Walter Mischel

Let me explain.

The marshmallow test goes back to 1968, where Walter Mischel from Stanford University took about 600 children, four to six years old, brought them into a room and set a marshmallow before them.

Now, the test was, here's one marshmallow.

If you can wait 15 minutes, you get two marshmallows.

Yeah.

So real quick, just in case your listeners don't know it, even though it is very famous, this series of psychological behavioral scientific experiments first carried out in the late 60s and early 70s at Stanford University by a psychologist named Walter Mischel and his colleagues and then successors.

And what they did is they took young kids, preschool age kids, and they took them into a small room and they had like a treat, a marshmallow typically, although sometimes there were others.

And it was sitting there on the table or under a cloche.

It's called the marshmallow experience.

They gave one marshmallow to one kids, and they said, "You can have this marshmallow right now, or you can wait 20 minutes and you can have two of them." And they tracked these kids, Walter Mischel at, I believe, Pen- Pennsylvania University, and they tracked these kids.

Whoever took the two marshmallows after 20 minutes, much more successful across the board in their life.

The ones that took the marshmallow right now, unfortunately, those kids had more mental health issues, addiction issues, impulsive.

It's an intriguing concept in so many ways.

And fun fact, Walter Mischel's book about the marshmallow experiment, he had the actor Alan Alda narrate the audio version.

I'm like, how did you swing that? That's, good job.

This is kind of entertaining to hear, so shout out to them.

That's right.

Walter Mischel's famous marshmallow experiment in the 1970s.

What did he figure out? He says, "If you give a kid one marshmallow and you tell him, 'If you wait 10 minutes, I'll give you two marshmallows,' " the kids, and they tracked these kids for 40 years, if you wait 10 minutes, and you can have that level of self-discipline, which you can learn over time, it doesn't mean if you fail the marshmallow test, you're doomed to, you know, spend your entire life in Rabbi Linzer's office, but you can learn this eventually, it's a total game changer.

If you can learn self-discipline, if you can learn self-regulation, even at a young age, your likelihood of doing drugs is way lower.

Thanks for listening.

Do we think it's a coincidence that the researcher behind the marshmallow test, Walter Mischel, shared a first name with the protagonist in Breaking Bad, Walter White?

Oh.

Cannot be a coincidence, can it?

I know I've spoken about it a few times on here.

Walter Mischel at Stanford, late 60s and early 70s, sat young children in a room with a marshmallow or a pretzel or a cookie or whatever they liked and said, You can eat this now, or if you wait until I come back, you can have two.

And then he left them to it.

And some gobbled it straight away, and some sat on their hands and sang to themselves.