← The Marshmallow Test Mastering Self Control
The Marshmallow Test Chapter 14. When Smart People Act Stupid
Author: Walter Mischel Publisher: New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. Publish Date: 2014-9 Review Date: Status:💥
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CONTEXTUALIZED SELF-CONTROL
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be able to delay gratification and exert self-control is an ability, a set of cognitive skills, that, like any ability, can be used or not used depending primarily on the motivation to use it. Delay ability can help preschoolers resist one marshmallow now to get two later, but they have to want to do that.
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Whether or not self-control skills are used depends on a host of considerations, but how we perceive the situation and the probable consequences, our motivation and goals, and the intensity of the temptation, are especially important. This may seem obvious, but I emphasize it here because it is easily misunderstood. Willpower has been mischaracterized as something other than a “skill” because it is not always exercised consistently over time. But like all skills, self-control skill is exercised only when we are motivated to use it. The skill is stable, but if the motivation changes, so does the behavior.
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The ability to exert self-control and wait for marshmallows implies neither that it will be exercised in every domain and context nor that it will be used for virtuous goals. People can have excellent self-control skills that they use creatively for good purposes valued by society. They can also use the same skills to create hidden families, offshore bank accounts, and secret lives. They can be responsible, conscientious, and trustworthy in some areas of their lives and not in others. If we look closely at what people really do, not at what they say, across different situations with regard to any dimension of social behavior, it turns out that they are not very consistent.
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THE CONSISTENCY PARADOX
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Situations also influence social behavior in an important way, depending on how they are perceived. Regardless of how conscientious a person tends to be or not be, most will be more conscientious about being on time when picking up the kids from preschool than when meeting a friend for coffee, and they will be more sociable and extraverted at large parties than at funerals. That kind of variability is evident.
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The conception of human traits, however, makes an additional assumption—namely that an individual will be consistent in the expression of a trait across many different kinds of situations in which the trait is desirable. It is assumed that a highly conscientious person will be more conscientious than a less conscientious person consistently across many different kinds of situations. If Johnny is judged to be much more conscientious than Danny “on the whole,” then he should also be ranked higher than Danny on his completion of homework assignments and on his attendance record, as well as on how conscientiously he keeps his room organized at home and how trustworthy he is when he babysits his younger sister. Is this assumption justified? Does the person high in any important psychological trait generally remain above the person low in that trait across many different kinds of situations?
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The assumption that people are broadly consistent in what they do, think, and feel in very different situations is intuitively powerful. It is fed by the hot system, which quickly forms impressions from the smallest slices of behavior and generalizes them to anything that can more or less fit. But does it hold up when we use the benefit of the prefrontal cortex to look closely at what people really do across different situations—