What’s the present value of a future marshmallow? Even five minutes into the future?
It’s made all the harder of course, not just by the fact that kids have lower impulse control, but by the fact that a minute lasts forever when you’re a kid.
I also think that this is a parable for our current economic straits.
It’s also made harder by the sensory deprivation in the room.
It’s easy to keep from spending money (or eating a marshmallow, or delaying any other kind of gratification) when you have other things to do to keep your mind and body occupied.
You can’t stick a kid in a room with a marshmallow and nothing else and expect them to sit there staring at it for 20 minutes. Give them some blocks or legos or toys to play with to kill the boredom and the results would likely change considerably.
Those kids were bored out of their ever-living skulls…
The parents of those kids deserve to be proud of how well behaved all those children were. They held out better than a lot of so called adults I know.
There’s also the fact that the utility curve for marshmallows falls off pretty steeply. I mean, even as a kid, the 5th would taste pretty blah compared to the 1st. Nowadays I doubt I’d get past one anyway — so why wait?
To be less facetious — I bet this is more a test of the desire of the child to please the adult issuing the command — to be praised after 20 minutes — than the test of his ability to forecast the value of future rewards. I think that’s reflected in the fact that when they did the longitudinal study, they found those who could wait the longest were “better adjusted” and did better on standardized tests.
The implied assumption is that these children did better generally because they had better impulse control — but what if it actually just says those children are more attuned to social signals and try to be “pleasing” and “well-adjusted” and perform on socially-valued measures (like standardized tests)? Perhaps the immediate marshmallow eaters founded more companies and invented more new tech because of their willingness to think for themselves in defiance of social expectations!
Yes, I would have eaten the marshmallow. Or rather (to be honest), in fact my 4-year-old self would have dutifully waited. But my middle-aged self wishes the 4-year-old would’ve flipped the finger to duty and being teased for no obvious reason, and eaten the damn marshmallow.
Then…I dunno, done some Kobayashi Maru trick…picked the lock, tracked down the cupboard, and stolen the rest of the bag and fed it to the 20 kids in the psychologist’s waiting room. Yaaaaaaah!
I think this study is more interesting for the coping mechanisms which the kids did while trying to avoid eating the marshmallow. Things like avoid looking at the marshmallow. Touching, smelling, and nibbling the treat to fend temptation off for a little longer.
And to echo Carl, I’d be awesome too. 😉
Carl isn’t short for Craig somehow, is it?
No, roy, “Carl” is short for a Sanskrit word that is best rendered in English as “throat warbler mangrove.”
About a quarter of a century ago, I was in a Heathkit store on Ball Road in Orange, CA, and they had a primitive computer hooked up to a primitive voice synthesizer.
Using Basic.
I looked at the code, and put in an “IF” statement to the effect that if someone typed in “luxury yacht,” it would output “Throatwarbler Mangrove.” It worked, but I’ve no idea if anyone else ever tried it.
My hovercraft is full of eels!
Laughed at this yesterday – kids being kids.
Unfortunately, this closely models our current financial situation, with Congress playing the role of the 4-year old. Except:
1. Eating the marshmallow results in death (or at least a long, chronic illness).
2. Not eating the marshmallow results in no additional marshmallow and the original marshmallow being taken away.
3. After five years vice five minutes, there might be a marshmallow, if we’re lucky.
Rand, they used to have C64s set up at K-Mart when I was a kid.. no games, no software, it was just the blue screen connected to the tv. I used to cut up the code.. chrome bars, fire, whatever the latest graphics trick was. People walking past always took a look. My goal was to make them stop.
The best was when the kids would stop, the parents would look at the price tag and say “no”.