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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of the Stanford marshmallow experiment: give a kid a marshmallow, and tell the kid that he can eat the marshmallow now, but if they can wait 15 minutes, they'll get two marshmallows.

They found that there's an excellent correlation between the kids who wait and future life success.

But it also turns out that there's also an excellent correlation between kids who eat the marshmallow without waiting and kids who grow up in an environment where adults don't keep promises...

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Don't forget that the perceived value of incentives varies. Tell the kid he'll get a bag of marshmallows and even if he thinks you're a liar he might wait the 15min. However, the kid that once got sick from eating a whole bag of marshmallows might not be so inclined to wait it out. The parallel being that kids who's parents went to college (graduated or not) and didn't move up in the world might not see paying attention in high school to be as valuable because "I'm going to be an electrician/whatever, I'm not going to college, I want to get to work and get paid" You see this in college too "I'm not going to grad school, I'll load up on classes/party it up, graduate and be done, C's get degrees, nobody cares about my transcript once I have the diploma"

Related: "An estimated 14.0 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2014," http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r...

I question the assumptions at the foundations of these experiments. What if the decision to eat a marshmallow when you have the chance is a good strategy for a large number of people? It's easy to imply that people just need a bit of grit and hard work to succeed in life, when maybe the conclusion we should draw is that poor people often have to live hand-to-mouth. Maybe if we want to increase future life success we should focus on improving the security of their environment instead of attempting to teach them to be grittier.

I don't really know. Maybe they controlled for those variables. IANAS (I am not a scientist).

parent is alluding to correlation vs causation. i.e. that their future life success may be caused by reliable adults.

For what it's worth, In the Marshmallow Test book, the author mentions that prior to the test, the experimenter spent 15 minutes interacting with the child to build trust. They gave the child a bell, and the researcher would explain that if the researcher left the room, the child could ding the bell to bring the researcher back. They'd do a few iterations of this, with the researcher promptly rushing back each time, in order to build trust.

Perhaps not a complete solution, but the problem was at least addressed.

It seems to me that a one-time positive experience with one person hardly influences attitudes formed over a far longer period - and I don't even need to take into account yet that for evolutionary reasons negative signals have a much stronger influence than positive ones. So to me all this shows is that they were aware of the problem - I don't see that this shows that they did anything significant to address it.

How much can you retrain someone's brain in 15 minutes? That child's experiences are not wiped out.

I would eat the marshmallows immediately and then steal more. I stole food all of the time because my parents were too cheap to give me enough lunch money. They own a two million dollar house in Saratoga and my father is the CEO of a semiconductor company. Go figure.

I'd be more successful in life if they didn't let me go hungry all of the time. At least be less bitter.

> But it also turns out that there's also an excellent correlation between kids who eat the marshmallow without waiting and kids who grow up in an environment where adults don't keep promises...

Citation for this please? I don't remember that being mentioned in the marshmallow paper.

From Wikipedia:

"Marshmallow Test Revisited". University of Rochester. October 11, 2012.

Kidd, Celeste; Palmeri, Holly; Aslin, Richard N. (2013). "Rational snacking: Young children's decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability". Cognition 126 (1): 109–114. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.004. PMC 3730121. PMID 23063236.

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