Don't Eat The Marshmallow!

This is a short TED about an odd study done at Stanford in the 1960s. Walter Mischel took a bunch of 4 year old kids and separated them out individually. Each kid was sent into a room by themselves and filmed.

Before they went into the room they were given a marshmallow, and told not to eat it. If they managed to not eat the marshmallow for 15-20 minutes they were told they would receive a second marshmallow. Their fortunes would double!

You can imagine what a 4 year old did when left alone with a marshmallow; 2 out of 3 ate it immediately.

The other kids, the ones that did not eat the marshmallow, struggled with the decision. They paced, groaned, picked at their clothing, and some smelled the marshmallow. There is one little girl whose face is dusted with white because she smelled the marshmallow so often.

They did a follow up study on theses kids 15 years later. They discovered that the kids who did not eat the marshmallow had an average of 210 more points on their SAT than the kids who gave into temptation. In fact they seemed to have found a direct correlation of how long the child waited to how well they performed in school.

The more interesting case for me, is one girl ate the middle of the marshmallow. She left the shell for the doctors to find, so she could get her second marshmallow.