MARSHMALLOWS, GREEN TEA, AND SUCCESS IN LIFE
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on August 22, 2013. The cure for addiction to rewards-without-effort (government welfare) afflicting so many millions is needed more than ever today. Several TTPers have told me they consider this one of the most important articles ever in TTP.]
TTP August 22, 2013
It began in Trinidad. Walter Mischel, a Jewish kid from Vienna whose family escaped from the Nazis to Brooklyn, was doing field work on the Caribbean island for his Ph.D. in psychology. It was 1955, and he noticed the population was split between people whose families came from India and those from Africa.
The Indians thought the Africans were “impulsive hedonists” who lived for the moment and never cared for the future, while the Africans thought the Indians only cared about “stuffing money into their mattresses” and didn’t know how to have fun. He wondered what lay behind such assessments.
In 1966, when the Stanford Psych Department launched its Bing Nursery School to research child development, Walter thought back to his days in Trinidad and came up with an experiment that was to become famous as the Stanford Marshmallow Test.












