What is delayed gratification?
How researchers measure waiting for a larger reward, what changes with age, and why picturing the future makes a later reward weigh more.
Answer to the question
What is delayed gratification?
Delayed gratification is choosing to wait for a larger later reward instead of taking a smaller one now. Researchers measure it with waiting tasks and with choice tasks, and the two do not always agree. In a 2011 study, imagining specific future events made volunteers more willing to wait for larger sums of money.
Key takeaways
- Researchers measure delayed gratification with waiting tasks, which time how long someone holds out, and with choice tasks, which track how fast a later reward loses value as the delay grows.
- In a study of 96 people across five age groups, a waiting task showed no age difference while delay discounting varied by age group (Göllner and colleagues, 2018).
- Children, young adults and older adults all discounted delayed money, with children discounting the most and older adults the least (Green, Fry and Myerson, 1994).
- Volunteers who imagined specific future events became more willing to wait for larger sums of money, and brain imaging linked the effect to the prefrontal cortex and its coupling with the hippocampus (Benoit, Gilbert and Burgess, 2011).
- Future time perspective was strongly related to both delayed gratification and delay discounting in the 96-person study, while a measure of episodic future thinking was not.
Picturing a particular future moment made volunteers more willing to wait. That result, reported in a 2011 experiment, is a useful way into delayed gratification, the choice to give up a smaller reward now for a larger one later. It suggests that waiting depends partly on how real the later moment feels when the choice is made.
Delayed gratification has two measures
Researchers use two main tools for delayed gratification. In a waiting task, a child is offered a small reward now or a larger one after a wait, and the measure is how long the child holds out. The best known version is the preschool treat task, taken up in Does the marshmallow test predict success. In a choice task, people pick between a smaller sooner amount and a larger later amount while the delay is varied, and the measure is how fast the later amount loses its pull. That loss of value with waiting is called delay discounting, and everyone shows some of it.
The two tools are often spoken of as one trait, and the data complicate that. Lars Göllner, Nicola Ballhausen, Matthias Kliegel and Simon Forstmeier gave both kinds of task to 96 people spread across five age groups, from age 9 to the oldest adult groups.
The waiting task showed no difference between the age groups. The choice task did.
The authors concluded that self-regulation varies with the measure used. Delayed gratification is therefore a family of behaviours more than a single dial. A person who lasts a long time in a waiting task and a person who discounts steeply on a choice task are describing different things, so a claim about one does not carry over to the other. The distinction also explains why popular accounts of patience can sound confident while the laboratory results stay mixed, a gap that Willpower Is Not a Fuel Tank approaches from the side of effort.
Every age marks down waiting
Leonard Green, Astrid Fry and Joel Myerson compared children, young adults and older adults in 1994. Participants chose between immediate and delayed hypothetical sums of money, with the delayed amount held constant and the delay varied. Every group discounted delayed rewards. Children discounted the most and older adults the least, which the authors linked to a life-span trend toward greater self-control.
One mathematical function with age-sensitive parameters described all three groups well. The authors read that as evidence that the choice process is qualitatively similar from childhood to later life, with differences of degree and not of kind. In delayed gratification, waiting takes value from a reward at every age. The steepness of the loss is what changes.
An ordinary offer shows what that means in practice. A savings plan, a training programme and a yearly membership all put a gap between the cost and the reward, and each is weighed on a curve of this kind. The same offer is a different offer to a ten year old and a seventy year old, because the curve under it has a different slope. Delayed gratification in this sense is a matter of how steeply a person marks down the future, which is why the fixed amount and the varied delay in the 1994 design matter so much to the result.
Everyday delayed gratification rarely arrives as a clean choice between two sums. It shows up as a decision to put money aside, finish a course of study or hold off on an upgrade, and in each the reward sits further off than the cost. The laboratory tasks strip that situation down to a single variable, the length of the wait, which is what lets the results speak to it so directly. The life-span comparison adds that the starting slope differs from one person to the next and from one stage of life to another.
A vivid future weighs more
Roland Benoit, Sam Gilbert and Paul Burgess ran that experiment in 2011. Volunteers either pictured specific future spending events or worked out what the money could buy. Imagining the future reduced temporal discounting, so people leaned toward larger long-term payoffs. Functional brain imaging linked the effect to the medial rostral prefrontal cortex. Activity there predicted farsighted choices trial by trial and tracked the reward value of the imagined events, and the region was more strongly coupled with the hippocampus, a structure tied to memory. The authors suggested that the prefrontal region uses hippocampal information to represent the value of envisaged outcomes.
The comparison condition matters here. Its volunteers also thought about the money, but about what it could buy and not about a particular future moment of using it. Both groups were thinking about spending, so the contrast isolates the act of picturing a specific episode. For delayed gratification outside the laboratory, that points to the texture of the imagined future and not only to the size of the reward at stake.
That is also the logic Stephan Guyenet draws on in The Hungry Brain, where the child waiting test and the effect of picturing the future sit together in an account of why a reward close at hand pulls so hard. Both strands point at the same lever for delayed gratification. A reward that can be pictured in some detail weighs more at the moment of choice than one that is only a number on a page.
Three readings follow from the tests described above:
- Make the later reward specific. Picture a particular, dated moment when it arrives, as the volunteers in the 2011 study did with spending events.
- Shorten the wait where possible. Discounting grew with delay in every age group Green and colleagues tested, so a long wait broken into stages presents shorter delays.
- Judge the measure before the person. A waiting task and a choice task capture different things, as the 96-person study showed.
Episodic future thinking, measured as a trait, was not related to either measure in the 96-person study, though a person's habitual orientation toward what lies ahead was. Future time perspective tracked both.
Common questions
What is delayed gratification?
It is giving up a smaller reward now for a larger one later. Researchers study it with waiting tasks and with choice tasks, and the two do not always agree.
How is delayed gratification measured?
In a waiting task, the measure is how long someone holds out for the larger reward. In a choice task, the measure is how quickly the value of a later reward falls as the delay grows, called delay discounting.
Does delayed gratification change with age?
It depends on the measure. In one study of 96 people aged 9 to the oldest adult groups, a waiting task showed no age difference, while delay discounting varied by age group. In an earlier comparison, children discounted delayed money the most and older adults the least.
Can picturing the future help people wait?
In a 2011 experiment, volunteers who imagined specific future events became more willing to wait for larger sums of money, and brain imaging linked the effect to the prefrontal cortex and its coupling with the hippocampus.
Sources
Guyenet, S. The Hungry Brain. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Hungry Brain.
Benoit, R. G., Gilbert, S. J., & Burgess, P. W. (2011). A neural mechanism mediating the impact of episodic prospection on farsighted decisions. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(18), 6771-6779. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6559-10.2011 https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6559-10.2011
Green, L., Fry, A. F., & Myerson, J. (1994). Discounting of delayed rewards: A life-span comparison. Psychological Science, 5(1), 33-36. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1994.tb00610.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1994.tb00610.x
Göllner, L. M., Ballhausen, N., Kliegel, M., & Forstmeier, S. (2018). Delay of gratification, delay discounting and their associations with age, episodic future thinking, and future time perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 2304. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02304 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02304