By Rick Nauert, PsychCentral, January 31, 2020
New research finds that children are more likely to control their immediate impulses when they and a peer rely on each other to get a reward than when they’re left to their own willpower. Investigators say their experiments are the first to show that children are more willing to delay gratification for cooperative reasons than for individual goals.
In the study, researchers used a modified version of the “marshmallow test,” a classic psychological experiment designed to examine young children’s ability to delay gratification. In the classic experiment, preschool children were led into a room where a marshmallow or other treat was placed on a table.
Investigators Rebecca Koomen, Sebastian Grueneisen, and Esther Herrmann, all affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology paired up more than 200 5- and 6-year-olds and had them play a brief balloon toss game to get comfortable in the testing environment. They then put the partners in separate rooms and placed a cookie in front of each of them.
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