I would give you an upvote now, but I'd rather delay my gratification give you 2 later
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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The original experiment boils down to being a zip code test anyway
Well, was it worth learning that about it?
Double-blind placebo controlled randomized skin color test
Itt:
People not seeing the marshmallow speak, or bite the kid. Or the horrified look on the kids face.
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.
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. :(
Or hungrier kids (aka poorer kids) get the marshmallow first. Or those in greater need of serotonin (at least I think it's serotonin) you get from sugar, etc. There's a variety of issues here, but that's true of most "experiments" that aren't actually randomized controlled trial experiments.
Or it measured how rare it was for them to get candy. The most interesting thing about the experiment is honestly the many ways in which it was flawed.
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Hobbes will avenge him
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.
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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
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.
You might want to try a different brand of sex tbh. It's gotta have serious issues to get beaten out by some fluffy sugar.
Tell me where
The Charmery Columbia, MD.
Haven't been there in a year, you'll prob want to call and make sure they're still doing them. Not all the locations sell it. (At least they didn't)
Ain't no marshmallow worth waiting 5 minutes for.
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.
Excerpts from Wikipedia:
A replication attempt with a sample from a more diverse population, over 10 times larger than the original study, showed only half the effect of the original study. The replication suggested that economic background, rather than willpower, explained the other half.
Work done in 2018 and 2024 found that the Marshmallow Test "does not reliably predict adult functioning".
It's great for a confirmation bias, but such a study is way too simplistic to really reach a conclusion. Oh, and:
The results seemed to indicate that not thinking about a reward enhances the ability to delay gratification, rather than focusing attention on the future reward.
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
A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush!
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?
This is a cognitive task aiming to assess whether kids can trade a small reward now for a bigger one later (it tests inhibitory control and ability to project oneself in the future). This experiment was conducted by comparative psychologists and, if I recall well, they also compared the kid's performance to that of some primates to understand the evolution of the human mind.
I get that, I'm just pointing out that depending on how it was conducted it may have been silly. Sort of similar to that test where there's nothing in a room but a button that shocks you and people got bored and shocked themselves. I'm not suggesting the study is invalid, I assume the researchers know better than me, but I could also see something like a kid just sitting at a table with literally nothing to do but salivate about the thought of two treats for a time period. Seems like a better test would be something like letting kids play and then doing this (which could've been what was done. It's just that the comic seems to imply otherwise.)
The best play is to eat the marshmallow immediately so that the experimenter moves onto the next test.
Why is this slightly calvin but not quite
….will there be a new one every 5 minutes?
I would ask for a grill and stick while waiting. A slightly burnt marshmallow is worth the carcinogen.