Turns out the test is only a good predictor of “how well you can trust the adults in your life to keep their words”. Which tells more about the envirement than about the kid.
This experiment was not specifically about whether a kid would wait for the second marshmellow or not (which would be delayed by 20+ minutes), nor whether they would play with the roomful of toys, but to see how they grew up. The real test was to catch up with the adults and see how ‘successful’ they’d become. The experimenters found that those children who waited for the second marshmellow achieved higher grades and had more ‘successful’ better-paying careers.
It’s the concept of delayed rewards vs immediate rewards and is prevalent in the world of machine learning.
later replications of the test showed that the difference between kids waiting or not, and successful or not was significantly related to their parents financial status, in other words, the broke kids ate the stuff that was in front of them, because they learned that promises are not always kept
I’d have the one just so I don’t have to wait 5 minutes to get out of that weird ass test.
the study didn’t account that many kids assumed the guy was lying
