Turns out the test is only a good predictor of “how well you can trust the adults in your life to keep their words”. Which tells more about the envirement than about the kid.
sometimes i think about that kid in the experiment
who was sat down and told to wait some time
before eating the sweetness put in front of himthat his patience would bring a reward
and i think about how they laughed when he didn’t succeed in waiting and instead
crammed the entire gummy bear into his mouth the second they leftlooking so guilty afterward
the way they gloated and collected data and prognosticated about his future job prospects and potential success-
certainly not as good as those who waited, they saidit was something about self-control
i know all too well that when he got home
there were probably no sweets
or if there were, they were there for a moment only
before being snatched away by either cruel hands or circumstance
no guarantee that promises meant anything, much less that they were kept.if it had been me in that chair
i’d have eaten it too.deleted by creator
The joke is that in this version of the experiment, the child isn’t being tested, the marshmallow is. And in this case, the marshmallow has decided to eat this one child instead of waiting until later, when it would have been allowed to eat two children.
I always found this study to be lacking…
5 minutes is not worth 1 marshmallow. Marshmallows are not that good, so one is way enough. As a kid, I could never trust adults who wanted to limit good things. Who’s to say the strange adult in a white coat would really bring a 2nd marshmallow? What if they actually remove the marshmallow instead?
In short, it can only separate kids in two groups: the blind followers of authority and the other ones.
As a kid, I could never trust adults who wanted to limit good things.
Guess what? This effect has been found in other experiments!
The marshmallow experiment is one of those that self-help gurus and LinkedIn ‘influencers’ love to peddle as being meaningful, in no small part because it tells people who had lucky upbringings that they are inherently better than others, and not just a product of their environment. But when it’s actually examined critically, it falls apart.
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This experiment was not specifically about whether a kid would wait for the second marshmellow or not (which would be delayed by 20+ minutes), nor whether they would play with the roomful of toys, but to see how they grew up. The real test was to catch up with the adults and see how ‘successful’ they’d become. The experimenters found that those children who waited for the second marshmellow achieved higher grades and had more ‘successful’ better-paying careers.
It’s the concept of delayed rewards vs immediate rewards and is prevalent in the world of machine learning.
later replications of the test showed that the difference between kids waiting or not, and successful or not was significantly related to their parents financial status, in other words, the broke kids ate the stuff that was in front of them, because they learned that promises are not always kept
I’d have the one just so I don’t have to wait 5 minutes to get out of that weird ass test.
the study didn’t account that many kids assumed the guy was lying
