Without Lifting A Finger

The Stanford marshmallow experiment [ 1 ] was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel , then a professor at Stanford University . In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately or two small rewards if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. (The reward was sometimes a marshmallow , but often a cookie or a pretzel .) In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores , [ 2 ] educational attainment, [ 3 ] body mass index (BMI), [ 4 ] and other life measures.