Keep your eye on the marshmallow

Yesterday at the beginning of class (the first time for us to meet this semester) I gave every student a marshmallow and told them not to eat it.

Class progressed as normal and at the end I asked them what they thought the marshmallow represented (keep in mind I teach PR at Oklahoma State University). Answers ranged from “temptation” to “PR” (hard on the outside but sweet and fluffy on the inside). Then I told them it represented deferred gratification and showed them this video -

Afterward we talked about occurences throught their day and what the immediate gratifications were associated with those events:

When the alarm goes off in the morning the immediate gratification is to hit the snooze button and skip class. When you just ate lunch and would rather take a nap than go to class the immediate gratification is to skip class and take the nap. And, for my last class of the day, when all their friends are off to Joe’s and they have class the immediate gratification is to head to Joe’s. Then we walked through the day deferring gratification and what the long term impact was: class participation led to better understanding which led to better grades which led to better understanding in future classes which led to better grades which led to a high gpa at graduation which led to a “4.0″ job which led to more money which led to “Mo Money” which I assured them, contrary to popular belief did not lead to “Mo Problems”.

I promised them if they would delay their gratification I would do the same and for the rest of the semester we would all keep our eye on the marshmallow.