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In early life we fixate on the here and now. We're driven solely by pleasure (e.g. food, social contact), and have no sense of the future consequences of our behavior. With age, however, we realize that some of those pleasures have costs. Sitting on the couch watching Jersey Shore sounds awesome, but it isn't going to help us score high on the SAT's. A tub of ice cream tastes phenomenal but it certainly isn't good for our health or our waist-line. With age we learn to think beyond immediate pleasure. We consider more important future outcomes or payoffs when determining how to behave.

Young children and adults differ in many ways. The latter descriptions illustrate one important difference, however - the ability to delay gratification. One of the longest running, most famous, and to me, most interesting lines of research in the field of psychology has been conducted on delay of gratification. Today I will define this construct and explain how we quantify this ability in childhood. In future posts I’ll tell you about why delay of gratification matters and I’ll describe what helps or hurts us when we try to delay.

What is delay of gratification exactly?
This is the ability to forgo an immediate, but less desirable reward (e.g. Jersey Shore), in order to obtain a delayed, but more desirable reward later (e.g. getting into college). As I mentioned at the outset, with age we all get better at delay of gratification. Nevertheless, if we look within an age group, people differ in how well they can delay. I'm sure you can think of some friends who find it nearly impossible to study for a midterm, and others who spend their lives at the library in order to get into med school. Interestingly, individual differences in delay ability emerge in early childhood, and as I intimated, these differences in childhood predict important outcomes in later life.
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