None of this makes the marshmallow study suspect science. Far from it. The correlations the researchers found are statistically meaningful, if not always overwhelming, but even the landmark 1990 paper cited by Goleman in “Emotional Intelligence” warns against reading too much into its results. And, of course, correlation does not equal causation, so while it may be that those who waited obediently for that second marshmallow were more likely to succeed later in life, that doesn’t mean those children possessed some inherent quality that made them less prone to temptation, which is the most common takeaway from the Mischel findings. As the University of Rochester study suggests, some children may have given up because they simply didn’t believe the researcher would give them that second treat. Or it could be that some of the children were just really hungry that day.

If such quibbles get lost as the study enters the public consciousness, Mischel’s findings may also offer some clues as to why we find his experiment so intellectually beguiling. When he first began handing out marshmallows to 4-year-olds, Mischel wanted to understand how some of them could delay gratification and some couldn’t and also whether we could teach children to delay longer. What he found was that if researchers gave children tools to distract them from the “hot” stimulus of the marshmallow (how good it tastes) and helped them focus on a “cooler,” more abstract thought, they waited longer. Some children, of course, supplied their own distractions. They kicked the table or sang songs or turned away. But Mischel learned that when the researchers encouraged children to think of the marshmallow as a white cloud or a cotton ball, they were less likely to pop it into their mouths before the adult came back into the room.

But the marshmallow study is itself a classic “hot” stimulus. If it were really true that you could sit a child down, hand her a marshmallow and 15 minutes later be able to predict her SAT score — well, think of all the money you could save in private-school tuition and SAT prep. Stated like that, the proposition sounds absurd, yet the notion that deep within us is a switch that determines the course of our entire lives is so seductive that it’s hard to distract ourselves with the caveats. It’s hard to keep from overextrapolating from a study that drew its subjects from a relatively homogeneous group of children of academics. It’s hard to remember that, even if the marshmallow study and others like it are completely accurate and reproducible across wide ranges of populations, an ability to resist temptation is one factor among many that shapes our lives. Willpower can do only so much for children facing domestic instability, poor physical health or intellectual deficits.

This matters because how we look at willpower carries enormous implications for social and education policy. If it is true that being able to resist temptation at age 4 accurately predicts better outcomes throughout a child’s life, and if it turned out that we could train our children to better resist temptation, then we might be able to cut the Gordian knot that separates underachievers from their peers in the classroom and quite possibly in other spheres of their lives, too, whether it be diet, drug addiction or marital success.

Sure enough, social scientists and educators are working to apply the lessons of the study and its offshoots to the real-world conditions of the classroom. For instance, the psychologist Angela Duckworth, a former colleague of Mischel’s and a recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, is working with schools, including KIPP charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx serving mostly poor black and Hispanic children, to help teachers evaluate and teach traits like grit and determination.

I am an unabashed admirer of Duckworth’s work, and I applaud the work of any social scientist searching for ways to improve the lives of underprivileged children. Still, their efforts give me pause, not because I doubt the sincerity of the social scientists or even because I think their science is flawed, but because I doubt the ability of the rest of us to fully absorb the complexity of their conclusions.

The voluminous peer-reviewed literature relating to Mischel’s original marshmallow studies bristles with complex statistical formulas hedged with caveats and cautionary footnotes, but that’s not what the public sees. What the public sees are all those cute YouTube videos of children singing to distract themselves from eating the forbidden marshmallow. What the public hears is the lesson expressed by the motivational speaker Joachim de Posada in a popular TED talk titled “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow!”: that the Mischel experiments demonstrate that a child who waited for the second marshmallow “already at 4 understood the most important principle for success, which is the ability to delay gratification — self-discipline.”