this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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[โ€“] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 20 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

A shower thought about the original experiment:

It may have only measured how effective "waiting for future gains" was, as a strategy, for each child, in their circumstance.

So the real discovery may be only that the children already had a pretty good idea how promising their own futures were. :(

[โ€“] taiyang@lemmy.world 8 points 4 weeks ago

Or hungrier kids (aka poorer kids) get the marshmallow first. Or those in greater need of serotonin (at least I think it's serotonin) you get from sugar, etc. There's a variety of issues here, but that's true of most "experiments" that aren't actually randomized controlled trial experiments.

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