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Choosing your next camera: Fighting with temptation
  • 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. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “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. 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. Then he left the room.




    Although 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. “I’ve always been really good at waiting,” Carolyn told me. “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’m sure she would have waited.” But her brother Craig, who also took part in the experiment, displayed less fortitude. Craig, a year older than Carolyn, still remembers the torment of trying to wait. “At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. “And so I just started taking all the candy.” According to Craig, he was also tested with little plastic toys—he could have a second one if he held out—and he broke into the desk, where he figured there would be additional toys. “I took everything I could,” he says. “I cleaned them out. After that, I noticed the teachers encouraged me to not go into the experiment room anymore.”

    Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal. One child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully around the room to make sure that nobody can see him. Then he picks up an Oreo, delicately twists it apart, and licks off the white cream filling before returning the cookie to the tray, a satisfied look on his face.

    Most of the children were like Craig. They struggled to resist the treat and held out for an average of less than three minutes. “A few kids ate the marshmallow right away,” Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers. “They didn’t even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later.” About thirty per cent of the children, however, were like Carolyn. They successfully delayed gratification until the researcher returned, some fifteen minutes later. These kids wrestled with temptation but found a way to resist.

    The initial goal of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while others simply surrendered. After publishing a few papers on the Bing studies in the early seventies, Mischel moved on to other areas of personality research. “There are only so many things you can do with kids trying not to eat marshmallows.”

    But occasionally Mischel would ask his three daughters, all of whom attended the Bing, about their friends from nursery school. “It was really just idle dinnertime conversation,” he says. “I’d ask them, ‘How’s Jane? How’s Eric? How are they doing in school?’ ” Mischel began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as teen-agers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow.


    Read the rest at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1XXJVJRl0
  • 12 Replies sorted by
  • In what respect do you view this as related to choosing your next camera?
  • >In what respect do you view this as related to choosing your next camera?

    And how it is not related?
  • I will rephrase my question, which aspect of this research applies most to your choosing of your next camera?

    :-D
  • The difference between the marshmallow experiment and choosing your next camera, is that there is a clear benefit for the children in the experiment to delay their gratification: a doubling of their reward.

    In case of choosing a new camera, this benefit is more ambiguous. There is both reward and punishment. The reward is that the newer camera will probably have more features, a higher resolution, better video codec, etc. The punishment is that you will not be able to shoot video until you have this new camera.

    Since there is no clear benefit to delaying gratification, I do not see the relevance of this research in respect to the choice of your next camera. Am I missing your point?
  • @Retina

    Did you read whole article?

    >The reward is that the newer camera will probably have more features, a higher resolution, better video codec, etc

    It can't be reward.

    >The punishment is that you will not be able to shoot video until you have this new camera.

    It is also not punishment.

    I also do not like your simplified reward/punishment approach.
  • I think people should just shoot with what they have. People crave the next best thing too much. People wait for the next best thing and never buy anything. Buy something, and use it until it has served its purpose and you cannot use it anymore because the jobs requires something different. If the job doesn't require it, don't upgrade, don't search. The satisfaction is that you stop craving things, and just do your creative thing. Too many people fall into the trap of wanting next best shiny thing that comes on the market. And then, when they have bought the next best thing, they look on to what follows, and are in effect never satisfied with what they got right here, right now. People never have peace of mind, never focus on expanding their creativity.
  • @Vitaliy_Kiselev: I've read the original study years ago. Just to make sure nothing new was mentioned, I just reread it. No new information.
    My 'simplified approach' is an attempt to try to fit the research to your title. Also, to do proper social research, you need to simplify the situation so you can set up a proper study and make any sensible conclusions afterwards. Even then you're grasping at straws. :-)

    @John_Farragut: Yours is a more clear example of delayed gratification. Why spend all this time on reading about photography/filming, scripting, lighting, acting, etc. to actually make a movie when you can have 'instant gratification' through a new camera, new lenses, DSLR rigs, follow focuses, LED lighting, tripods, etc. ?
  • My first marshmallow said "Red Scarlet... coming soon"

    My second marshmallow said "Panasonic GH2... shoot today"

    I've already digested and flushed the first marshmallow many moons ago, and
    the GH2 makes me question the need for the first marshmallow at all...

    What should I get for my next marshmallow?
  • If I see enough safe margin, I'd buy a new or an used gear to try it out. I meant good resale value.

    For example, I bought iPad 1 at $525 as soon as it came out. Then I sold it at $475 a month before iPad 2 was released. Not bad for using it for 10 months.

    Usually camera bodies lose value over the time. If one can wait longer, he can get two bodies at a cost of one body retail price. But if one can make money immediately by using a new camera, that's completely different story.

    Generally it's good idea to wait... instead of preordering new camera body. Use available tools as long as they don't hinder the progress of one's projects.

    One conundrum. Buying m43 lenses is instant gratification or delaying gratification? At first it seems instant gratification. Small m43 lenses are easier to use on m43 body, but they can't cover APS-C sensor. But it could be delaying gratification. Some of us will use m43 system for very long time. Why carry extra SLR glasses and adapters for weeks, months, years for just-in-case scenario? Is it instant gratification temptation to own good old SLR lenses so that we can switch to different mirrorless system easily? I can't tell anymore. BTW I have only two m43 lenses and a lot more SLR lenses.
  • Still happy with 2 GH1's, so no marshmallow for me. Lens craving, yup got that one.
  • So here´s the deal : 1st I need to go HD asap so I´d rather eat the marshmallow rigthaway. But here´s the point which one I´ll take the red (lol) the white, the pink or the yellow? Many colors out there but wich flavor is more suitable for me? I own a couple of Nikon ai lenses and fd´s as a anachronistic analog photographer will be definitely a go the GH2. Most of my footage will be hand-helded with fisheye, so I really don´t need all those expensive bulky ff and rigs. But also no 60p there and also a bulky ext mic, so wait until the gh3 is out( when?) or wait for the panny GX1 http://www.43rumors.com/ft5-panasonic-will-launch-a-gx1-by-end-of-this-year/ . I need a real camcorder no a HDSLR my choice for now is a vg 20 body only.