a right answer. That the goal is to figure out what the poem “really means.”
This might help you get an A in English class. It might help you win at school. But it doesn’t teach you anything about poetry, or creation, or appreciation. It doesn’t help you notice something beautiful in your actual life. It doesn’t help you capture a moment or let art move you. How often will you need to write a formal analysis of a poem’s structure after graduation? Compare that to how often you might want to experience something beautiful and let it sit with you.
That’s why I was excited when we went to an open house at the Heschel School and the English teacher shared the following poem for discussion.
That’s why I was excited when we went to an open house at the Heschel School and the English teacher shared the following poem—not with the students, but with us, the parents.
Think about that for a second. He wasn’t teaching the kids how to interpret Billy Collins. She was teaching us, the parents, how not to ask our kids what their poems “really mean.” In a room full of achievement-oriented parents who probably wanted to know about grade distributions and college acceptance rates, he was quietly suggesting that maybe we were asking the wrong questions entirely.
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slideor press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hose
Billy Collins, Introduction to Poetry from The Apple that Astonished Paris.
to find out what it really means.
That last bit—students beating a poem with a hose to extract its meaning—that’s what we always do. We’ve turned everything—even poetry—into a puzzle with a correct solution. But real poetry isn’t a science. It’s an art. Art doesn’t have one correct interpretation.
So What Do We Do Now?
The marshmallow test isn’t about marshmallows. It’s about self-control. And self-control matters. The ability to separate impulse from action is genuinely important—it shows up in the Bible, Buddhist texts, every wisdom tradition we have.
These experiments are tools, not destinations. The problem is we keep treating the measurement as if it were the phenomenon.
The scientific method is powerful because it’s humble—it demands replication, welcomes skepticism, updates with new evidence. But when we need every question to have a scientific answer, we get pseudo-science instead—the aesthetic of science without its rigor.
Some things can’t be boiled down to a single experimental variable. A poem means different things to different people. That’s not a failure, that’s the point.
My son is destined for great things not because of a marshmallow test, but because he’s curious and kind and stubborn in productive ways. Not everything worth knowing fits neatly into an experimental design. The hard truth is that science doesn’t know everything, and it never will. You can’t reduce a person to a test score or a poem to its “real meaning.” And that’s not a failure—that’s what makes life more than a bunch of equations.
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