...Bethany Moreton Cognitive psychology—“the mind’s new science” of the last several decades—has directed both popular and scholarly attention to the cultivation of individual willpower as a tool of personal maximization. The Stanford marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification among preschoolers...

... intersect in the privileged North, structuring class and social inequality in significant ways. Bethany Moreton ruminates on the famous 1968 “marshmallow test” of Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel, in which children were told that resisting a tantalizing sugary treat for fifteen minutes would...