Participants will be told the following:
Thank you for agreeing to take this survey.
As we said, we have finished data collection on a meta-analysis of studies using the Mischel 'Marshmallow' task of delay of gratification. The goal was to look for secular changes from the original data (1960s) to the present day (data collected in 2017) in children's ability to delay gratification.
We have not analyzed the results yet. We currently have around 33 studies, using the same procedure, on children from the 1960s to data collected in March of 2017.
We are testing whether delay of gratification times change over the past 50 years, after conditioning on the age of the children.
Do you believe young children's average ability to delay gratification will:
increase (longer wait times)
Decrease (shorter wait times)
Stay the same
If participants choose 'Stay the same', they will then be asked:
Do you believe the time will stay the same because:
There is no change in children's ability to delay gratification
Forces increasing and Decreasing ability have cancelled out
There is not enough data to know yet
Afterwards, all participants will be asked:
Please indicate your job level:
Professor - Tenured
Professor - Tenured track
Post-Doc or non TT Professor
Graduate Student
they will also be asked
What field of psychology do you consider yourself in?
Developmental Psychology
Personality Psychology
Other field
and finally
How old are you? [18-99 scale]
We predict that older participants will be more likely to think ability to delay gratification has decreased.