{"id":7995,"date":"2012-03-12T05:42:51","date_gmt":"2012-03-12T12:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=7995"},"modified":"2012-03-12T05:42:51","modified_gmt":"2012-03-12T12:42:51","slug":"time-and-marshmallows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/12\/time-and-marshmallows\/","title":{"rendered":"Time and Marshmallows"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Perhaps no one comprehends the roots of depravity and cruelty better than Philip Zimbardo<\/a>.” At least, that’s what it says here<\/a>. They’re referring to the fact that Zimbardo — a psychologist who long ago supervised the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment<\/a> (chilling video here<\/a>) — is an expert on the psychology of “evil” behavior. But he’s also an expert on the psychology of time, which we can all agree is much more interesting.<\/p>\n

I recently got to hear a talk by Zimbardo, in which among other things he discussed the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment<\/a> — a rather more adorable experience than the prison experiment, from what I understand. The Marshmallow experiment, originally conducted by Walter Mischel in 1972, was aimed at understanding how we think about different times — the future vs. the present. Children were asked to do some easy tasks, and then were rewarded by being given a marshmallow. But! They were told that the experimenter had to step outside for a few minutes, and if they could just sit tight and not<\/em> eat their marshmallow until he came back, they could have that and also an additional marshmallow.<\/p>\n

It’s a matter of future vs. present rewards. It’s natural (and totally rational) to discount rewards that are promised in the future — after all, the future is hard to predict, and anything can happen. If I offered you a choice between $4 today and $5 ten years from now, you’d be sensible to take the lower amount today — depending on how much you trusted me, of course. But if there is a good reason to trust, and the future isn’t that far off, it makes sense to delay gratification a bit. So what happens when some four-year-olds are put to the test?<\/p>\n

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Zimbardo - Marshmallow experiment<\/div><\/div>
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