And let’s not also even discuss ambrosia salad, the very sight of which always made me queasy.
Page of recipes with many (shudder) pictures. View it ye who dare:
I’ll allow, though, one marshmallow recipe I liked.
Melt some marshmallows in a small pot. I think you’re supposed to add some butter too, IIRC. Pour in a bunch of Trix and stir until fully coated. (I’ve also seen it done with Rice Krispies instead of Trix.)
Shape into balls or patties and set aside to cool.
Now THAT, I might not have easily resisted.
Same, but I might have also gone for some s’mores if it was straight off the fire, gooey and dripping with goodness.
S’mores are the one acceptable use for marshmallows.
…because I get to watch them burrrrrn!!! 
The marshmallow tests I’ve seen, didn’t actually use marshmallows. They used candy kids actually like.
It was an experiment. And the results have since been debunked.
This researcher did it over a ten year period. The original researcher did it again. There have been replications as well.
In this study, the children were even more delayed in their gratification than in the first study.
Just for the record, the children were not just offered marshmallows. They were offered a choice of two treats and told that they could eat the nonpreferred one then or wait for the preferred treat. The experiments also included pretzels and cookies.
More important, though is that this was not a test to see if delayed gratification was correlated with better outcomes in life. The experiment was designed to see how children delayed gratification, The experiment tested whether it was easier to wait if the children could see the treats or not or if they were given techniques to distract themselves. Since this was the purpose of the experiment, the children used were not a representative sample. They were a fairly homogeneous group of upper middle class children of highly educated parents (Stanford faculty).
It was not until many years later that Mischel began to question if children who found it easier to delay gratification did better in school and reached out to parents for their SAT scores. He then reached out again forty years later to see where these children ended up.
Of note, though, this was not designed to have a right or wrong answer. It was designed to see at what age children could begin to delay gratification and what mechanisms helped them. People who say that someone “passed” or “failed” the marshmallow test do not understand the experiment.
Of note, although I never responded to the later survey (bad subject), I wonder where I fit in as a data point. While I did pursue higher education, I have constant struggles with my weight. So can I delay gratification or not? (Also, no clue on how I performed on the initial test or even which subset I was in).
A question and answer interview with the creator of the marshmallow test.
Q: In capturing the imagination of the public, you’ve said that the test and its results have been “endlessly distorted.” Should your book come with a warning label “Don’t try this at home,” so parents stop administering it at the kitchen table to figure out if they’ve got a “grabber” or a “waiter”?
A: The relationship between seconds of delay and long-term life outcomes are impressive, but not nearly strong enough to believe that how long you wait on the marshmallow test is a measure of your destiny. It isn’t. There is no question that lots of kids who don’t wait long on the marshmallow test at all, who even grab it early, have lives that are perfectly wonderful. And lots of kids who are good waiters can under many circumstances wind up with all kinds of problems. It’s a mistake to think that you either have this skill or you don’t have it, because it’s a skill that is eminently teachable.
Firstly that isn’t an accurate characterisation of “socioeconomic factors” it includes things like parental educational attainment and and number of books in the home and parental attention. Secondly you are mistaken about what outcomes they looked at - these included things like standardised text scores and BMI - not simply financial outcomes. Thirdly, even if your characterisation of the study was correct (which, make no mistake, it isn’t), so what? That doesn’t mean the study doesn’t mean anything - it just means that it came to the interesting conclusion that a kid’s willingness to delay gratification in a certain way at a certain time has a statistically signficant correlation to certain things in their background in a way that also has a significantly significant correlation to factors in their later life - which is in itself interesting.
Please tell me you aren’t serious…
Your post has been debunked.
Your comment makes me weep for the future of science.
It is, though, because it may shed some light on the ways in which wealth supports later success.
True, but the simplistic version of the story that is told and retold is far better known and far more influential than the original experiment. Many millions of people have read or heard about the marshmallow test, while very few have read the original paper or could accurately describe the experimental design and conclusions. It is that simplistic and moralistic version that richly deserved to be debunked.
It turns out that my hypothetical is not so fanciful. In reading the article linked in the OP, I discovered that an experiment had indeed been run where the experimenter “tricked” the children by denying them the promised reward.
Consider the following hypothetical psychology test. A stranger approaches you in the street and makes you an offer. If you give him 50 dollars now he will meet you at an agreed place later that day and give you 100 dollars. Some people decline the offer, preferring to keep their 50 dollars safely in their pocket. Are those people foolish? How does this differ from the deal offered to the children in the original experiment?
I’ve always suspected the marshmallow test has had the enduring legacy that it did was due to a teeny bit of schandenfreude - people loved the moral lesson that those who delay gratification, get good things, while those who can’t resist, nope.
Whether it was actually true or not wasn’t as important as the fact that it tickled people’s sense of justice.
Well, for one thing, it would be a lot closer if the stranger offered you 50 now or 100 later.
Yeah I agree that is flawed. You shouldn’t have to fork over any cash. It should be him giving you money - small sum now or big sum later.
Which, of course, is exactly the Nigerian Scam that so many people allegedly do fall for all the time. People desperate for the marshmallows they were denied as children.
You are right, that would be a much closer analogy.
Even with that tweak, your analogy is inapt.
A stranger offering an adult a not insubstantial sum of money, out of the blue, on the street is extremely weird, to the point where I wouldn’t even take the first $50 because I’d be so sure that there must be some form of scam involved. The whole thing would accordingly become entirely about whether or not one trusted the stranger to follow through.
Contrastingly, for at least a substantial portion of children, it is completely normal to be offered the occasional treat by an adult. And a substantial portion of children would therefore take the experiment at face value.
Your scenario isn’t comparable.
Except that hasn’t been debunked. What the original Marshmallow Experiment and subsequent refinements and repeats seem to show is that there is a correlation between delayed gratification behaviour in the Experiment, and certain later life outcomes.
That the reason some kids will delay gratification more than others is perhaps explicable by socio-economic factors doesn’t alter the fact of that correlation. It is possible that socio-economic factors result in kids being more likely to delay gratification but that may well be a factor causative of the correlation.
Stranger danger! I hope that children don’t take candy from people they aren’t well-acquainted with, even if their parents are in the next room. As you point out, there’s good reason for the children to be skeptical, which could be another confounding factor in the experiment.