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marshing your mallow
Sep. 6th, 2011 02:56 pmThe marshmallow study continues, with now-middle-aged participants still reflecting their four-year-old willpower. (PDF download of the study.)
I'm told that when I was about four, I participated in a study at the local university. The researcher asked me a series of questions, and I was supposed to answer them while playing with toys as some sort of distraction. Partway through, I put down the toys and asked to see the clipboard with the questions on it. The researcher bemusedly handed it over, and I read through and answered the questions, explaining that it was easier for me to process them when I read them myself. My mother sat on the other side of a two-way mirror, making a valiant effort not to piss her pants laughing. I have no idea what the study was about, but I'm pretty sure my data were excluded.
It makes me wonder how I would have handled the marshmallow test, had I been a participant at the age of four. I would have earned my second marshmallow easily, because I would have spent the fifteen-minute wait lecturing Dr. Mischel about his choice to use a candy containing gelatin and demanding to know whether he was aware of the processes involved in producing that ingredient. I would have then stormed away in a huff, possibly after destroying both marshmallows in a display of symbolic protest.
These days, I just criticize the experimental design and try to figure out the point of the study before debriefing. I am a terrible subject for scientific studies. Really, really awful.
I'm told that when I was about four, I participated in a study at the local university. The researcher asked me a series of questions, and I was supposed to answer them while playing with toys as some sort of distraction. Partway through, I put down the toys and asked to see the clipboard with the questions on it. The researcher bemusedly handed it over, and I read through and answered the questions, explaining that it was easier for me to process them when I read them myself. My mother sat on the other side of a two-way mirror, making a valiant effort not to piss her pants laughing. I have no idea what the study was about, but I'm pretty sure my data were excluded.
It makes me wonder how I would have handled the marshmallow test, had I been a participant at the age of four. I would have earned my second marshmallow easily, because I would have spent the fifteen-minute wait lecturing Dr. Mischel about his choice to use a candy containing gelatin and demanding to know whether he was aware of the processes involved in producing that ingredient. I would have then stormed away in a huff, possibly after destroying both marshmallows in a display of symbolic protest.
These days, I just criticize the experimental design and try to figure out the point of the study before debriefing. I am a terrible subject for scientific studies. Really, really awful.
