The marshmallow experiment

I had never heard of this experiment until my colleague sent me a link to this hilarious video. It's an experiment that you can conduct on 4-year old to find out about their ability to delay gratification. Even though he's not quite four yet, we decided to try it out on the little guy. We sat him down at the dining room table and gave him one marshmallow and told that he could eat it right away of, if he could wait for a little while, he would get two marshmallows.

"I want two!," he cried excitedly.

"Okay, but you can't eat that marshmallow until we come back in the room. We are going to leave for a little while so remember, you'll only get a second marshmallow if you wait."

We then left him alone in the room for approximately five minutes. Of course I was spying on him the whole time to see what he would do. He did everything short of eating the marshmallow. He sniffed the marshmallow. Threw it. Mashed it with his hands. Licked it. But he never actually tried to eat it. After five minutes of him yelling, "can I have my other marshmallow now?" we finally gave it to him. The fact that he was able to wait bodes well for his future. Of course in the real experiment the kids had to wait for 15 minutes, so I'm not sure if the results are very accurate. Also, licking the marshmallow could be seen as cheating. Plus, when he demanded that we repeat the experiment again the next day, he ate the marshmallow after waiting only a few minutes and didn't seem to care in the least if he got a second one.

When this experiment was originally conducted 40+ years ago, they did a follow up study with the same kids 15 years later. The children who ate the marshmallow right away (2/3 of them) scored an average of 250 points lower on SAT tests than those who waited. Also, those who were able to delay gratification went on to be higher achievers, were more successful and happier in general.

I'm thinking that once he's four we'll do the experiment again with M&M peanuts, a treat he likes much more than marshmallows!