AFTER poring through an article I had written recently, a friend had asked what the marshmallow test, which I had mentioned in passing, was all about.
Incidentally, I have received a couple of similar queries as to what I had been yakking about. After a few diggings here and there, I would like to share, with everyone, an excerpt of an article on the topic that I wrote during the pandemic.
A class of preschool children is instructed by their teacher that she will leave them alone for twenty minutes. They are handed out a single piece of marshmallow each. She then says that if, upon her return, they still have managed not to eat the one marshmallow, they will be handed seconds as a reward.
This was an actual test of preschoolers more than 50 years ago at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School, performed by Walter Mischel and his team.
In the succeeding years and decades, each child was then continually monitored, noting how they had fared later in social life. The findings of that experiment, now famously known as “The Marshmallow Test,” had yielded equally controversial but interesting results.
For one, it was said to have established a link between the children’s ability (or inability) to delay gratification during various aspects of later life, ranging from how well they scored in their scholastic assessment test or SAT (used as an admission requirement to university), and up to even having an effect on their Body Mass Index (BMI) as grown-ups, among others.
Understandably, these correlative findings have for years become the subject of much debate, not only among doctors and behavioral experts alike. In the present, I have even heard it mentioned as a joke or a poke by laymen, teasing someone as failing the marshmallow test, when he or she had not followed instructions.
But seriously, up to this day, two distinct schools of thought fight it out: were Mischel’s conclusions correct, or not? If indeed yes, it leads to the question: Is there really such a thing as free will, or is our fate and existence pre-determined?
During one birthday party, a former college mate of mine, who once was a devout follower of his faith, had mentioned that everything is fixed, thereby running contrary to God giving us free will.
I said, in my opinion, I also have doubts on the subject, although for the moment, I’d rather be mum about it.
Asked to explain, I said I would only go as far as, “How come I didn’t get the memo when he handed them out?” Pressed to explain further, I insisted no. Consider it my free will.
