Instant Gratification and The Digital Natives: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Instant gratification refers to the temptation, and resulting tendency, to let go off a future benefit just to satisfy short-term pleasure. Instant gratification is closely associated with obesity. Studies show that the increased presence of automation, smart gadgets and the internet has resulted in a growing impact on instant gratification. The Digital Natives being born in a purely digital era have everything digitalized; has it caused a decrease in the ability to delay gratification? A qualitative study was conducted to see if there has been a decrease in the ability to delay gratification with the assumption that the Digital Natives are impulsive and show behaviour of instant gratification. For this, Marshmallow’s Test was conducted on pre-schoolers and the video recordings were coded on NVivo for data analysis to achieve the research objective. The study shows that most of the participants were able to delay gratification. But few participants exhibit a lesser ability to delay gratification; though they did not eat the whole Marshmallow, they were constantly nipping and eating bits of the Marshmallow. There was a significant difference in the ability to delay gratification with regards to different socio-economic status of the family that the participants belonged to. The ability to delay gratification in most of the participants could be due to multiple factors like parents being more educated - teaching children to be more patient, early education, good health, better standards of living, etc.