The Underestimated Role of Worldviews

A worldview exerts a continual pull on all aspects of life and learning. Understanding this can lead to better educational interventions.

The marshmallow experiment is one of psychology's most famous experiments. The marshmallow experiment, as a reminder, is designed to show cognitive control, or rather, delayed reward gratification.

The experiment goes as this: a child is placed in a room with a marshmallow in front of them, they are then instructed by an adult that the adult is going to leave the room, and the child can choose to eat the marshmallow now, or not eat the marshmallow. If the marshmallow is still there when the adult returns, they will get another marshmallow as a reward. This gives the child two marshmallows, double their original circumstance, on the condition that they manage to exert the cognitive control to resist the temptation of eating the juicy marshmallow placed in front of them.

There have been many variations of this experiment and many amusing YouTube videos to back them up (see below). The videos are amusing because we see sweet children struggling to control their desire and impulse to eat the marshmallow and employ a number of amusing strategies. So far so good.

Where the experiments become more interesting is correlating them to later academic or life success. The original experiments showed that those children who could resist the marshmallow, or whatever sweet temptation was used for the experiment, enjoy much more later-life success, such as higher income, higher academic achievements, better professions. The relatively simple logic, based on brain functioning, is that the cognitive control required to resist immediate gratification, is similar to the cognitive control required for many aspects of life such as studying, and waiting and working for a bigger reward later. There is a whole bunch of truth in this hypothesis.

However, a new twist to this experiment has raised some other issues and this is relevant for education and schooling.