Marshmallow Theory

Marshmallow experiment was conducted by a Stanford professor named Walter Mischel. The objective of the experiment is to understand the ability to wait to obtain something that one wants. Experiment subjects were children ages four to six.

The experiment began by bringing each kid into a room, where a marshmallow was placed on the table in front of them. The researcher told the kid she was going to leave the room for 15 minutes and if the he/she did not eat the marshmallow while she was away, then they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. But, if the kid decided to eat the marshmallow before the researcher come back, then they would not get a second marshmallow as reward. The kids remained seated in the room for 15 minutes. The researcher observed that some of them covered their eyes with their hands or walking around to wait until the researcher come back for an extra marshmallow while others simply eat the marshmallow.

After some decades when the kids grew up, another experiment was conducted again to the same kids to examine the relationship between the ability to delay gratification from a young age and achievement at elder age. From this experiment, researcher found out that the kid who were willing to delay gratification and waited for an extra marshmallow ended up having better achievements in their life and relatively more success in life compared to those who were not willing to wait for the second marshmallow at young age.

Therefore, they concluded that people with greater power of delayed gratification having a greater chance to be succeed in life. If you look at yourself, you’ll see this “marshmallow theory” playing its role everywhere, such as if you delay the gratification of playing computer games and study now, then you’ll gain more knowledge and score better grades, and a lot more real life examples.

The experiments conducted make one thing clear which is if you want to succeed at something, you will need to be self-disciplined, the ability of self-control. If you are weak at delaying gratification, you can train yourself in the same way as the kid and the researcher by promising a small reward. After some time, you would have a more successful life compared to the others.