Delaying Gratification in Today's Culture of Immediacy
In the famous Marshmallow experiment conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s, he attempted to find out the correlation between a person's ability to wait out their temptations for a bigger rewards and their eventual life outcomes. The children were given a marshmallow in front of them and were told to wait for the researchers to come back before they can eat it. If they were able to resist eating the marshmallow after the researchers came back after a period of time, they would received another marshmallow as a reward. As expected, some children were able to wait and some could not. Over the course of this whole experimentation, Walter Mischel and his team realised that children who were able to resist the temptation of eating the marshmallow in front of them tend to perform better in life when they are older. This is widely termed as "Delayed Gratification", which simply means the ability to reject instant reward in exchange for a larger reward in the