go viral：风靡，走红
do well in school：中文都说“成绩好”，但英文和score/grade没有任何关系。
crystal ball：占卜师用的水晶球，常用来比喻可以预知未来的方法。
crystal ball
delayed gratification：延迟满足，指愿意为获得更有价值的长远结果而放弃即时满足的抉择取向，和愿意等待的自我控制能力。原文中提到的棉花糖实验是20世纪60年代美国心理学家沃尔特·米歇尔设计的“延迟满足”实验。
Yuichi Shoda：正田裕一，美籍日裔心理学家，华盛顿大学心理学教授，在推动认知情感个性理论方面做出了巨大的贡献。
Person-Situation Debate：个人情境争论，是人格心理学领域的一场历史性辩论。其焦点是个人和情境哪一个要素对行为的影响更大，奥尔波特等心理学家一方认为一个人的人格是不变的，个体在不同的情境中会做出同样的选择，就像棉花糖实验中忍耐克制的孩子长大后面临不同的情境也能做出同样正确的选择；而以桑代克为代表的一方则认为个体在不同的情境下受不同的环境因素影响，会做出不同的选择，实验中懂得延迟满足的孩子不一定在所有情境下都能表现出这种品质。
If-Then Signature：心理学家沃尔特·米歇尔认为个体在不同的情境下所做出的行为是不同的，是“如果…就…”的条件关系，每个情境下都有具体的行为特征，即if-then behavioral signature。心理学家正田裕一认为，个体的人格是会随着客观情境的变化而改变的，与米歇尔的发现相符。
示范笔记为誊写版本，除了字迹更工整外，保留了原始版本的符号、缩写、排版，不存在脱离实际的后期美化。
Thanks to YouTube, a particular scientific experiment went viral. It's known as the "Marshmallow Test". The "Marshmallow Test" was actually a series of experiments started in the 1960s, in which nursery school children are placed in a room and an experimenter puts a marshmallow in front of the child and says, "You can eat this now, but I'm going to leave. If you wait, and I come back and this marshmallow is still here, then you get 2 marshmallows." This was essentially a test of delayed gratification. And you can go on YouTube and watch people doing this kind of experiments on their own children. And you'll see sometimes some kids will touch it, or they will sniff it, or they will take a lick. Others will turn their head, or sing, or kick their legs. Sometimes a boy starts hitting himself in the face. The kids who start by touching and sniffing the marshmallow usually will have eaten it by the time the experimenter comes back. Some of those who distract themselves will not have eaten it by the time the experimenter comes back.
The tantalizing finding of this study was that the amount of time that a kid waited, or if they waited the whole time, predicted much later in life outcomes from how well they did in school, to how likely they were to be addicted to drugs, and all sorts of other things. And so that's sort of what parents have taken away from it. So when you see them doing experiments on their own kids on YouTube, it's sort of with this idea that you are getting a crystal ball into your kids' future.
But actually there are some problems with that. The first problem is that a replication of that study much more recently found that most of that effect, that predictiveness, disappeared. And as one of the studies' author Yuichi Shoda has repeatedly said, we took the wrong thing from this study in the first place. Even in the original, there was a ton of variation between what kids did and how their lives turned out. And what was more interesting to Shoda was the fact that you can teach very simple strategies to help kids delay gratification. So if one kid was struggling, you could have them think about the marshmallow as a puffy cloud instead of a piece of food, and they would suddenly have a much better time at delaying their gratification.
And Shoda himself has been one of the researchers who's helped to build a bridge in what's called the "Person-Situation Debate" in psychology. This is basically are people who they are? Are they stable, and the things that they do are just part of their internal makeup. Or are the things they do really affected by the situation they are in. And the answer is probably some of both.
And what Shoda's work gets into, it's call the If-Then Signatures. So it could be that we have some stable traits, but they change depending on the context. So we are consistently inconsistent. For example, if David is at a giant party, then he's an introvert. True. If he's with his small team at work, then he's an extrovert. Also true. So I'm inconsistent, but consistently so. And these If-Then Signatures may be part of bridging that Person-Situation Debate. And so maybe it's not that surprising that when you change the situation in a way to make the kid think of the marshmallow as not a marshmallow, suddenly they could delay gratification in a way that they couldn't before. What we should think about as we think about the "Marshmallow Test" is not this predictive crystal ball, which turns out probably not to be there anyway. But really, the lesson is how quickly you can change someone's apparent personality trait by altering the context or the way they think.
【口译点评】Communicate to Inform, Not Impress（5000字）
