The work of social psychologist Kurt Lewin has provided the philosophical foundation for the field of organization development since its inception. At its core is the simple idea that a person’s behavior is a function of the person and their environment. Lewin believed that to understand people from a psychological perspective, it was necessary to consider all the possible factors that influence a person’s behavior and the ways those factors interact and change over time.
Following Lewin’s death in 1947, the field of social psychology evolved away from many of Lewin’s ideas and there was a lot of soul-searching and debate going on in organization development in the 1990s and early 2000s over its original Lewinian heritage. But more recently, a new generation of scholars has been taking an interest in Lewin’s work, with many arguing that it is still highly relevant to the needs of organizations and society at large, and noting that psychology as a field has moved much closer to Lewin’s worldview than it was during his lifetime.
A case in point is the classic Marshmallow Test. This is a famous psychological experiment conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford University in the 1960s. In the study, a preschooler is presented with a marshmallow and told that the researcher had to leave the room for a while. The child was then told that they could either wait to eat the marshmallow when the researcher returned at which point they would be rewarded with two marshmallows. Or, if the child couldn’t wait, they could ring a bell to call the researcher back into the room and then the child could eat just the one marshmallow.
Mischel’s original objective for the experiment was to study a child’s capacity for delayed gratification. In later studies, some of which included the original participants, Mischel’s research was used to suggest that even into adulthood, a capacity for delayed gratification was highly beneficial to an individual. This research project ultimately projected all kinds of connections between delayed gratification and higher academic achievement, social competence and even good health later in life.
In the late 2010s, almost fifty years after the original studies, researchers Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan undertook a restaging of the marshmallow test. But, unlike the original experiments that used a test sample of fewer than 90 children from a Stanford University campus preschool, the new research included more than 900 children in a mix that was more representative of the general population of the US in terms of race, ethnicity, and parents’ education. Also, in their analysis, the researchers controlled for other factors, like household income, that might explain a child’s ability to delay gratification and impact their long-term success.
Ultimately, the results of the new study published in 2019 found limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes later in life. Instead, it suggested that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background, and in turn, that the child’s background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind long-term success.
The new studies revealed many flawed assumptions in the analysis of the original marshmallow test by showing that circumstances matter far more in shaping children’s lives than was ever considered in the original studies back in the 1960s. This reaffirms Kurt Lewin’s theorem that it is necessary to consider all the possible factors that influence a person’s behavior.
My purpose in telling this story is two-fold. One is to illustrate how some previously unquestioned assumptions about human behavior have weak foundations and need to be challenged as circumstances change. The second is to illustrate the relevance and enduring power of Kurt Lewin’s innovative ideas. They continue to provide inspiration and guidance for finding better ways to understand our social world and the people in it.
Hello, I'm Lisa Meyer 