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The Marshmallow Experiment

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What is the Marshmallow Experiment and what does it explain?

The marshmallow experiment is a simple procedure. The researcher brought the child to the room and told them about the experiment. The researcher would leave the room for about 15 minutes, but he wouldn’t tell the child. The child would either eat the marshmallow or wait for the second marshmallow. This was the basis of learning about delayed gratification and led to new discoveries and benefited the study of psychology.

It became a popular study and was named The Marshmallow Experiment. The interesting part of the experiment was because there was a correlation between the experiment and played out after in life. The researchers called it delayed gratification. The people who resisted …show more content…

Mischel said for one group to imagine the physical traits, a second group to imagine the traits of how it tasted, and a last group to imagine the pleasure they would get from eating it. The first group waited 3 times as long as the second one, but the last group actually waited with the longest delay. For the last group, it showed how thinking about the pleasure of eating a marshmallow is a distraction for the group to not eat. This shows that if you think about the physical appearance, if you change the subject to something you cannot gain from or if you find a way to distract yourself from the temptation, you can gain self-control.

The University of Rochester replicated the original experiment. This time though there was an important twist and The first group was given an unreliable experience and the second group a good experience. The effect was very dramatic on the marshmallow experiment. The children who had unreliable experiences ate the marshmallow quickly and the other group waited because they knew he could be trusted. The first group saw delayed gratification as a negative and the second group saw it as a positive based on their …show more content…

Studies show that happier faces were rewarding, so the researchers thought, if happier faces were rewarding, shouldn’t low delayers be affected? This test shows that low delayers wanted the reward while high delayers were fine without it because they were able to not press the button significantly more than the low delayers.

In short, the Marshmallow experiment was an experiment used to learn about self control. The experiment had a simple concept: to see how 4 year olds will deal with delayed gratification. Then after many years, they had found better life scores of high delayers than low delayers. Delayed Gratification is another term for self control. High delayers have ways to distract themselves: for example, facing the opposite direction of the marshmallow or picturing the marshmallow as a picture.
In the brain, high delayers showed more activity than low delayers in a region of the prefrontal cortex associated with impulse and behavior control. Meanwhile, low delayers showed more activation of a deeper region of the brain associated with pleasure, desire and

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