Jun
3
Submitted by caleb on Thu, 06/03/2010 - 08:57
Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.
This video was created by Worship House Media, a company who makes video clips for use in church sermons and illustrations. There are obvious applications of this video to eternal reward teachings and various other theological points; which is why they made and sell it.
These kids are four years old, and, as the video shows, given the option of eating one marshmallow now, or two in fifteen minutes or so. Fifteen minutes, to a four year old child in an empty room with a marshmallow, is the larger half of eternity.
Stanford University was the pioneer of this, particular, study and even included a follow-up. The Sanford study produced, roughly, a 2:1 ratio of those who ate the marshmallow compared to those who didn’t.
Years later, those children were tracked down and studied. Those who didn’t eat the marshmallow were all doing well. They had good grades, graduated high school, and were moving on to university.
Of the kids who did eat the marshmallow, most (70-80%, if you believe Joachim de Posada, a Hispanic motivational speaker) were doing poorly in school, some had dropped out.
Eating the marshmallow did not mean you were barred from success, but delaying the marshmallow was an extremely strong indicator of success.
Anyway, I saw the video and wanted to know more about it, so there you are. This experiment is huge in the nature vs. nurture debate, and early childhood development studies.
In my opinion, this behavior could be taught by parents when the child is very young, but I could be wrong. I’ll have to find someone else’s children to experiment on.