Do you really want to get to know someone?
Show them a button and see if they push it.
On April 1st, Reddit did exactly that, and since then, hundreds of thousands of people
have taken part in what has turned into, essentially, a giant social experiment.
And it’s teaching us a lot about the psychology of delayed gratification.
The Button is simply a page on Reddit with a timer that counts down from 60 seconds,
and a clickable button that’s next to it.
Whenever a Reddit user clicks on the button, anywhere in the world, the timer resets.
But you can only click it once.
Then, you get a little colored circle next to your name, called a flair, that displays
the time on the countdown when you clicked.
So the lower your number is, the longer you waited before clicking the button -- without
someone else clicking it before you.
And it didn’t take long for a hierarchy of users to be established, based on those
colored flairs.
According to the weird internal logic of the Reddit Button, a lower number equals more
bragging rights, because it probably means you waited a reallllly long time -- or maybe
made some other sacrifice, like signing on in the middle of the night -- to find that
rare moment when fewer people were clicking.
Basically, you wanted it more.
You were more patient.
Or maybe you were just lucky.
But either way, you earned a shiny new flair.
But the status of button-clickers has been shifting lately, because more people are taking
part -- and presumably taking more extreme measures -- to get the lowest number possible.
After the first week, the lowest time that people had reached before clicking was 35
seconds, and users with that number reigned supreme.
But after two weeks, the new best time was 27 seconds, so the 35-second pressers weren’t
special anymore.
So: Patience.
Reward.
Gratification.
You know what this reminds me of?
Marshmallows.
Duh.
In 1972, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel wanted to test self-control in children, and
the dynamics that he studied were kinda similar to those in The Button.
Mischel and his team gathered 92 subjects, ages 3 to 5, and put each kid in a room with
a marshmallow.
He told the child he’d leave the room for a little bit, and if they didn’t eat the
marshmallow while he was gone, they’d get two marshmallows when he came back.
Then he left for fifteen minutes and watched what happened.
It turns out that as a whole, kids aren’t very good at waiting, even if it means double
the marshmallows.
But some children were better at it than others.
And that’s kind of what’s happening with the Button -- except that the average reddit
user is between 25 and 34 years old.
And instead of marshmallows, users are being rewarded for their patience with supposedly
higher status.
So why are some people content with clicking the timer while it’s still in the 50s, while
others are putting in a lot of effort to achieve a higher status?
Well, it’s basically a game, so not everyone who clicks is taking it all that seriously.
But it also has to do with what Mischel and his team called the hot-and-cool system.
The cool system is your more logical side, reminding you about the extra marshmallow
and all the reasons why you should wait.
But the hot system is much more sensitive to emotions -- basically, it’s the voice
of temptation.
Mischel proposed that in some people, it’s much easier to trigger the impulsive hot system,
which overrides the rational cool system.
These people struggle a lot more with self-control.
Years later, when Mischel followed up with his test subjects, he found that those who
had waited for the second marshmallow as kids were better planners and better students as
teenagers.
And then, in 2011, Mischel and a new team brought 59 of the original subjects back for
yet another test, this time to see how quickly their hot systems might be triggered by certain
images.
It’s been shown that people respond impulsively and emotionally to happy faces, so the team
told the subjects to press a button only when a neutral face was on the screen.
The idea was those people with more self-control would be less apt to react to the happy faces.
And as it turned out, those who couldn’t wait for the second marshmallow as children
were more likely to still have trouble with impulse control.
The team repeated the test with 26 of the subjects, this time while scanning their brains,
and found that the so-called “high delayers” -- that is, those who’d waited for the second
marshmallow -- had a more active prefrontal cortex, where the brain processes impulses
and controls behavior.
The low delayers, meanwhile, showed more activity in what’s called the inferior frontal gyrus,
a deeper region of the brain that’s been linked to addiction and pleasure.
So it may not be a controlled experiment worthy of Mischel and other scientists of the human
mind, but Reddit’s Button is just another reminder that, where there are lots of people,
there will be lots of psychology to study.
The real question is: have you pressed the Button?
What time did you get?
Let us know.
And while you’re at it, why not click on this button to go to Patreon.com/SciShow,
where you can help support the show while getting cool stuff like exclusive Fancy Facts
every month.
And if you want to keep getting smarter with us, just go to Youtube.com/scishow and subscribe.