Copyright Medium.com
By Leone Seidel
The Stanford Marshmallow experiment is an experiment on delayed gratification in kids that was conducted in 1970. The kids in the experiment were aged from 3 years and 6 months to 5 years and 8 months, and were attending the Bing Nursery School of Stanford University. Delayed gratification is the ability to wait for more rewards. Before the experiment, the experimenters played with all the kids to make them participate in the experiment. The experiment was set up like this: an adult would step into the room and tell them that they could eat animal crackers and pretzels if they wanted to. But, if they waited 15 minutes, they would get much more animal crackers and pretzels. Most kids tried not to think about the reward. Only a third of the kids managed to wait fifteen minutes to get the snacks, and those who did did better in many different ways, like on the SAT. Some kids waited over an hour, which was surprising for scientists. This was not thought to be possible. Although this seems to be proven, some people disagree with the experiments’ results. They say that if the child was daydreaming, they could have waited for a long time, because they would be distracted. Well, this happened not to be the case for these 26 kids, but maybe on a larger scale the critics might be right. Which brings us to the actual Stanford Marshmallow experiment. The setup for this one was the same, except with more kids, there were three groups, the children got marshmallows instead of other snacks. With this the observed success was half as much as the previous experiment. So maybe with hundreds of kids participating, the critics might be right. Unfortunately. With this in mind, think about the setup. Could it be improved to make the kid focus on the marshmallow? Well, if the kid was tempted enough, they would probably not be able to think about other things. Unless, of course, the children didn’t like marshmallows, where there is no real solution except to change the snacks. So, you would either have to change snacks and poll a bunch of the students, or tempt the children more. This might end up requiring the experimenters to poll the participants to see what tempts them. Tough luck. The most recent Stanford Marshmallow Experiment was performed on adults, and with retirement money instead of snacks. As one participant said, “We have been saving up marshmallows our whole life, but at a certain age, we can’t save up any more marshmallows anymore.” Marshmallows, of course, meaning money.