Good Report On Marshmallow Experiment

The marshmallow experiment was conducted in order to find out how children of about 4 to 6 years old would act when presented with an option to get either the smaller, but immediate gratification, or the bigger, but delayed one. The participant were seated in a room, one-by-one, and their ability to understand the instructions was tested using puppets. Afterwards, they were offered one marshmallow, but were also informed that if they waited for a minute and did not eat the marshmallow, the experimenter would return with one more marshmallow, and the children would be able to have two, instead of just one. In case they have eaten the first marshmallow prior to the experimenter’s return, they would not get the second treat. As a result, certain children were indeed able to wait for the experimenter to return and were rewarded for their efforts with two marshmallows. However, some children gave up either immediately or sometime after the researcher has left the room. One child was particularly interesting to observe, since after being presented with a chocolate bar and having received the instructions, the boy did not even make an effort to wait until the researcher was gone, and after agreeing with the instructions, he has just picked up the bar and started eating it. As a result, the experimenter concluded that some children are present-oriented, while others are future-oriented, and this feature largely depends on a child’s age, since children below the age of 4 cannot yet form causal connection. He also concluded that if a child does not develop the ability to form such connection, he will most probably perform worse in school and life than his peers. The follow-up interview and study of these children many years later confirmed this hypothesis.
Walter Mischel, who was the original author of the experiment, wanted to find out the age, when children developed the ability to control their impulses in order to wait for the greater gratification, the concept also known as delayed gratification. However, it is not always mentioned that he hypothesized that children coming from families with no father would perform a lot worse in this experiment than children from families with both parents present. It was also hypothesized that this tendency was grounded in the trust issues children without fathers could have. Another theory used for this experiment said that present-oriented children would perform a lot worse academically and be less prone to success than future-oriented children.
When I conducted this experiment with 6 children of the age of 5 to 6, I found out that 3 children were able to wait until my return in order to receive an additional Oreo cookie, which was the treat of their own choice. The remaining three children started eating the first cookie prior to my return, although one of them held out for a very long time almost until a minute before I came back. When I asked each child, why he or she would not wait until my return, one of them replied that he thought I would not return as promised, and he really wanted to eat the cookie. The other two told me that they could not wait because the cookie was just there, in front of them, and it looked very tasty.
The response of the last two children shows that they did not think of the long-term results of their actions. The immediate gratification that was in front of them outshined the possibility of the phantom delayed gratification with two cookies instead of one. However, here, I would like to suggest that this experiment should be repeated with greater offered gratification, such as 10 cookies instead of 2. I believe that this experiment would show different results, since much could depend on what is at stake for these children. At the same time, the results on the one child that did not trust me show that his distrust in promises of the better reward lies deeper and may be symptomatic of his distrust to other adults or people in general. The three children that received two cookies were generally quite obedient, according to their parents, which may partially explain why they agreed to my instruction. However, I believe that they also understood their future possibilities, since my observations showed that they did their best to distract themselves from the cookie in order to hold out for the greater reward.