Dr. Kentaro Fujita

In my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their whys, the purposes behind their decisions, the broader purposes behind what they're doing, they're much more likely to be able to overcome the temptation.

So if there's a piece of chocolate cake in front of me and I'm trying not to eat it, if you said, oh, I'm not supposed to eat that because I'm on a diet, that doesn't have much magic to it.

But if instead I'm saying things like, I need to do this for my family, I want to look good for my children's wedding photos, or my children are looking at me, or I want to be a good example, or all these other kinds of reasons that you might, these higher order reasons that you might have for getting healthier, being fitter, or whatever, not eating the cake, we show that that increases the odds that people will avoid the cake.

And we think it's because it's giving people meaning.

These are higher order things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out.

So the marshmallow test was actually a series of experiments that was conducted by Walter Mischel,

in the 60s to 70s to 80s at Stanford.

And what happens in the classic paradigm is a child comes in and is seated in front of a plate with some kind of thing that they really want.

Generally speaking, it was a single marshmallow.

And the children were told that the experimenter was going to leave for a while, but if they could avoid eating the one, or basically hold out and not eat the one,

And it was still there when the experimenter came back, they could get two marshmallows.

So this is essentially a self-control problem because you have a smaller sooner reward and you're sort of trading that off with a larger later reward.

And the key dependent variable here was how long the child could wait.

Now, the dirty little secret about the marshmallow experiments is that no child waited the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was gone.

But what you could do is you could basically – as soon as the door closed, you would start the timer and then the amount – and you were just basically looking to see how long the children would wait.

That was interpreted as the child's delay of gratification ability or otherwise self-control.

Now, there were a series of experiments that we can talk about.

They used these experiments to learn a lot about the different tactics and tricks and tools that kids could learn to use to improve their delay of gratification.

But that's not what everybody knows.

What everybody knows about these experiments is that many years later, they analyzed data in which they looked at children's delay times.