This week Professor Michael Thomas discussed the famous marshmallow experiment and its recent fall from grace.  A new replication study by Watts and colleagues controlling for various social factors such as home environment and socio-economic status has put into doubt the original claims about the importance of impulse control..  But what does this really mean?

Professor Thomas explored the real consequences of controlling for correlated variables in statistical analysis and how this can lead to simplistic conclusions about causality.  For more on this read Payne and Sheeran‘s interesting article!