The Marshmallow Test

It seems counterintuitive how a marshmallow can base off how if you were better at life than others.  In the 1960’s Marshmallow test was instructed but Walter Mischel who was then a professor at Stanford.  He put nursery school students and put them into a room individually and gave them a treat.  But there was a catch to it.  Mischel told each child that they could eat the treat right that second, or they can wait fifteen minutes until the experimenter returned.  If they did wait they would be given another treat.  Overtime, he found the same children that he used in this experiment and came to a conclusion that this had real life consequences.  He concluded that the children who had waited to receive another treat had the ability to become healthier, get better grades, enjoy higher success, and be able to prove to be better at staying in relationships.

This had changed how educators view success and how to be successful.  They realized that, “it’s not just intelligence that matters, but self-control and patience and being able to tam one’s impulses-from the desire to eat the marshmallow to the desire to blow off an exam or have an affair.”

However, there has been a new study conducted by a cognitive science graduate student at the University of Rochester, named Celeste Kidd.  Kidd had spent most of her childhood working in shelters for homeless people and families and she believed that it helped her understand what children in their situation would do, given the marshmallow test.  She is “fairly sure those kids would eat the marshmallow right away.”  But Kidd believes not only because they were weak but also because there was lack of trust.

Kidd made her own version of the marshmallow test and had a group of children split into two.  In the first group she promised to give them better art supplies if they waited 15 minutes along with bigger and better stickers than the ones they received at first.  She did the same with the second group however only carried through with the first.  She came back with brand new art supplies and bigger stickers but told the second group of children that there weren’t any new art supplies or stickers.  When she gave both groups marshmallows, nine out of 14 children in the reliable condition waited 15 minutes to receive another treat, while only one of the 14 children in the unreliable condition waited those 15 minutes. This shows that in Mischel’s study, he focused on determination and how childhood decisions and explain adult decisions.  Kidd’s study focused on a situational attribute.

How To Make Doctors Worse

It seems counterintuitive that someone’s economic standing can affect someone else’s performance rating.  As cruel as that sounds, doctors in Massachusetts General Hospital had examined performance rating for physicians.  The outcome came to be that doctors who treat patients who are economically underdeveloped, they receive lower performance ratings. It turns out that patients who have higher incomes are the most difficult to treat and please.  This turns out to be a larger conflict than it once started out. Medicare wants to measure these performances to their payment; meaning that doctors who are paid less when treating poorer patients, they will be more hesitant to treat those patients.

Yet, politically correcting this imbalance will be difficult and physicians who only have a handful of these patients will make them feel that they are being punished for the patient overall discrimination.  However, these physicians are in the same practice group, so why is the mystery that some are getting lower ratings than other physicians?

Free Heroin to Battle Addiction

It seems counterintuitive to being giving the worst drug addict daily doses of heroin in a government funded clinic.  In Vancouver, there are clinics where they provide drug addicts with doses of their drug every day.  They say that if they make the patient comfortable by giving them doses 2 or 3 times a day, it is less likely for them to “end up in an alley dead with a needle in their arms or much less likely to sell themselves sexually for money to buy drugs.”  This ultimately ends up helping those addicts but also for the civilians around them.  They won’t have to break into someone’s car to steal something, or to rob a store to get money.  They argue that if you simply give them the drugs, then they are keeping the society out of harm.

Kevin Thompson is a former heroin addict who visit the clinic about three times a day to get his doses.  When Kevin was interviewed after his fix, he confessed that getting free heroin is the best way; it’s either having the government clinic provide you with the drug or having a guy like Kevin breaking into your car, or non intently hurting someone. Some of these programs have been run in Europe for years.  Dr. Scott MacDonald says that by providing them with the drugs, it will make their lives come into order again.  There is a possibility for the drug addicts to become clean, forcing them to flush the drugs. This is a treatment, where drug addicts cannot have any success in rehab centers.