let's say you're looking at a marshmallow you have two options you can either wait for the first marshmallow and get a second marshmallow or you can have one marshmallow now but then you're done how long do you think you'd wait for that second marshmallow or would you wait for the sega marshmallow at all this is the dilemma facing preschool-aged children in the 1960s little did they know that the way they handled this dilemma would be part of one of the most famous psychological studies of all time in this video i'm going to be telling you
a little bit about the stanford marshmallow test what it was what it said about success and the impact it's had on psychology to this day so the premise of this test was pretty simple stanford professor walter mitchell and his team put a single marshmallow in front of a child usually around four or five years old they told the child that they would leave the room and then come back in a few minutes now if the child ate the marshmallow they could not get a second but if the child waited until the researchers was back in
the room the child would get a second marshmallow researchers recorded which children ate the marshmallow and which ones waited and then researchers waited they waited and waited and waited and when the children were teenagers the researchers revisited the children and asked their parents a series of questions about their cognitive abilities how they handled stress and their ability to exhibit self-control under pressure they also took a look at the child's sat and act scores and a few years later the researchers tested the participants again on their self-control so what did they find well in short michelle
and his team found that developing self-control as a child had a profound impact on the child's later success in life success came in many forms in general the children who waited for the second marshmallow scored higher sat scores reported lower levels of substance abuse were less likely to be obese and overall had better social skills and self-control according to their parents in fact one of the children who succeeded at the marshmallow test which surprised me was susan washiki youtube's very own ceo her mother in her book how to raise successful people actually noted that one
of the researchers contacted her and said that susan was the child who waited the longest so due to the nature of the experiment the results were published in the 1980s and the 1990s since then the world of psychology has regarded this study as one of the most important studies paving the way for different ways of looking at how personality influence and predicts success but let's talk a little bit about why the children would eat the marshmallow right away well the marshmallow test was able to give researchers a link between self-control and success in short having
self-control as a child could influence your success as an adult but what influenced self-control because not all children grabbed the marshmallow right away michelle and his team developed a hot and cool system of thinking that explained why children would have eaten the marshmallow immediately the same system of thinking could be applied to any task that involves instant gratification kind of like making a purchase or smoking a cigarette so here we go the cool system is where most people are whenever we're not tempted it's the cognitive ability to think about long-term benefits we know that smoking
is bad for us and resisting a cigarette will result in long-term health we know that if we wait we'll get more marshmallows and we know that if we go to the gym instead of hitting the snooze alarm we will feel more awake later and more healthy in the long run but on the other side is hot stimuli they threaten the cool system when things warm up and get hot our behavior then becomes impulsive we smoke the cigarette we take the marshmallow and we hit the snooze button but that raises a question why do some people
heat up faster than others well why are some stimuli hotter than others these are the questions that psychologists like michelle have been trying to solve and there's a few other studies in this area the stanford marshmallow test took data from a relatively small and not exactly diverse group of participants not all of the researchers were convinced that the test had found the one true key to success so a more recent study was set out to redo the marshmallow test focusing on different social and economic factors that could also play into a child's success the main
factor they chose was the mother's educational background they split participants into groups based on whether or not that mother had obtained a college degree researchers also controlled for factors like family background early cognitive ability and the child's environment at home in short what they found was that self-control didn't exactly have an impact on the success like the marshmallow experiment said that it did children who came from more wealthy homes were more likely to just practice self-control and when the researchers accounted for social and economic factors they found that self-control wasn't really necessary in predicting success
which raised a lot of big flags this doesn't just put the results of self-control in the question it also questions why children grab the marshmallow in the first place researchers have offered different opinions including thoughts on how scarcity impacts a child's ability to use and take resources think about it wealthy kids don't have too many problems waiting for food toys or other things their parents can afford it they'll get it but kids from lower income families they have more to worry about the food might be scarce a parent may promise to bring their kids to
a nice restaurant or buy them an interesting toy but they may not just be able to follow through with it if something is right in front of you you might as well just take it because you can't guarantee that it's going to be there later or that you'll get a reward for waiting i thought that this twist to the marshmallow test was kind of interesting another few studies on willpower and self-discipline have noted that people are able to resist temptation longer if they get the temptation out of their control for example if an alcoholic throws
away any alcohol around the house or if a person trying to lose weight has someone else shop for them or finally someone wanting to study simply sells their gaming console the idea is that it's very hard to resist temptation but it's very easy if you just remove the choice in the marshmallow experiment videos they found that the kids who did the best were the ones who distracted themselves they covered their eyes they played a game or maybe they sang to themselves this is just a little bit more insight into the theory of willpower but i'll
have another video on that later let's get back to the marshmallow test while recent studies have claimed to debunk the marshmallow test it's impossible to deny that the impact of the study is very interesting michelle's work was able to show the world how certain personality traits impacted a child's chance at success further work has since been done on different personality traits and how they relate to success in things like business or romantic relationship we might not know the terms like growth mindset or even emotional intelligence if the marshmallow test didn't exist and the marshmallow test
is not the only classic experiment that has recently undergone criticisms psychology is currently undergoing what is called a replication crisis replications of world-renowned experiments like the marshmallow test or the stanford prison experiment show that these tests may not be as solid or accurate as we once were taught in schools like any type of work that involves the scientific method psychology is always evolving and psychologists are continuing to tweak change and adjust theories that don't hold up to modern tests but as we get back on the track self-control does have an impact on behavior and possibly
success but it's up to the current and future generations to learn more about just how self-control is actually influenced and how it influences other personality traits and factors so as i in this video i want to thank you so much for watching this video on the marshmallow experiment and if you have any questions feel free to leave them below i love to respond to questions and i encourage you to watch more videos in my social psychology series i'll see you in the next one
