Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.

The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores, and lower body mass indexes.[i] Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.

In 2019, researchers paired up more than five- and six-year-olds. They played a brief balloon toss game to let them get to know their partner.

They then put the partners in separate rooms and placed a cookie in front of each of them. Some partners were assigned to a solo condition and only had to rely on their own self-control to earn a second cookie, much like the traditional experiment. Others were placed in a cooperative condition in which they received a second treat only if both they and their partner waited until the experimenter returned. Waiting in this condition was therefore risky and indeed less likely to result in a second cookie because children had to rely both on themselves and their partner to refrain from eating. The authors called this the interdependence condition. To identify any cultural differences in the responses, the researchers tested children at a laboratory in Germany and went to schools in Kenya to test children of the Kikuyu tribe. 

Across both conditions, Kikuyu children were more likely to delay gratification compared to their German counterparts. However, across the two cultures, significantly more children held off on eating the first cookie in the interdependence condition compared with the solo condition. 

“The fact that we obtained these findings even though children could not see or communicate with each other attests to the strong motivational consequences that simply being in a cooperative context has for children from early on in development,” Grueneisen said.

The research team suggests that children develop a sense of obligation towards their social partners from a young age. 

“In this study, children may have been motivated to delay gratification because they felt they shouldn’t let their partner down,” Koomen said, “and that if they did, their partner would have had the right to hold them accountable.”[ii]

How cool is that? It rings true, doesn’t it? We all know that we will work out more if we have a workout friend and lose more weight if we do so with a friend. In our battle against the flesh, God has given us many gifts: the Spirit, his Word, and also community.

In Ephesians, Paul says that God has given Christian gifts “for the building up the body of Christ, until we all attain the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:12-13). In the book of Acts, we see a community urging one another forward in generosity, service, prayer, and courage.

Marshmallows abound in this world, but God has given us the blessing of community. Let’s press into the church so that we might push away sin.

[i] See Wikipedia’s article for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment

[ii] Association for Psychological Science, “’Marshmallow Test’ Redux: New Research Reveals Children Show Better Self-Control When They Depend on Each Other,” January 14, 2020, https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/marshmallow-test-redux-new-research-reveals-children-show-better-self-control-when-they-depend-on-each-other.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawFDHNhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHV3tB1od6WCfsDRROppXLH39kSaqWSZdNtF2ZhJWDdaNP5ngYsFue8GGZw_aem_R0ohbmfP14tohw95XyMQ2g.

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