Instant and Delayed Gratification
The disparaging term instant gratification is often used to label the satisfactions gained by more impulsive behaviors: choosing now over tomorrow. The skill of giving preference to long term goals over more immediate ones is known as deferred gratification or patience, and it is usually considered a virtue, producing rewards in the long-term.
Walter Mischel developed the well-known marshmallow experiment to test gratification patterns in four-year-olds, offering one marshmallow now or two after a delay. He discovered in long-term follow-up that the ability to resist eating the marshmallow immediately delay was a good predictor of success in later life.
Read more about this topic: Gratification
Famous quotes containing the words instant and/or delayed:
“Take the instant way,
For honor travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path,
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue. If you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an entered tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.””
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 32:1.