Today we started working on our Psychology Fair project. We are going to be doing the "Marshmallow Experiment," which is a study on delayed gratification. Our participants will be offered the choice of getting a marshmallow right away, or the option of waiting a few more minutes for two of the sweet treats. They will not know how long they have to wait, but we will have them wait for 4 minutes.
We have been working on dividing the labor involved in this project between the three of us, as well as researching it to gain a better understanding of the significant of the results this experiment has gotten.
Here is a link to the results of the Stanford study on delayed gratification.
3/10
Today we looked up articles to better immerse ourselves in understanding the marshmallow experiment and delayed gratification. Basically we are testing people's self control.
3/11
We are trying to find a hypothesis based on what we think will happen at the Psychology fair. We are not testing little kids, which is usually how this experiment is done. Instead we are testing highschoolers. A concern of ours is that the marshmallow will not be temptation enough for our older test subjects, but we still want to try it out.
3/14
Brainstorming ideas for poster board
3/15
We have decided that marshmallows may not be enough to tempt people. We are going to have candy too. The experiment will stay the same, except that instead of getting two marshmallows in delayed gratification, they will get the two and a piece of candy.
3/16
Today we worked on our poster board. Our hypothesis is, If given the option of delayed gratification, our participants will not wait, only take the marshmallow and leave. We think this because highschoolers are impatient and will just want to continue on with psych fair.
3/17
We continued to work on our poster board today
3/18
Finished our poster board. It is pretty colorful and we hope it will attract people to our booth.
3/21
We need a lot of marshmallows. And candy. I have some candy at home but the three of us are going to go out to get some marshmallows for Psych Fair.
3/22
We bought our marshmallows today. We were worried about not having enough but I think we are going to have a lot of extras.
Great topic! This long article from the Atlantic might be useful (interview with Mishel) http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/what-the-marshmallow-test-really-teaches-about-self-control/380673/ AND this one about a "modern" take on the marshmallow test might be interesting to you http://hechingerreport.org/the-new-marshmallow-test-resisting-the-temptations-of-the-web/
ReplyDeleteLove this topic always interesting to see the conclusion of studies like this.
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