Thursday, January 7, 2016
Is the Marshmallow Experiment relevant?
Today we talked about the Marshmallow experiment and the correlation that comes along with it. The experiment they did was put a marshmallow in front of a little kid and he was told if he could wait 20 minutes, he would receive another one. They accounted for 94 percent of the kids later in their life and gathered data on their BMI and SAT. It was shown that the kids that waited had a higher SAT and a lower BMI. However, I question if this is even relevant. How can we determine whether a little boy's patience determines his success later in life. I feel that this test may determine something about the kid in their early stages, however, I believe people all mature at different rates. The question also comes up what does an SAT determine? Many people believe it is a test that determines very little about intelligence. This experiment is very interesting, however, I don't believe we can consider this experiment extremely relevant. Thoughts?
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I think it would be interesting to do a version of this experiment on high school/ college students that haven't heard about the marshmallow experiment before after they have taken the SAT and made some major life decisions. I wonder if it would be more effective to look back at they're past achievements and compare it to a time when one is more capable of weighing every cost and benefit since they are older.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Bailey that the Marshmallow test does not truly correlate with the kid's future SAT scores. But, today in class we watched another video about the marshmallow test conducted by a different scientist. This test also explained that the marshmallow test does relate to the child's future SAT scores, which I disagree with, but it also brought up another point. It stated that the marshmallow test was conducted on students at the age of four, and then the children were reassessed when they were 18 years old. The kids who ate the marshmallow without waiting proved to be less confident, more easily angered, and worse at collaboration when they were 18. I thought that this information was incredibly interesting and factual, because a person's patience level as a child could relate to these attributes later in life.
ReplyDeleteI also don't think that you can base a kid's whole future and how they will grow up to be based on an experiment about patience. This is also not connected to the SAT or any other kind of testings. There is always room to grow.
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