3 MARSHMALLOW CULTURE

On January 23, 2017, the New Yorker ran a cartoon depicting Donald Trump at his inauguration. A man representing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court extends his hand, which has something in it, and says: “You can eat the one marshmallow right now, or, if you wait fifteen minutes, I'll give you two marshmallows and swear you in as President of the United States.”
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The cartoon calls us back to our childhood: The uncle just showed us a marshmallow and then left the room. If we immediately call him back, we immediately get the marshmallow. If we wait until he returns to the room on his own, we get two marshmallows. The “uncle” was the Austrian-American psychologist Walter Mischel, and the game was part of an experiment he conducted with four-year-old children between 1968 and 1974. In 1980 and 1981, Mischel revisited his subjects and discovered that the ones who were capable of waiting as young children were better developed intellectually and socially than their impatient peers.