Surprising Results from The Marshmallow Challenge

Tom Wujec compares the performance of various teams in a marshmallow building challenge and discovers a few results that might shock you.

The task is simple: in 18 minutes, teams of four must build the tallest free-standing structure out of spaghetti sticks and one marshmallow on top. The apparent simplicity of the task trips up many teams; about 40% of the teams end up with structures that buckle and collapse under the weight of the marshmallow.

Interestingly, kindergartners perform better on this task than business school students, lawyers, and CEOs. Kindergartners "produce not only the tallest structures, but also the most interesting structures of them all."

Why? The key to the kids' success is their "iterative" process -- trial-and-error that gives the team instant feedback on what works and what doesn't. Business school students, on the other hand, tend to rely on a single plan that ends up failing.

Wujec also finds that incentives have a strong impact on performance. When he "ups the ante" and offers a $10,000 reward, all of the teams during one challenge fail to build a standing structure. When he offers the same reward to the same group of design students four months later, the structures are much better than most other groups. Wujec concludes that
incentives + low skills = failure
incentives + high skills = success

Interesting stuff. If I were still a teacher, I'd run the experiment on my own students. You can view the instructions for the Marshmallow Challenge here.