You are clutching at straws. The experiment was done with the parents in the next room, who the children knew had encouraged them to participate. The children would be no less willing to take candy from an experimenter their parent has okayed than they would be to take candy at a birthday party or from a teacher, which is perfectly normal. And based on personal experience, a lack of willingness to take candy is pretty much entirely absent, for the kids with which I’m familiar.
Also this experiment was done 30 or 40 years ago before “stranger danger” paranoia reached the level it is at today.
This part I agree with, more or less. Taking candy/food from strangers was always something to be careful about, but it wasn’t like it is today with lots of people opting out of Halloween. Based on my experience, I was and would have been wary about someone giving me candy. At that age, I refused candy from multiple people, at least once very luckily, looking back.
You maybe. All I take from that is that you are an outlier.
Are you seriously saying you would have refused to take candy even if your parents had said “today you are going to be here with this nice lady in the white coat. She will look after you.”
I don’t think so.
And again, even if you say “yes I would still have refused” then all I take from that is that you are an extreme outlier. You are not like any small child of the age involved in this experiment that I have ever met.
Perhaps they are outliers. Yes, I have refused candy from doctors. My point there was that some children might be more skeptical than you might believe. I know I was. That could make the test less straightforward than it is often described.
Hee. I did the marshmallow experiment with my oldest kid when she was 3 or 4. I told her she could have one marshmallow now or two later (and she likes marshmallows).
She reasoned, “Well, I’d rather have one now than two later,” and she ate the marshmallow. And no, she didn’t regret it later, either; she still thought she had made the right choice.
(At age 11, she still likes marshmallows and would definitely prefer two later to one now – I think it’s fascinating that her estimation of the discount rate has changed so much in that time.)
I’ll have to try the test with my 4-year-old son. He already delays gratification. He gets a snack and a drink on our drive to preschool, and lately he’s been saving half of it for the drive home. It may have started accidentally, but he specifies that’s what he’s doing now. (He usually drinks more than half of his juice, but he tries.)
This is not true. This was done at a preschool. The parents had consented but were not present or in the next room.
My problem with the experiment is the reduction to a simple question of offering the child one treat now or two if they can wait and then indicating that the child “passes” the test if they can wait or “fails” the test if they do not wait. This is not what the original experiment was, Again, it was designed to see at what age children can begin to delay gratification and what strategies help them. The children were given various techniques to help them wait and they also looked at factors such as whether the treats being visible or hidden made it easier for children to wait.
The additional observation of higher SAT scores etc with longer waiting times was an incidental finding that the original researchers noticed and decided to pursue. However, given the homogeneous nature of the original studied children, these results cannot be extracted to a wider population and in fact do not hold up with a more diverse subset of children.