Imagine you are 6-years old and you taking part in a psychology experiment. You are taken into a room and a marshmallow is placed down on the table in front of you. Just as you go to grab for it the researcher tells you that she must leave the room and while she is gone you can either eat the marshmallow now or you can wait until she gets back and get a second marshmallow.

Wait do you do? Now think carefully your decision could have an impact on just how happy you are as an adult.

In replication of a classic Stanford psychological experiment from the 1960s examining children's abilities in self control and that is related to your overall happiness later in life. Finding that children who passed the marshmallow test enjoyed greater success as adults.

Said Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, "What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control... It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”

-Featured in the New Yorker

The best part about the study is watching the children try to resist the mighty allure of the marshmallow long enough to get the award.





The original aim of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that cause some people to have more self control.

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that children that had trouble with self control the children were also more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. In addition to having lower S.A.T. scores,struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

Mischel believes that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”

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