The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

The experiment is simple:

Children aged 3-5 are placed in a chair alone with a marshmallow on the table in front of them. The experimenter tells them that the rules are as follows:

1. You can eat the marshmallow at any time, and the experiment will be over.

2. If you wait 15 minutes without eating the marshmallow, you will receive 2 marshmallows.

The experimenter then leaves the room, and the clock begins.

It is a simple test of patience and delayed gratification. Some children turned and faced the other direction, some got creative and would sing and dance to pass the time, some played with their toes as if they were piano keys, and some repeated the instructions over and over: “If I wait, I get two.” Some seemed to daydream. Each child adopted their own unique method to take their mind off the sweet, chewy treat that was right in front of them, ready to eat at any moment.

This may seem like a silly experiment that you’ve heard of before and think isn’t all that important to your life, but here is where it gets interesting:

They followed these children who participated in this study throughout their future schooling and concluded that “The more seconds they waited at age 4 or 5, the higher their SAT scores and the better their rated social and cognitive function in adolescence.”

So what?

The kids who learned early on to wait and delay the gratification and release of pleasure chemicals in the brain for a longer period were able to forgo distractions and study/focus for longer, rather than taking the cheap dopamine from video games or other time-sucks.

This goes beyond SAT scores and schoolwork. I would be curious to see the physical health metrics on the kids who were able to wait and not eat the marshmallow. Its a translatable example as it involves a sweet treat: there’s always a McDonald’s drive-thru or a doughnut shop, but can you hold out for the good, nourishing meal at home, or not eat them at all to meet your physical health goals?

As an athlete, are you willing to swing and miss, throw interceptions, practice the same movement over and over, and overcome adversity to win and improve at your craft?

There are many stories and myths written about this topic—avoiding false pleasures and temptations—and we are just living our modern-day equivalent of them: scrolling social media, eating packaged engineered foods, hyper-realistic CGI action movies, video games, dating apps, late nights at the bar etc. These provide a pleasurable, fleeting, short-term escape from the patience and discomfort required to achieve and participate in the real, deep pleasures of life that come with holding out, committing, building and avoiding the temptation of one marshmallow now for a better result later.

Critiques:

When reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “The Black Swan,” which I would highly recommend, he touches on a concept called the “Ludic Fallacy.” "Ludic" is derived from the Latin word “ludus” meaning game.

This is the false belief that the world can be understood, predicted, and controlled using mathematical models or theories from games or structured environments.

The Ludic Fallacy suggests that the world is an infinite game, not a finite one with set and agreed-upon rules and time limits. The world is a street fight where anything goes and anything can happen, not a boxing match. The world is a game of chess where someone can jump over you as one does in checkers and take your piece.

There are no set rules, and the rules and circumstances are constantly changing. The only real certainty we have in life is change. The goalposts and end zones can move when you reach the 5-yard line.

With this said, we are not living in a structured environment like the one depicted in this study. We do not know when the “15 minutes” will be up; sometimes the two marshmallows come after years, sometimes after months, sometimes days, and sometimes never. Sometimes we may reach those 2 marshmallows only to find out we really wanted 4, and now on we go for another uncertain period of time. Sometimes we are promised 2 marshmallows after a certain period only to find out the experimenter ate the whole bag behind the two-way mirror.

Delayed gratification is, for the most part, positive, but I do think studies like this that have a structured setting can provide false promises. If you keep waiting and holding out for a future favorable result, and keep putting things off to “someday,” or “once I have made it,” or “once I retire,” you may only do so just to find you don’t even like marshmallows.

In conclusion; TLDR:

The world is not a study; the world is not a finite game with set rules. Nothing is promised, nothing is given, and your time here could be up before the 15 minutes is. Be sure you really like marshmallows before devoting time to receiving them.

Avoid false pleasures at the expense of losing real pleasures. Time is our most valuable asset. Instead of waiting around for someone to give you more marshmallows, you can always stop waiting, leave the study, and go to the store to buy some or make some yourself.

I conclude with this video from the GOAT to cap this off:

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