elharo

A New Interpretation of the Marshmallow Test

I've begun to notice a pattern with experiments in behavioral economics. An experiment produces a result that's counter-intuitive and surprising, and demonstrates that people don't behave as rationally as expected. Then, as time passes, other researchers contrive different versions of the experiment that show the experiment may not have been about what we thought it was about in the first place. For example, in the dictator game, Jeffrey Winking and Nicholas Mizer changed the experiment so that the participants didn't know each other and the subjects didn't know they were in an experiment. With this simple adjustment that made the conditions of the game more realistic, the "dictators" switched from giving away a large portion of their unearned gains to giving away nothing. Now it's happened to the marshmallow test. In the original Stanford marshmallow experiment, children were given one marshmallow. They could eat the marshmallow right away; or, if they waited fifteen minutes for the experimenter to return without eating the marshmallow, they'd get a second marshmallow. Even more interestingly, in follow-up studies two decades later, the children who waited longer for the second marshmallow, i.e. showed delayed gratification, had higher SAT scores, school performance, and even improved Body Mass Index. This is normally interpreted as indicating the importance of self-control and delayed gratification for life success. Not so fast. In a new variant of the experiment entitled (I kid you not) "Rational snacking", Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri, and Richard N. Aslin from the University of Rochester gave the children a similar test with an interesting twist. They assigned 28 children to two groups asked to perform art projects. Children in the first group each received half a container of used crayons, and were told that if they could wait, the researcher would bring them more and better art supplies. However, after two and a half minutes, the adult returned and told th

119Jul 5, 2013

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Rationality Quotes Thread March 2016

Rationality Quotes Thread February 2016

Monthly Bragging Thread January 2016

Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016

Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015

Rationality Quotes Thread November 2015

Monthly Bragging Thread October 2015

A New Interpretation of the Marshmallow Test

The Power of Pomodoros

Rationality Habits I Learned at the CFAR Workshop

Preparing for a Rational Financial Planning Sequence

Rationality Quotes Thread March 2016

Rationality Quotes Thread February 2016

Monthly Bragging Thread January 2016

Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016

Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015

Rationality Quotes Thread November 2015

Monthly Bragging Thread October 2015