The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
The longer children could wait before eating the single marshmallow, the more likely they were to have to to do well in school, more likely to make more money, have more friends, have better physical and mental health, and also have lower incarceration and problematic behavior reports.
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Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
Would love a "what would change this verdict" RSS feed. Sign me up if it exists.
So if you looked at the simple correlation between did delay time predict outcomes like academic achievement and problematic behavior, the answer was yes. It seemed to replicate. But then the the the researchers controlled for things like social economic status which was one of the criticisms of the original Stanford studies because Stanford children or at least the children that were going to the Stanford University daycare where these experiments were being conducted were not your average American family mostly wellto-do and this matters and so when the researchers they had like 30 or 40 other coariant variables that they were controlling for when they controlled for all these other variables children's delay of gratification was no longer predicting these outcomes it was supposed to.
the original marshmallow experiment was conducted at Stanford and it looked at kids between about the age of 2 and five um and it put them the child was placed in a room with nothing in the room except for a table a chair a little plate and on that plate a single marshmallow and the researcher said to the child you know I'm going to leave the room um I'll be back in 15 minutes if you can go the whole 15 minutes without eating a mar eating this marshmallow when I come back I will give you a second marshmallow so you'll get two and the whole point of it was to really measure delayed gratification and a child's ability to delay gratification and the the most significant finding was very simply that older children were better able to delay gratification than younger children