Readers with long memories and a taste for trivia, may possibly remember a TV show entitled “Are you smarter than a 10-yearold?” The show paired adult contestants with Year 6 students, as the contestants attempted to win prizes by answering questions drawn from the school syllabus. The kicker was that contestants who were eliminated had to turn to the camera, and admit that they were not smarter than a 10-year-old. To the great delight of primary school children everywhere, many adults found themselves uttering these embarrassing words on public television. But what would happen if we raised the stakes, and pitted company CEOs against under-5-year-olds? How do you think that the best business minds of today would fare against the up-and-coming generation? As it happens, we now know the answer to this question (at least in terms of one specific experiment), and it all starts with the deliciously-named Marshmallow Challenge. You might already be familiar with the Marshmallow Challenge (aka the Spaghetti Tower). This is the exercise where you are given a handful of raw spaghetti, some tape, string, and a single marshmallow. Your team is then tasked with building the tallest structure that it can, as measured from the ground to the marshmallow perched at the very top of the structure. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? The originator of the challenge, Peter Skillman, has run this experiment with hundreds of people, including CEOs, lawyers, business and engineering students, and preschoolers. He has achieved some dramatic results, with clear differences in the results achieved by different groups. Interestingly, the top performers appear to be the under5s. Lawyers out-perform MBA students; CEOs out-perform lawyers; Pre-schoolers outperform CEOs. There are plenty of ideas about why this should be the case. Is the root cause of the differences a developmental issue, a social dynamic, or something else? One suggestion is that adults instinctively waste their resources on status issues before focussing fully on the task. For instance, who is in-charge, how will other members of the team respond to my input, what if I am criticised for my ideas? Another explanation is that adults have too many competing conceptual tools and models available to them, all of which need to be quickly assessed, in order to come up with the best strategy. A third possibility is that young children are unencumbered by limiting ideas, and that they can see the task in clear and simple terms. Remember also, that pre-schoolers are constantly constructing things, so a manufacturing task may be second nature to them. One of the most promising explanations is based on observing how different groups approach the construction problem. In the case of the under 5-year-olds, they get straight into the task, without going through overt planning or negotiation phases. Consequently, they iterate more frequently than the other groups, going through more opportunities to try-and-fail, before producing their final masterpiece. The key in all this appears to be time. The standard challenge allows 18 minutes for the task, and every one of the 1,080 seconds is incredibly valuable. It has been suggested that, given unlimited time, the under-5s will quickly lose interest, while a highly-driven adult group will ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A 4-YEAR-OLD? BY PHIL SALES June 2023 { 38 }
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