COVID-19: The Marshmallow Test that can save Millions of Lives and Trillions of Dollars
Vipan Nikore, MD, MBA
11 Apr 2020 ~ 7 minute read
In 1990, Stanford Professor Walter Mischel, and his colleagues Yuichi Shoda, and Philip K. Peake, published a famous psychology study that measured the ability for children to delay immediate satisfaction for future rewards. It was simple, 185 preschoolers were left alone and told that if they could resist one marshmallow for 15 minutes, they would get two marshmallows in the future. They started this experiment in the 1960’s, and when they followed up in the 1980’s, they found that children who resisted the initial marshmallow demonstrated better life outcomes by many measures.