In the late 60s and early 70s of the last century, Stanford University professor Walter Mischel conducted a series of experiments during which he proved that children with this character trait are more likely to achieve success in life. What this feature is and why the experience was called “marshmallow”, we will describe below.
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How the “marshmallow experiment” was carried out
To further explore this fact, Walter Mischel conducted an experiment that was later called the “marshmallow experiment.” He took 16 boys and 16 girls aged from 3.5 to 5.5 years as subjects. For each of the eight researchers there were 4 children - 2 boys and 2 girls.
The experimenter took the child into the room, sat him in a chair and placed one marshmallow on the table in front of him. After that, he offered a deal: “Listen, I’ll go out now for 15 minutes. While I'm gone, you can eat this marshmallow, or you can not eat it and get a second one as a reward. It's up to you."
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Results of the “marshmallow experiment”
As the researchers expected, most of the children did not wait and ate the marshmallows right away. Only 1/3 of the subjects received a reward in the form of a double portion.
Walter Mischel published the study in 1972. However, the most interesting things began after that. He followed the lives of the subjects until 2011. It turned out that children who delayed gratification received higher scores on the SAT exam (analogous to the Russian Unified State Exam), were less likely to have bad habits and become depressed, and also received higher salaries.
The further fate of the participants
Children who passed the marshmallow test grew up. The experiment is finally over. All these years, the researchers observed the participants and identified the same relationship between self-control in childhood and success in later life.
Participants who showed maximum persistence successfully passed the final test at the end of school. Their IQ level was an order of magnitude higher compared to other schoolchildren. All this allowed them to enter universities and continue studying.
The children achieved success not only in the area of study. Participants in the marshmallow experiment were less susceptible to addictions, bad habits, and emotional instability.
Those children who could not resist and ate the marshmallow showed less significant results. They did average or poorly on the final test and did poorly in their studies. The guys among them had bad habits, some of them showed signs of depression and could not cope with stress.
The researchers of the first experiment were confident that success in life directly depends on the child’s ability to exercise self-control.
Refutation of the “marshmallow experiment”
Don’t be upset if as a child you couldn’t restrain yourself and “ate marshmallows” right away. Scientists from the University of the City of New York doubted the results of Michel's experiment, since he had a very small sample - only 32 people.
To refute the “marshmallow experiment,” they took 900 children from different walks of life and carried out the same manipulations. It has been proven that the ability to delay gratification has virtually no effect on success in life. Children from rich families who waited for the experimenter to arrive, and children from poor families who did not receive a reward, had the same chances of becoming successful.
The difference in results is due to life situation. Parents often promise to buy toys or sweets for children from low-income families, but do not keep their promises due to lack of money. Therefore, such children are not inclined to trust other people and strive to get pleasure right away, because later it may not be there.
It is easier for children from families with a high level of income to restrain themselves and wait for the experimenter to arrive, because they know that they will always have something tasty lying around at home. For example, ice cream or the same marshmallow.
Despite the research of New York scientists, it is difficult to disagree with the fact that the ability to endure helps in life. If you cannot endure difficulties, you will quickly give up and achieve nothing.
We wish you to cultivate patience and become successful!
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Key words:1Self-knowledge
John Bunyan and the Marshmallow Experiment About the Literary Roots of a Psychological Experience
One of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology is the “marshmallow experiment” by Walter Mischel, a researcher at Stanford University. The essence of the experiment was a “delayed gratification” test. A piece of marshmallow was placed on the table in front of a three-year-old child and they were promised that if he waited fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow, he would receive a second helping (or some other treat). As you might expect, the children behaved differently: some ate the marshmallows as soon as the experimenter left the room, but most tried to honor the terms of the agreement: the children tried their best not to eat the marshmallows, although many found this difficult. The experiments began at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, Michel’s first publication was published in 1972, and then he began to observe the further fate of the experiment participants. According to Michel, children who showed more self-control subsequently succeeded more in life.
Since then, Michel's conclusions have been repeatedly re-evaluated and criticized by psychologists. It was shown, in particular, that the child’s behavior in the experiment depends on the financial situation of the family and on whether adults have deceived him before. However, it has not yet been noticed that the “marshmallow experiment” is more material for literary criticism than for psychology. The design of Michel's experiment has a distinct literary basis, which is found in a novel written three centuries before the experiment.
Then the Interpreter took Christian by the hand and led him into a small room where two children were sitting on chairs. The eldest was called Impatience, the youngest - Patience. Impatience was very restless and dissatisfied, but Patience sat quietly. The Christian inquired about the reason for the elder's dissatisfaction. The interpreter replied that their Teacher promised them precious gifts by the beginning of next year, and Impatience wants to receive them immediately, while Patience happily agreed to wait... Then someone entered the room and handed Impatience a bag of expensive gifts. But the owner of the big bag was not happy for long. Within a couple of minutes everything was scattered, torn and broken. Patience left the room empty-handed, but left quietly, with the expectation of joy on her brow.
- Explain to me what all this means? - asked Christian.
— These two boys symbolize two types of people. Impatience is a child of the world; it wants to get everything right away, even this year, that is, in this world: such are earthly people. <...> But Impatience very soon squandered everything, and only rags remained with him - such will be the lot of all people like him when the end of the world comes.
“I see that Patience has chosen a better fate,” noted the Christian. “He will be given the Kingdom of Heaven, while the other will face poverty and shame.”
This is nothing more than an excerpt from J. Bunyan’s novel “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (1678), also known in Russia under the titles “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and “The Christian’s Journey to Blessed Eternity”; here it is given in the 19th century translation made by Yu. D. Zasetskaya (by the way, the daughter of Denis Davydov). John Bunyan, the dissident Puritan preacher of the Restoration era, is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of English-language literature. All that is known about him is that he was repeatedly sentenced to prison for his radical Protestant sermons: the Stuarts who returned to the throne disliked the Puritans associated with the revolution, and Bunyan, among other things, managed to take part in the civil war on the side of Parliament as a teenager. He was a tinker by profession, and his reading range remains completely unclear to this day - with the exception, of course, of the Bible. However, he managed to become the most widely read English-language writer in the world for three centuries. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Bunyan overtook Shakespeare in the number of readers. Suffice it to mention that by 1938, The Pilgrim's Progress had gone through 1,300 editions.
In our country, after 1917, for obvious reasons, this book was completely forgotten, although by the beginning of the 20th century there were at least two Russian translations; The novel “John Bunyan” was known to the entire educated elite of the Russian Empire, and its first chapter formed the basis of Pushkin’s poem “The Wanderer.” But in Anglophone culture, especially American culture, Bunyan's novel is almost equal in importance to the Bible. The Russian reader may recall, for example, the plot-shaping role of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” in Louisa Alcott’s novel “Little Women” (1868–1869), where the heroines try on the allegorical images of the book for their own life trials. And although its popularity has declined since the second half of the 20th century, it still remains a source of archetypes and model situations. The secret of Bunyan's success is that he translated the Christian dogma of sin, repentance and salvation into the language of everyday analogies that were intuitively understandable to the average reader of the modern era, such as in the cited example of the patient child.
It is quite difficult not to notice the incredible similarities between Bunyan's allegory and the scenario of Michel's real psychological experiment. Both Bunyan's and Michel's experiments involve testing children for the principle of delayed gratification, with the capacity for patience being endowed with absolute ethical value. The willingness to sacrifice immediate pleasure in favor of the future is rewarded not only with a second piece of marshmallow, but also with an increase in social status in the distant future, while those who eat marshmallows are destined for the future of a “loser.” The experiment divides the subjects according to their future - into the saved and the damned. Consciously or unconsciously, Michel's experiment is modeled on the literary model of the Pilgrim's Progress, a Puritan instruction for saving the soul.
Bunyan's children are purely allegorical: the child has personified the soul, the Anima, since the Middle Ages, and in the 17th century the image of the child-soul became especially widespread in art. The parable meaning of the plot with the children is not hidden - the participants in the dialogue themselves explain that we are talking about a choice between earthly goods and salvation after death. However, the “marshmallow experiment”, in a very characteristic way for the 20th century, interprets the allegory literally, comprehending it within the framework of real psychology and social relations. Puritan asceticism is transformed into the “Protestant ethic” according to Weber - social success serves as a reward for correct behavior. In art, such a turn, generally speaking, is not new - just remember what happened to Andersen’s plot in the Disney cartoon “The Little Mermaid”. What is much more unexpected is that in this case we are dealing with science, and not even theoretical, but experimental.
The influence of scientific experiments on literature has long been known: for example, the scene of raising babies in Huxley’s Brave New World was inspired by the behaviorist experiment of J.B. Watson with “little Albert,” and the plot of Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog” was inspired by the medical experiments of the Russian emigrant Sergei Voronov. But the reverse process—the influence of literature on science—seems to have not yet become the subject of close attention. The example of the “marshmallow experiment” shows that literary plots—at least those that are significant for the cultural code—can dictate the very setting of a scientific experiment. In those areas of science in which man is the subject, it is important not only what results the researcher obtains, but also what questions he asks, and why he asks this particular question. Given the craze for the problem of self-control, for which monkeys and even tits began to be tested, few people think to ask why self-control came to the center of attention in the first place and why researchers are so concerned about its presence. An analysis of the value systems set by fiction may be useful to a historian of science.
