We would also need studies showing how additional government intervention in the family helps prevent the culture trap. What can the government do to make people value education and delayed gratification, which are perhaps the two traits best shown to enhance individual outcomes?
Most of the work on delayed gratification has been shown to not be measuring capacity for that but instead trust in potential future gains and personal security.
What the government could do to enable what you’ve called out is help ensure more people meet the necessary lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy so that when kids show up to stuff marshmallows in their mouths they can feel secure enough in the probable truth of the statements and even simply the return of the researcher to assign any probability to the appearance of a second marshmallow.
Step one is something like don’t let babies be raised in abandoned projects where everything they have gets stolen regularly from before they can remember.
