this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
389 points (94.9% liked)

Comic Strips

16446 readers
3659 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 17 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

A shower thought about the original experiment:

It may have only measured how effective "waiting for future gains" was, as a strategy, for each child, in their circumstance.

So the real discovery may be only that the children already had a pretty good idea how promising their own futures were. :(

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 hours ago

Or hungrier kids (aka poorer kids) get the marshmallow first. Or those in greater need of serotonin (at least I think it's serotonin) you get from sugar, etc. There's a variety of issues here, but that's true of most "experiments" that aren't actually randomized controlled trial experiments.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 13 hours ago

Or they're just natural born addicts like myself and need that instant reward and think to hell with my future self. That's his problem. Present me just got a marshmallow.