Delayed Gratification

Delay of Gratification is the act of resisting an immediate pleasure in hope of obtaining a more gratifying reward in the future. As simple as it sounds, as it turns out, most of us, if not all, struggles to resist our impulses to take immediately available rewards even with the knowledge that a bigger reward is available had we resisted. This applies to almost every aspect of our life: from our occupation, to our education, to our hobbies, to our life choices. The famous Marshmallow Test¹, despite of what we think of ourselves, outlines our very weakness when it comes to immediate rewards and self discipline. It shows our ability to resist temptation which tells a lot about our personality and potentially vaguely predict our future. In our defense, self-discipline can taught to fight our most primal urges. But part of our innate temperament stick around even how much we train to resist.

The Marshmallow Test | Igniter Media | Church Video¹

Furthermore, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Joseph Newman, conducted a study where participants were to play a game: simply the more points gained, the more money won. Participants were given a button and a screen that flashes twelve different numbers randomly, and were instructed that a “good” number will win them points and a “bad” number will lose them points; pressing nothing at all will do nothing. Through trial and error, participants eventually learned that the number four is a good number and nine is not. Instinctively, we know good enough not to press the button when number nine comes across the screen, except that sometimes people press the button in spite of this knowledge. Newman found that extroverts were likely to make this mistake. In the words of the psychologists John Brebner and Chris Cooper who have shown that extroverts think less and act faster on such tasks, introverts are “geared to inspect” and extroverts are “geared to respond.”

But the most interesting part of the experiment is not what extroverts do before they hit the button, but what they do after. “When introverts hit the number nine button and find they’ve lost a point, they slow down before moving on to the next number, as if to reflect on what went wrong. But extroverts not only fail to slow down, they actually speed up,” wrote Susan Cain.²

As Newman explains, it makes perfect sense because focusing on achieving our goals as #reward-sensitive extroverts do, we don’t want anything to get in our way, we speed up to reach our goals quicker. Yet, it is crucial that we take a pause to process our misstep so we can learn from it. If extroverts were to be forced to pause at such instance, Newman says, they’ll do just as well as introverts did. But left on their own devices, they don’t stop. In contrast, introverts are programmed to kill their #"buzz" and scan for problems. However, this doesn’t imply that introverts are smarter than extroverts, as explained in the Are Introverts Smarter Than Extroverts?#.