Narrator: Now listen to part of a lecture on this topic in a psychology class.
Professor: There’s this famous experiment known as the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. Researchers got a bunch of 4- or 5-year-old kids and gave them each a marshmallow. They told the kids that if they didn’t eat the marshmallow now, they would get another marshmallow later, and they could eat both of them. If they did eat the marshmallow right now, they wouldn’t get a second one. It turned out that some kids ate the marshmallow right away, while others were able to wait.
Then, in a second experiment, they split the kids into two groups. Before they even brought out the marshmallows, they started treating the two groups differently. In the first group, they’d promise the kids a reward, and then they’d actually give them the reward later. So they’d say that they’d give them more crayons to color with, and then they’d come back and give them the crayons. In the other group, they’d promise the kids a reward, but then they’d never give it to them, and they’d leave them disappointed.
When they did the marshmallow experiment with these two groups, they found that the kids in the first group did a much better job at not eating the marshmallow. The kids in that group learned that the researchers would actually come back and follow through on their promises, so they were more willing to wait. The other group learned that the researchers were likely to disappoint them, so they tended to eat the marshmallow right away instead of waiting for a second one.
Narrator: Explain how performing the marshmallow experiment helped to improve the children’s ability to delay gratification.
In the second phase of the marshmallow experiment, um, the researchers treated two groups of children differently. With the first group, they told them that they would bring them rewards and they did… bring them rewards. The second group, they told them they would give them rewards and they never ended up giving them to them. So then… when they tried to give the marshmallow experiment again, the first children, um, you know, believed the researchers and were… able to do delayed gratification. They waited for, um, the marshmallows, because they had a trust with the researchers. And the children who did not have that experience… had a harder time, um, because, you know, they thought they wouldn’t have the marshmallows. So they didn’t wait.
The student explains in detail how the experiment worked for both groups of children. She also explains the connection to the concept of delayed gratification. In the first part of her response, she sometimes uses the same pronouns (they, them) to refer to different groups of people or things and this can be confusing. She could improve her response by explaining a little more about what the marshmallow experiment actually was. It would also help not to use quite so many pronouns (“they” and “them” over and over), because it becomes unclear which people are being referred to (the researchers or the children).