America Has Become a One Marshmallow Country

In the 1960s and into the early 1970s, psychologist Walter Mischel* created the “marshmallow test”. The basic premise was to see whether children could develop the self-discipline of delayed gratification. A researcher would sit in a room with a child. When the researcher had to step outside the room for an indeterminate time, she gave the child a marshmallow and told the child that if he didn’t eat it, when the…