How do the findings form the University of Rochester delay of gratification study we discussed inform our understanding of why individuals of lower SES have a hard time breaking out of the cycle of poverty?

The famous Marshmallow experiment initially conducted at the University of Stanford in the 1960s and 1970s, recently was revisited at the University of Rochester in 2012.

The new experiment at Rochester was seeking to identify how the reliability of the environment influences the individual's capacity for delayed gratification. Researchers have found out that unreliable environment leads to shorter waiting time.

In particular, in the first group, children were offered a set of used and incomplete art supplies for their work, before moving forward to the Marshmallow part of the experiment. The experimenter told that if a child waits, she will bring better art supplies, but later came with nothing. Meanwhile, in the second group, the experimenter returned with what was promised.

On the marshmallow stage of the experiment, children from the first group, who experienced unreliable environment had shown around three minutes in waiting time before taking the marshmallow. Meanwhile, children from the second group who experienced reliable environment waited for 12 minutes on average. Thus, the researchers concluded that a reliable environment leads to a higher capacity for delayed gratification.

Applying to the people with lower socioeconomic status (SES) and the hard time they experience in getting out of poverty, we can say that the unreliable environment brought with lower SES, leads to lower capacity for delayed gratification. Hence, people with lower SES are at higher risk of hunting fast gratification of spending their salary rather than accumulating it and investing in order to get out of poverty.