“At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. Craig, a year older than Carolyn, still remembers the torment of trying to wait. I’m sure she would have waited.” But her brother Craig, who also took part in the experiment, displayed less fortitude. “If you give me a challenge or a task, then I’m going to find a way to do it, even if it means not eating my favorite food.” Her mother, Karen Sortino, is still more certain: “Even as a young kid, Carolyn was very patient. “I’ve always been really good at waiting,” Carolyn told me. Then he left the room.Īlthough Carolyn has no direct memory of the experiment, and the scientists would not release any information about the subjects, she strongly suspects that she was able to delay gratification. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says.

Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine.

Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. Children who are able to pass the marshmallow test enjoy greater success as adults.

The marshmallow test book