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by sdwr
687 days ago
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Life can be a lot like a hologram, where the little things show the whole picture. The marshmallow test is not really testing hunger or self control. It tests how willing people are to align with authority/the bigger picture. The ideal participant isn't someone doing the calculus that 2 > 1. It's someone who recognizes that they are being tested, and cares about that more than any number of marshmallows. The question isn't "how hungry am I?", but "what does adult attention mean to me?". And that's why all of this stuff will stop replicating eventually, why new psychotherapies revert to the mean - it doesn't have the same amount of meaning for the test-givers after decades of trials. |
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I feel you're making the exact same mistake as the original researchers.
The marshmallow test is a proxy, but it's impossible to say what it's a proxy for in any given individual. One kid will wait because they're scared the researcher will be angry if they don't. Another kid will wait because they recently learned what marshmallows are, and they actually really want to eat two. A third will not wait, because they've never seen a marshmallow before and would rather try one first before getting two.