[tankerslay]

How is the marshmallow test (or "The Boy Who Ate the Marshmallow") different from "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"? Both teach a lesson with a nugget of wisdom, the former about the perils of self-indulgence, the latter about the foolishness of sounding a false alarm. Both lessons are supported by numerous examples--far more than 90--that each of us has observed in our own lives. But one is presented as a self-contained fictional story, while the other is told as the result of an experiment that revealed some kind of natural law.

Why is our culture so drawn to presentations of basic life lessons as if they were the results of scientific experimentation? It's as if we have some sort of self-consciousness about "believing in" fables that drives us towards the telling of "fables-as-science".