EJ brought up at lunch one day about how there is some test where the psych folk with drop 3 M&Ms infront of a kid and tell them that they are going to leave the room for a bit. They also say that when they return, if the kid hasn’t eaten the 3 M&Ms the kid will get 3 more. They don’t tell the duration of time that they will be gone for.
At some age, kids learn about weighing instant gratification with patience and delayed gratification and greed?
So I was supposed to put Sal through this test.
Finally did it.
Sal sat like a happy camper, all quiet and perfect and charming in his chair with 3 Skittles in front of him for about 5 minutes while I just looked stuff up on the computer in a different room.
I went back with 3 more Skittles and he was happy to see me and happy to get his additional 3 Skittles.
He then started to eat them. I asked for the purple one and he even shared with me.
It would have been perfect, if I didn’t over hear him tell his mother, as I was leaving the room “I didn’t really want the purple one anyway.”
I wonder what he did to it (it was one of the 3 that was with him alone for a while…)
http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2009/03/09/mischel%E2%80%99s-marshmallows/
Wow. Cool.
I’ll push the time span now with Sal to see how long he can wait and then extrapolate his SAT scores from it…and BMI.
Or if he doesn’t do so well, we’ll get him into bully training school earlier rather than later.