Yuichi Shoda and the Marshmallow Test are cited in this Medium.com article about COVID-19.
COVID-19: The Marshmallow Test that can Save Millions of Lives and Trillions of Dollars
Vipan Nikore, MD, MBAFollow
Apr 12
What a famous Stanford experiment can teach us and why a coordinated effort to physically distance, wash your hands, and stay home when sick is especially critical this next month.
In 1990, Stanford Professor Walter Mischel, and his colleagues Yuichi Shoda, and Philip K. Peake, published a famous psychology study that measured the ability for children to delay immediate satisfaction for future rewards. It was simple, 185 preschoolers were left alone and told that if they could resist one marshmallow for 15 minutes, they would get two marshmallows in the future. They started this experiment in the 1960’s, and when they followed up in the 1980’s, their original interpretation of the results suggested that children who resisted the initial marshmallow demonstrated better life outcomes by many measures.
With almost 2 million COVID-19 infections and 100,000 deaths in almost every country across the globe, everyone in the world is about to face their own variation of the marshmallow test, and the rewards are not two marshmallows but rather millions of lives saved and a stronger, more flourishing economy. The ability of the world’s citizens over the next month to delay gratification by resisting basic human instincts (and resist the upcoming nice weather for those experiencing seasonal changes) will determine our future.
Just like with the marshmallow test there are no tricks — for a short amount of time stop as much of basic routine life as possible, stay six feet apart from others, wash your hands, and do not go outside if you are sick (unless of course it is an emergency such as going the hospital)— if people do this, then less people will die, the economy and daily lives will return to normal sooner, and your world and everyone’s world will be much better in the long run.
Read the entire article here.