“Can Marshmallows Predict a Child’s Future or is it Just a Tasty Treat?”

The Marshmallow Test was a study of nursery children to see if they had the ability to challenge their temptations. A marshmallow was put in front of them on a plate and the child had two options-to either wait fifteen minutes and receive another, or to eat the marshmallow right away. Many children have a difficult time restraining their needs, and not realizing what the consequences might be in the future. Children, especially nursery aged, do not know or realize that they have or can have willpower. Some might have it without realizing. For example, if a child does wait those fifteen minutes to receive another marshmallow, they are resisting their temptations no matter how hard it is.

Willpower is to have control of one’s impulses and actions; self-control. However, willpower is also “the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals.” In this case, children who were able to resist eating the first marshmallow were seen as having the ability to better stay in relationships when they were older. For instance, if a person can resist cheating on their partner, it can give them the ability of being loyal to him/her. The short temptations would be the cheating and the long-term goal would become loyal and perhaps starting a future together. But the question is why can some people resist their temptation, while others cannot? Suppose an individual needed to make some fast money and had two options in mind, having a healthy and steady job and having the salary $8 an hour or seeking out a secretive “spot” to help drug addicts fight their withdrawal symptoms making $1000 a day. The natural human instinct is to make the most money in a short amount of time, but what people do not realize in their moment of decision, is their long-term goals in contrast to short-term temptations.

For children to recognize this concept and understand how they can apply it to their everyday decisions can have a major impact on their lives and shapes them as individuals. According to Marina Chaparro, RD, one of the best things about willpower is that growing self-control in one areas of your life leads to other positive changes. Willpower changes the way people think. For instance, going to the gym may lead to eating healthier. Willpower is not innate, however it is similar to a muscle in a body where it can be strengthen over time. Yet, unlike muscles, willpower can be affected by emotions. If the child had a tough day, he/she might just eat the first marshmallow to make his or her day seem a bit better. Short-term temptations are diseases, cravings, thoughts that are turned into actions without rethinking about what the outcomes might be.

Children who were able to resist eating the first marshmallow grew up into teenagers who received higher SAT scores and were seen as having the ability to better stay in relationships than the children who ate the marshmallow in the first thirty seconds. The man behind this 1960’s experiment goes by the name of Dr. Walter Mischel, who in fact noticed that the children who were able to wait for the second marshmallow displayed creative ways of distracting themselves. The distractive behaviors suggest that the children with greater willpower have a higher sense of creativity. The results were incredible; the preschoolers who were able to control their temptations have a lower BMI, lower rates of addiction, a lower divorce rate and were able to conquer stress in their future. However, Mischel does not lose any faith in the preschoolers who immediately ate the first marshmallow saying, “I have no doubt that self-control skills … are imminently teachable.”

For instance, “If you’re a smoker and as you approach the cigarette you’re thinking lung cancer … and imagining it very vividly, your picture of your lung with a black spot and your physician telling you ‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you etc.’ that visualization can be very powerful,” said Mischel. Mischel believes that techniques of self-control can be taught and learned at any age. But the question is why can some people resist their temptation, while others cannot? Suppose an individual needed to make some fast money and had two options in mind, having a healthy and steady job and having the salary $8 an hour or seeking out a secretive “spot” to help drug addicts fight their withdrawal symptoms making $1000 a day. The natural human instinct is to make the most money in a short amount of time, but what people do not realize in their moment of decision, is their long-term goals in contrast to short-term temptations.

The Marshmallow Test is in fact a study testing children’s’ willpower and their self-control. Willpower has many factors including the child’s parents, the environment they grew up around, and if they have the ability to trust. Waking up everyday to the same surroundings shapes the way people think and act, and the people show them who to trust and who to look past. Growing up in an environment where children only know that the norm of their society is to have things and items taken away from them will cause them to grow up with having extremely low expectations and little to no trust in anyone around them.

The beginning of this argument presents the “facts” dealing with this famous psychological test. However, it may have many parents fooled into thinking this test depicts their child’s entire future. A single, tempting marshmallow is placed in front of each preschooler in a blank room. Given two options, the child can immediately eat the marshmallow in front of them, or they can wait fifteen minutes until the instructor returns and rewarding them with a second marshmallow. As a result of this experiment, the results came to conclude that children who had the decency to wait the fifteen minutes grew up into teenagers who scored significantly higher on the SATs than the children who could not help satisfy their cravings.

Indeed, the data did conclude that the children who have self-control scored higher on the SATs, less likely to become divorced, and were prepared to handle stress in a better way. However, what most people, especially parents, are not told is that Mischel had only taken the results of 94 children out of the entire 550 who participated in this experiment. Mischel had only tracked down 94 SAT test scores, which is a small percentage of 17% of the entire population of the study. The correlation between a child being able to wait 15 minutes to receive a second marshmallow and their future test scores was negative, and did not go hand in hand with one another. Most of the children who participated in this study did not actually contribute in the original marshmallow test. Instead, “their marshmallow was covered from view, or they were given a pretend scenario to distract themselves with,” (Bronson and Merryman.) The original children who did the original were 35 children, 17 boys and 18 girls. These results came to be a third of the 35 children waited the full fifteen minutes, while only a minority of children ate the marshmallow almost immediately.

The famous Marshmallow Test conducted in the 1960s, about 55 years ago, came from 35 hungry and sugar-hyped children who could not wait to get their hands on the deliciously sweet snack. University of Connecticut, Inge Marie-Eigsti had attempted to replicate the findings and conclusions of Mischel’s study. Her team had successfully tracked down the children who had done the Marshmallow Task back in the 1990’s, except with cookies in replacement of the marshmallows. Her did found it ridiculous to ask for their SAT scores thinking they would not have much of a difference. The now 18-year-olds were given a full IQ examination. In addition to testing the teenagers’ IQs, Eigsti’s team also ran tests of “executive function” which is part of the brain that controls self-control. Their conclusions came to be the correlation between avoiding to eat the cookie when they were four year olds and their IQ or self-control at their current age was not interrelated at all.

Eigsti had found some surprising evidence from the data that was collected. Connected to Mischel, Eigsti had only a handful, five, children who ate the cookie almost immediately. Interestingly, these children demonstrated symptoms of ADHD. After 55 years of praising Mischel’s work for predicting the life of a preschooler, in actuality, the Marshmallow Test may have just been a test to see whether the child has Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Children with ADHD typically have symptoms that start to appear before the age of seven. The youngster’s, who cannot sit still, never listen, cannot follow directions or choose not to follow them, announce inappropriate comments may be known as the typical troublemaker, or they can have ADHD without any adult realizing until they are older. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder usually appears in early childhood but it is difficult to come to that conclusion. Helpguide has listed some facts about ADHD including:

“Some children with ADD/ADHD are hyperactive, but many others with attention problems are not. Children with ADD/ADHD who are inattentive, but not overly active, may appear to be spacey and unmotivated. Children with ADD/ADHD may do their best to be good, but still be unable to sit still, stay quiet, or pay attention. They may appear disobedient, but that doesn’t mean they’re acting out on purpose. ADD/ADHD often continues into adulthood, so don’t wait for your child to outgrow the problem. Treatment can help your child learn to manage and minimize the symptoms.”

Not all children with ADHD are hyperactive; some children may be the out of control child who cannot stop fidgeting or in constant motion, but others may experience a type of mellow approach to ADHD. Some children may sit quietly in the back of the classroom while having their mind wonder off into space and unable to stay focused on one thing. This may be the key answer as to why some children are able to resist eating the second marshmallow. These children may be able to distract themselves and not stay focused on the marshmallow for every second of the fifteen minutes.

Mischel had made many predictions and hypotheses about the outcomes that would result form this experiment. His description of children with insufficient development of the brain’s executive functions fit the descriptions of children with ADHD quite well. ADHD had been considered a problem in young boys who would not listen to their parents and would have behavior problems. Now, “it has been redefined as a developmental impairment of the brain’s self management system.” The preschoolers that Mischel had used for this experiment had done brain scans in their midlife. The results showed that those who had more difficulty in waiting proved differences in the brain functioning, which is extremely comparable to those found in children with ADHD. The preschoolers who had a hard time waiting for their second marshmallow had inherited difficulties in the brain’s executive functioning areas, most similar of those with ADHD. These children may seem as though impatient hungry children, which may just be the case. However, it can lead to more evidence in their impatient, fidgety behaviors that they experienced throughout their adult life as well as their preschool years.

Many brains scans have been performed on children who are suspected to have Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. “The neuroimaging technique that has aroused the most interest among those suspected of having ADD is SPECT. This 20-minute test measures blood flow within the brain; it shows which brain regions are metabolically active (“hot”) and which are quiescent (“cold”) when an individual completes various tasks.” Many scientists have found that the people who have ADHD have a slower brain maturity rate. Their brains do not mature as quickly as they should. Scientists also discovered that certain areas of the brain are less or more active when performing a task with ADHD when compared to people who do not suffer from ADHD. According to the Marshmallow Test, those with high self-control also showed different brain patterns compared to those who had low self-control. For those who experience high self-control, researchers found that the prefrontal cortex becomes more active as opposed to those with low self-control; the ventral striatum shows a boost in activity. The world famous Marshmallow Test can still manipulate the minds of some parents, but it can all be a misunderstanding. The test may have been a test to see whether children are experiencing symptoms of ADHD without knowing. From the research presented, Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Test does not correlate the resistance of a marshmallow to a child’s life accomplishments.

Works Cited

Smith, Melinda, Lawrence Robinson, and Jeanne Segal. “ADD / ADHD in Children.” : Signs and Symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder in Kids. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2015. <http://www.helpguide.org/articles/add-adhd/attention-deficit-disorder-adhd-in-children.htm&gt;.

Bronson, Po, and Ashley Merryman. “Just Let Them Eat the Marshmallow.” The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, 19 Feb. 2010. Web. 23 Apr. 2015. <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/02/19/just-let-them-eat-the-marshmallow.html&gt;.

Brown, Thomas E. “The Marshmallow Test,.” Psychology Today. N.p., 2 Dec. 2014. Web. 25 Apr. 2015. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mysteries-add/201412/the-marshmallow-test-willpower-and-adhd-part-1&gt;.

Watson, Stephanie. “Worth 1,000 Words: What a Brain Scan Reveals About ADHD.” Healthline. N.p., 16 Sept. 2013. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <http://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/brain-scans#Results4&gt;.

Sherman, Carl. “Can Brain Scans Help Diagnose ADHD?” ADDitude Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <http://www.additudemag.com/adhd/article/783.html&gt;.