Jonah Lehrer has an article in The New Yorker this week about self-control, and in it discusses an interesting experiment conducted with four-year-olds: Provide them with a marshmallow, and explain that they can eat it now, but if they wait, they can have two. Things got really interesting when the study's author followed up with the kids years later:

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds. [Link, Via Kottke]

Even more interesting to me is that there are a lot of videos on YouTube of parents conducting this experiment with their own four-year-old kids. Here's one video that has a long segment featuring a bunch of kids and their varying responses to being left alone in a room with a marshmallow. It's embedded in a pastor's sermon about temptation, which sent me searching around for a version with less commentary, but this really has the best footage out there. If you don't want the sermon (and again, it isn't my point in posting this) you can skip ahead to 0:42, and drop off where the preacher picks up again at 5:05.


We are absolutely doing this experiment with our own four-year-old daughter this weekend. I'm pretty sure we still have a few vegan marshmallows in the fridge from our last Whole Foods raid. We'll videotape it - that's what allows you to leave the room but see what went down afterward - but won't publish the clip (but hey, that's just us). I think it's best approached either in general terms (not reading your child's future into the result, but drawing conclusions about four-year-old behavior in general) or with a desire to understand your child's baseline ability to delay gratification - a complete inability to do so could go a long way in helping you help your child succeed.

I'd sure love to see what I would have done at four - my guess is, I'd have eaten the one marshmallow at around a minute and a half.