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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the cooperate dept.

"Marshmallow Test" Redux: New Research Reveals Children Show Better Self-Control When They Depend on Each Other

For their study, researchers Rebecca Koomen, Sebastian Grueneisen, and Esther Herrmann, all affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, used a modified version of the "marshmallow test," a classic psychological experiment designed to examine young children's ability to delay gratification. In the classic experiment, preschool children were led into a room where a marshmallow or other treat was placed on a table. The children were told they could either eat the treat right away, or they could wait until the experimenter, who had to step out of the room, returned, in which case they'd receive a second treat. About a third of the children were able to wait for the second treat for up to 15 minutes.

In their new research, the researchers paired up more than 200 5- and 6-year-olds and had them play a brief balloon toss game to get comfortable in the testing environment. They then put the partners in separate rooms and placed a cookie in front of each of them. Some partners were assigned to a solo condition and only had to rely on their own self-control to earn a second cookie, much like the traditional experiment. Others were placed in a cooperative condition in which they received a second treat only if both they and their partner waited until the experimenter returned. Waiting in this condition was therefore risky and indeed less likely to result in a second cookie because children had to rely both on themselves and their partner to refrain from eating. The authors called this the interdependence condition. To identify any cultural differences in the responses, the researchers tested children at a laboratory in Germany and went to schools in Kenya to test children of the Kikuyu tribe.

Across both conditions, Kikuyu children were more likely to delay gratification compared to their German counterparts. But across the two cultures, significantly more children held off on eating the first cookie in the interdependence condition compared with the solo condition.

Journal Reference:

Rebecca Koomen, Sebastian Grueneisen, Esther Herrmann. Children Delay Gratification for Cooperative Ends, Psychological Science (DOI: 10.1177/0956797619894205)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bussdriver on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:34PM

    by bussdriver (6876) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:34PM (#943731)

    It is easily as complex as predicting the weather. no matter how much they isolate variables there are many involved and some that get missed. Plus here the clouds know they are being observed and studied; even kids know something is unusual. It's in the LIMITS of science so while it is "soft" it is also the hardest science there is. Good luck trying to get enough people, time, and money to do it well and NOBODY wants to reproduce your work; it's hard enough to be able to do it the 1st time let alone the SAME uninteresting thing again... and take many years to see results. We need serious government support to make this stuff actually work. When it doesn't reproduce-- then you have to revise it to account for whatever variables broke it and start over again...

    At least the weather happens every day and the results are clear numbers. New experiments/tests daily. lots of funding.

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