Marshmallow Test

I would ask for a grill and stick while waiting. A slightly burnt marshmallow is worth the carcinogen.

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I would give you an upvote now, but I'd rather delay my gratification give you 2 later

I don't get it

Itt:
People not seeing the marshmallow speak, or bite the kid. Or the horrified look on the kids face.

The original experiment boils down to being a zip code test anyway

A shower thought about the original experiment:

It may have only measured how effective "waiting for future gains" was, as a strategy, for each child, in their circumstance.

So the real discovery may be only that the children already had a pretty good idea how promising their own futures were. :(

Hobbes will avenge him

I'd have the one just so I don't have to wait 5 minutes to get out of that weird ass test.

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.

Ain't no marshmallow worth waiting 5 minutes for.

Such a silly experiment. You're gonna make them sit and be bored for five minutes with nothing else to do besides thinking about two marshmallows?

Store-bought marshmallows are one of those things where I only really want one.

There's an ice cream shop few towns over that makes fresh, exotic flavored marshmallows, depending on the day they're better than sex. But even those are about the size your fist and honestly two would be a little bit too much.

The best play is to eat the marshmallow immediately so that the experimenter moves onto the next test.

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 him

that 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 left

looking 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 said

it 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.

Why is this slightly calvin but not quite

….will there be a new one every 5 minutes?

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.

There's lots of talk about the kids who didn't wait 5 minutes, but I also find it interesting to read about the kids who did delay gratification. It's not that they were superior specimens, or junior ascetics, or reborn Buddhist monks. They were as tempted as the rest.

They mostly avoided temptation by coming up with games to distract themselves. It's something creative and it can both be learned and improved like a skill. It reminds me of the people who compete in memory games. It's not a super normal talent, it's games people can practice.

It does raise a question why kids who could do this were more academically successful later, and if kids who are taught this will have similar success later. Important questions that should be considered carefully.

This study is actually kind of sad, because upon further reflection on the data, it was found that the kids with "poor impulse control" were actually less likely to trust authority figures because they had experienced so many letdowns or broken promises from adult role models in their lives. Kids with happy home lives who were used to getting treats were way more likely to wait for the second marshmallow, whereas kids who had been consistently lied to or had never been given spontaneous treats by their caretakers were more likely to just take what was right in front of them.

I had to zoom in

The kid is smart, he gets an healthy dose of marshmallow now instead of a sickening quantity later

Oh ye, that experiment was rather bad

Calvin?

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 him

that 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 left

looking 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 said

it 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.

Just to confuse him, wait five minutes then eat just one of them.

My mom took my little brother to participate in a child psych study like this when he was a toddler (mom had some ties to the university). It was a very similar experiment with skittles as the prize. My brother sat staring glumly at the candy the whole time. The test administrator was increasingly enthusastic with praise after each round right up until the end when she congratulated him and said that he could have the whole bag. He said "no thanks" and ran back to mom crying because he was told there would be candy but they only had skittles, which he very much did not like (and for that matter still doesn't). The administrator was apparently embarrassed and told my mom that she thought that all kids liked skittles....