Stanford marshmallow experiment

And because it's a sometimes occasion, like a birthday party, fill your boots, go for it.

I remember seeing online that marshmallow experiment.

It's kind of cute watching these kids sitting in a room looking at this marshmallow and trying to work out whether or not they can hold off eating it or waiting because they've been promised that if they don't eat it until the person comes back into the room, they get two.

And watching little kids as young as like three and four, you can see the cogs turning in their head.

First up, we have a groundbreaking 2024 empirical article by Sperber and colleagues.

And this one completely reevaluates the famous marshmallow test.

They used data from over 700 individuals tracked from preschool all the way to age 26.

Which is just wild to think about.

We are going to look at the hard, unvarnished data of how human beings actually develop and perform.

I am ready.

Okay, let's unpack this, and I think we have to start with the marshmallow test.

If there is a single psychological study that has completely infiltrated the public consciousness, it is this one.

And so just continue living as you've lived after school.

Now, Stanford did an experiment, a study called the Marshmallow Experiment, this was decades ago, where they took preschoolers around four years old into a room, a research room, and they were told, the children, "You..." And they were there by themselves, the kids.

"You can eat one marshmallow now.

I'm gonna g- leave a marshmallow on the table, and I'm gonna go out of the room," the researcher was saying, "And you can have the marshmallow now.

And the other trait they found that's very closely linked to that is the ability to delay ratification.

And there's another very famous experiment that was done that sometimes we call the marshmallow experiment where you get some young kids, you sit them down, and you put a single marshmallow in front of them.

You know what I mean? And you go, now, this marshmallow is for you to have.

You can have that right now.