Walter Mischel's Marshmallow Experiment

In the world of psychology, researchers often base their works off of previous experiments that revolutionized their fields and dramatically changed the way of thinking during their time. One example of these revolutionary experiments is Walter Mischel’s 1966 Marshmallow Test, which provided information regarding self-control amongst children exposed to delay-of-gratification. During the late 1960’s when the field of social psychology was in a state of transition between methods of experimentation, the Marshmallow Test was one of the original tests that first used independent and dependent variables. These early experiments set the premise for later experiments to be performed after the definition of experimentation was changed. With this knowledge,

The participants were separated into two groups: one with the reward(s) in front of them while waiting and the other without the presence of the reward. Both groups were told if they waited 15 minutes, they would receive two marshmallows, but if they did not wait the full amount of time, they would only receive one. In Mischel & Ebbesen’s (1970) “Attention in delay of gratification,” they hypothesized that as the degree of attention paid to the delayed rewards increased, the length of time which the children waited would increase. To their surprise as well as others, their results did not support their hypothesis, and the thoughts regarding self-regulation of the time changed significantly (Mischel & Ebbesen,

The primary process is “the baby’s act of creating in its mind an image of an object that will fulfill a need.” This process is controlled by what Freud terms the id, which refers to the natural, unconscious instincts and drives that a person is born with. The secondary process, however, converts these images into action and is controlled by the ego (Cordón, 2015). Thus, the transition from the unconscious to the conscious opposes Mischel’s belief of how delay of gratification occurs (Mischel & Ebbesen,