The Stanford Marshmellow Experiment

“Every choice we make is an investment in a future we cannot see.” — Alicia Britt Chole

In the 1960s Walter Mischel, a Stanford University professor, began a series of experiments on children around the ages of four to six years old. The purpose of the study was to understand when the control of waiting to obtain something that one wants, or delayed gratification, develops in children.

Each child was brought into an empty room where a marshmallow was placed on a table next to a chair. The researcher explained that he was going to leave the room but if the child did not eat the marshmallow right away, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. However, if the child chose to eat the first one before the researcher returned, then they would not get the second marshmallow.

The researcher left the room for 15 minutes while the child pondered the option: eat one treat now or two treats later.

Mishcel studied over 600 children. Their behavior in that room was actually quite entertaining. He later reported that some of them would “cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray, others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal,” while others would just eat the marshmallow as soon as the researcher left.

This popular study was published in 1972 but it wasn’t the treat that made it famous. What was most interesting happened years later. As the years unfolded and the children grew up, the researchers carried out follow up studies and tracked the progress of those children in other areas.

The children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow ended up having higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills as reported by their parents, and generally better scores in a range of other life measures.

James Clear summarized it this way, “The researchers followed each child for more than 40 years and over and over again, the group who waited patiently for the second marshmallow succeeded in whatever capacity they were measuring. In other words, this series of experiments proved that the ability to delay gratification was critical for success in life.”

Common sense tells us this: The child who delays the instant gratification of playing video games to finish homework first, will learn more and get better grades. If we delay eating the unhealthy snack now we will ultimately be much healthier.

James Clear suggests four simple ways to help us to “train our ability to delay gratification, just like we can train our muscles in the gym.”

1. Star t incredibly small. Make your new habit, as Leo Babauta said, “so easy you can’t say no.” Too often we set our goal too high and before long we become discouraged and we set it aside.

2. Improve one thing, by one percent. Do it again tomorrow. We do indeed move the mountain a shovel at a time.

3. Use the “Seinfeld Strategy” to maintain consistency. Seinfeld said that the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes, and the way to create better jokes was to write every day.

4. Find a way to get started in less than two minutes. Simplicity is the key. If one’s strategy is too complex and it takes too long, it is just too easy to discard.

Whenever you do what you know you ought to do, even though you don’t feel like doing it, you will be a better person.

These two axioms say it all: “If it is important to you, you will find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.” And, “We make our choices then our choices make us.”

Think about it.