Dr. Kentaro Fujita

So the setup here, it sounds really simple, but there's a lot of art behind this to make this experiment work the way that it's supposed to.

I don't know if it reduces the trust in the parents' advice, but there is a lot of research on what's known as social modeling.

The most famous experiment of this, they brought in a blow-up doll, which was a clown, and it was referred to as Bobo.

And kids either watched a video of an adult punching Bobo or being nice to Bobo.

And then we're allowed to play with Bobo themselves.

And those that watched the adult punch Bobo were more likely to punch Bobo themselves.

So this suggests that children are very observant for our own behavior.

And so if you are acting in a certain way, children are learning that that's the appropriate way to learn.

So I don't know that it's been done specific on self-control.

It may have.

But certainly in many, many other behaviors, children are remarkably observant of what adults do.

So as I mentioned, the marshmallows experiments or marshmallow tests, they have to be set up right.

And like a lot of other psychology experiments, I think the psychologists kind of intuitively understood what it took to get it right, but were not very good at articulating those for others to follow in kind of a recipe book.

The most famous criticism or the one that got the most press recently is that there was a very large data set of children outcomes in which they completed the marshmallow test at four years old.

and then a bunch of different life outcomes at adolescence.

And so they basically wanted to see whether they could replicate the marshmallow test.

And in principle, they should have.

And they did and they did not.

So if you looked at the simple correlation between did delay time predict outcomes like academic achievement and problematic behavior, the answer was yes, it seemed to replicate.

But then the researchers controlled for things like social economic status, which was one of the criticisms of the original Stanford studies, because Stanford children, or at least the children that were going to the Stanford University daycare where these experiments were being conducted, were not your average American family, mostly well-to-do.