I can resist everything except temptation (or marshmallows)

by | Sunday, September 20, 2009

Have you heard of the marshmallow experiment? It is a pretty famous experiment conducted at Stanford back in the 60’s. Walter Mischel a psychologist conducted this experiment on four-year olds in which the children were given one marshmallow and promised a second marshmallow if only they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Turns out that some children could and others couldn’t wait. Following up on this study Mischel and his collaborators found that those who waited were better adjusted, dependable and, on some measures, more successful than those who could not delay gratification. In fact they found that these children scored an average of 210 points higher on the SAT!!

You can read more about this experiment and its findings in this New Yorker article titled Don’t: The secret of self control.

I had read of this experiment a while ago, it had also been the focus of a recent RadioLab segment and then I began running across a video titled Oh, The Temptation. As the director describes it he used, 2 Hidden Cameras, A bunch of Kids, 1 Marshmallow each to create this movie. He agrees that this was “not an original idea, but very fun to make.” And it is great fun to watch…

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

Topics related to this post: Evolution | Identity | Personal | Psychology | Research | Science | Video | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Blogging SETS: Morning session

I am trying to live blog the conference: Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity [Full agenda here]. Let us see how far I can keep this up. August 20: Morning session: The pre-conference session has been about meeting old...

New ambigram logo for ideaplay.org

I had written previously about a blog started by students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Ph.D. program (ideaplay.org) and had designed a couple of ambigrammatic logos for them. You can see the original post here. Here is one of the original...

iVideos from Australia, the 2011 edition

Last June I had posted a note (Teacher as filmmaker: An update from down under) about the iVideos created by students from the University of Technology, Sydney (under the guidance of Dr. Matthew Kearney). iVideos or "idea videos" are short films often 2 minutes (or...

Sketching on the iPad

Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting with using my iPad as a drawing/painting tool. The sketches below were created by tracing on an existing image - usually a photograph. So this is not "freehand" drawing per se - but given my limited talents that may...

TPACK on Vimeo & in the Netherlands

Dr. Clare Kilbane, Associate Professor at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio recently created an enhanced podcast/vodcast explaining TPACK as a part of an ARRA grant implemented in the state of Ohio last spring. This podcast/vodcast was designed in the style of...

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya 2007

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya (2007) is an important paper in the TPACK related work for a range of reasons. The research captured in this paper actually predates the TCRecord (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) article, but the vagaries of publishing and journal waiting-lists...

Technology integration, looking forward to the past

Tom Johnson's Adventures in Pencil Integration is the smartest, sassiest blog I have come across in a long time. This is how the sidebar describes the blog/author. The year is 1897 and Tom Johnson works for a small school district. This is the story of the journey to...

Presentation at University of Zurich

Presentation at University of Zurich

I was invited by my friend Dominik Petko, Professor of Teaching and Educational Technology at the Institute for Educational Science at the University of Zurich to make a presentation to their faculty and staff. The video of my presentation (Contextualizing TPACK...

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #16, May 2013

  TPACK Newsletter, Issue #16: May 2013 Welcome to the sixteenth edition of the (approximately quarterly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and useful to you,...

1 Comment

  1. Onlinespiele

    Thats a great Post and the Video is really good. I dont know if you have seen that on TED.com, there was a gread Ted Talk a while ago concerning that expereminent. It was mostly about gratification, but it featured some other funny moments from the video as well. Definately worth it, if i find the link i would be glad to post it, yet i am not one of the Kids that wait i guess=))

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *