Don't Try This Experiment Unsupervised

Can't resist that marshmallow? Self-control doesn't get easier with age. (Ars Technica, 9/6/2011)

Excerpt: Forty years ago, Walter Mischel conducted a simple yet elegant experiment in which he asked four year old children to resist eating a marshmallow while he was out of the room. He promised that if they hadn't eaten it by the time he returned, they could have two marshmallows. Mischel observed that, while some children were able to resist the tantalizing treat, many others could not. But he didn't stop there—20 years later, he checked again and found that the children who were able to delay their gratification had grown into adults who exhibited greater levels of self control.

It has now been four decades since this experiment, and Mischel and his colleagues are still following some of the participants of the original marshmallow test. In this week’s PNAS, the team reports that the children's differences in self control are still evident after forty years, and there is new information about why some people's brains may be worse at controlling impulses.

In the first part of the new experiment, Mischel and his team were looking for more subtle behavioral differences between "high-delayers" (those who didn’t eat the marshmallow early) and "low-delayers" (those who could not resist the temptation). They wanted to test whether positive social cues would be more difficult for low-delayers to resist. Fifty-nine participants from the original marshmallow experiment were invited to take part in this new experiment; these people had either performed above average on the marshmallow task or had performed particularly poorly.

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