Delayed gratification
I'm pretty sure 80% of my kindergarteners would fail this test:
Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.
(hat tip Andrew Sullivan)
Friday, September 18, 2009
(hat tip Andrew Sullivan)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Search This Blog
Categories
- korea (148)
- places of worship (103)
- Britain (63)
- ruins (51)
- awesomeness (48)
- castles fortresses and palaces (47)
- England (38)
- Japan (34)
- architecture (34)
- art (34)
- teaching (34)
- politics (29)
- holidays and festivals (28)
- food (22)
- news (22)
- Cambodia (19)
- philosophy (19)
- Iceland (17)
- volcanoes (17)
- hiking (15)
- meta-blogging (15)
- Wales (13)
- Scotland (12)
- hobocore (12)
- music (12)
- comics (9)
- religion (9)
- cemeteries (7)
- the future (6)
- Viking (5)
- books (5)
- mindfulness (5)
- Romans (4)
- movies (4)
- writing (3)
- Canada (2)
- glaciers (2)
2 comments:
I think this is less a test about delayed gratification and more a test of children's ability to sit in a room by themselves for several minutes without resorting to eating for entertainment.
I would have eaten the marshmallow just to have something to do!
I think your are right for some of them. Some of them spend time sniffing the marshmallow and eating little bits, which your are right, could be out of boredom as much as out of temptation. However, some of the kids seem to thoroughly occupy themselves with the dilemma and hardly seem bored. It is enough of a factor that I certainly wouldn't consider the experiment rigorously scientific since it might not be measuring what it purports to be studying.
As a child I'm pretty sure I would have had no trouble with this test. I've always had a long attention span. I probably would have pretended that the marshmallow was a spaceship or dinosaur or something to occupy myself though, and might even have eaten it as part of the story I was telling myself. I forget a lot of things when caught up in stories.
Post a Comment