How to Succeed by Not Eating Marshmallows

Researchers at Stanford University ran a test on four-year-old children to study delayed gratification. They gave the kids a marshmallow and told them: "I'm going to leave the room for fifteen minutes. When I return, if you have not eaten the marshmallow, I'll give you another one and then you can eat them both." The researcher set the marshmallow on a table in front of the seated child and left the room.

Most of the kids ate the marshmallow as soon as the researcher left the room. Some were able to hang on longer before eating it. A few were able to resist the temptation, and they were rewarded with a second marshmallow.

This test was run in the late 1960s, and the researchers have been following the kids' progress ever since. (You can read an article about the study in the New Yorker online). It turned out that 100 percent of the children who showed self-control as four-year-olds retained their self-discipline as teenagers and  adults, says Joachim de Posada, who talked about the study at the TED conference held in Long Beach, California earlier this year (see the above video). "They had good grades. They were doing wonderful. They were happy. They had their plans. They had good relationships with the teachers, students. They were doing fine."

What about the kids who gave into temptation? "A great percentage of the kids that ate the marshmallow," says de Posada, "were in trouble. They did not make it to university. They had bad grades. Some of them dropped out. A few were still there with bad grades. A few had good grades."

These findings are great news for kids who have the discipline of an Olympic athlete before they're out of  diapers, but what about us adults who raided the cookie jar every chance we got as toddlers, and watched reruns of Gilligan's Island instead of studying Advanced Placement chemistry in junior high school? Are we cursed forever? Maybe not, says de Posada. He believes children and even adults can be taught to master self control. He's written a book called Don't Eat The Marshmallow...Yet!: The Secret to Sweet Success in Work and Life that can help you learn to resist giving into immediate payoffs that could instead be delayed for bigger jackpots later. I haven't read the book myself (there's too many good programs on TV!) but I'm curious to know if any creditblogger visitors have.

Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.

Comments

[Wholesale]

Good interesting blog...Entertaining too !

[Bill4935]

So, the researchers' point was that eating a single marshmallow as a youth led them down a sugary path that led to poor grades, dropping out and ruination?

That's crazy! Haven't they heard of "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc"??

Just because they started failing after they ate the marshmallow, that doesn't mean it was the cause. Most likely the two events were completely unrelated.

Lastly, I'm grateful that the modern experimental psychology community does not condone torturous activities like forbidding a small child to eat the candy in front of them for minutes at a time.

[dave]

here's the problem: marshmallows are nasty. researchers should have chosen something tasty.

[JD]

My nephew took the test at age 5 and, when we returned, he had licked the marshmallow all over but hadn't eaten it. I dont know if that's a good sign?