← The Marshmallow Test Mastering Self Control
The Marshmallow Test Chapter 8. The Engine of Success: “I Think I Can”
Author: Walter Mischel Publisher: New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. Publish Date: 2014-9 Review Date: Status:💥
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While self-control ability is an essential ingredient for constructing a good life, it does not function in isolation: the engine of success is fueled by additional resources that protect against the negative effects of stress and provide a foundation that can be cultivated and nurtured.
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A SAVED LIFE: GEORGE
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George believes that the most important way KIPP changed him was by making it clear that there were consequences for his behavior:
Explicit expectations for the first time in my life that there are consequences. I had never been at a place where people told me what they wanted out of me—without screaming. And what they wanted was for my own good, and everyone else’s. Plus lots and lots of positive reinforcements for doing well, and for everything good I did. When you do the right thing, the right things happen. When you do the bad, wrong thing, the bad things happen.
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George learned quickly about the consequences: “In one year I generalized this to life outside the school. If I’m polite to others, they’re polite to me. It usually, but not always, works in the real world. Soon you generalize the rules of ‘consequences to my actions’ from here to everywhere.”
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At the time of this writing, George was doing extremely well, working toward his bachelor’s degree on a full scholarship at Yale University. I asked him where he thought he would be if he had not won the lottery that allowed him to transfer into KIPP. “Without KIPP I absolutely would be hanging in the streets, looking for a job,” he replied. What was at the root of his transformation from feeling totally adrift at age nine to becoming a successful Yale undergraduate? He said, “Learning to have self-control, being honest, being kind to my teammates, being polite, never settling for what I have, and asking the big questions were all things that led to my success at KIPP and in life.”
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George would not have benefited so much from this kind of program if he had not worked so hard from age nine on. It’s not just George, and it’s not just the world of mentors, models, resources, and opportunities that KIPP gave him. It is both nature and nurture, not in opposition but influencing each other reciprocally as their boundaries blur. How a person interacts with that world of opportunities and constraints drives the life that unfolds.
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EF, IMAGINATION, EMPATHY—WINDOWS INTO THE MINDS OF OTHERS
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Because EF requires us to exert cognitive control over our thoughts and feelings, it is easy to think that it is the antithesis of creative and imaginative processes. But in fact, it appears to be an essential ingredient for the development of imagination and creative activities, including pretend play early in life. EF allows us to get beyond the immediate situation and the here and now, to think and fantasize “outside the box” or imagine the impossible. By facilitating imagination, EF in turn enhances the development of flexible and adaptive self-control.
Note: it allows us to jump out of the system, rather than mindlessly reacting to our subjective biases
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Likewise, EF is strongly linked to the ability to understand the mind and feelings of others, and helps children develop a “theory of mind” for inferring the intentions and anticipating the reactions of people with whom they interact. EF allows us to understand and take into account the feelings, motivations, and actions of others and recognize that their perceptions and reactions may be quite different from ours. It helps us grasp what others may think or intend and lets us empathize with what they are experiencing.
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THE ENVIABLE BELIEFS
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the potential health benefits of our abilities, achievements, and prospects depend on how we interpret and evaluate them. Think of people you know who are highly competent but sabotage themselves with their own negative self-evaluations and paralyzing self-doubts. Beliefs about the self are correlated with objective measures of competence and mastery, but far from perfectly.
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The impressive evidence about the importance of these beliefs for successful coping, both psychologically and biologically, keeps growing. Shelley Taylor, the founder of the field of health psychology and a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, and her team have shown that a sense of mastery and optimistic expectations buffer the deleterious effects of stress and predict many desirable neurophysiological and psychological health-related outcomes. As Taylor and her colleagues reported in 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, each belief has a substantial genetic component but is also open to modification and influence by environmental conditions. Given the importance of these beliefs for the quality and length of life, I next consider each more closely.
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MASTERY: PERCEIVED CONTROL
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“Mastery” is the belief that you can be an active agent in determining your own behavior, that you are able to change, grow, learn, and master new challenges. It’s the “I think I can!” belief
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It had not occurred to her that it might be within her power to change what she felt. “Falling apart” was suddenly an option, not her inevitable fate. She did not have to be the passive victim of her biography, witnessing her life unravel. This was her “Eureka!” moment; it started her exploration of alternative and more constructive ways of thinking about herself and opened courses of action she had not considered because she had thought them impossible.
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Carol Dweck,
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Her work, summarized in her 2006 book, Mindset, shows how people’s personal theories about how much they can control, change, and learn—and how much they can improve what they do, experience, and make of themselves—influence what they actually can achieve and become.
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At Stanford in 1974, my students and I developed a scale to assess how preschoolers perceived the causes of their own behavior: did they see themselves as the agents for the good things that happened, or did they credit external factors? And did these differences in causal attribution link to their self-control and how they were developing? In order to measure where they were on this scale of perceived “internal versus external control of behavior,” we asked them questions like these:
When you draw a whole picture without breaking your crayon, is that because you were very careful? Or because it was a good crayon?
When somebody brings you a present, is that because you are a good girl (boy)? Or because they like to give people presents?
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We then looked at how the children’s answers to these questions were connected to their behavior, which was also assessed in other situations that required self-control. The bottom line from these studies was that even preschool children’s belief that they could control outcomes by their own behavior was significantly linked to how hard they tried, how long they persisted, and how successful they were at self-control. The more they saw themselves as the causes of positive outcomes, the more likely they were to delay gratification on the Marshmallow Test, to control their impulsive tendencies, and to persist in diverse situations in which their own behavior would be instrumental in reaching the desired outcome. They believed they could do it, and they did.
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The child’s self-perception as someone who can—who can exert effort, persist, and be the causal agent for positive outcomes—is nourished by the self-control skills that help them succeed. One could see this in the pride that some preschoolers expressed in the Surprise Room at Stanford when, instead of just eating their treats for which they had successfully waited, they chose to bag them to take home, eager to show their parents what they had earned. The more effectively children can wait and work for their bigger treats early in life, and the better the cognitive and emotional skills that enable these triumphs, the more they grow their sense of “Yes, I can!” and ready themselves for new and greater challenges. In time, the mastery experiences and new skills they acquire—like learning to play the violin, or build Lego empires, or invent new computer applications—become intrinsic rewards in which the activity itself is satisfying. The children’s sense of efficacy and agency becomes grounded in their experiences of success and leads to reality-based optimistic expectations and aspirations, each success increasing the chances for the next.
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OPTIMISM: EXPECTATIONS OF SUCCESS
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Optimism is an inclination to anticipate the best possible outcome. Psychologists define it as the extent to which individuals have favorable expectations for their future. These are expectations of what they really believe will happen—more like faith than just hope—and they are closely linked with the “I think I can!” mind-set.
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The positive consequences of optimism are dazzling, and would be hard to believe if they were not so well supported by research. For example, Shelley Taylor and her colleagues showed that optimists cope more effectively with stress and are better protected against its adverse effects. They take more steps to protect their health and future well-being, generally stay healthier, and are less likely to become depressed compared with those who are low in optimism. Psychologist Charles Carver and his colleagues showed that when optimists have coronary bypass surgery, they recover more quickly than pessimists do. The list of benefits goes on and on. In short, optimism is a blessing to be wished for, as long as it reasonably connects to reality.
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To appreciate optimism and see why and how it works for those who have it, consider its opposite: pessimism. Pessimism is a tendency to focus on the negative, expect the worst, or make the gloomiest interpretation possible. Show a depressed pessimist a phrase like “I really hate” followed by a blank space in which to insert the first thoughts that come to mind, and he or she is likely to insert “me” or “the way I look” or “the way I talk.” Extreme pessimists feel helpless, depressed, and unable to control their lives. They attribute the bad things that happen to them to their own stable negative qualities, rather than being open to more situational and less self-condemning explanations of what went wrong. They fail a test and think, “I’m incompetent,” even if the test is not a valid measure of anything important. Kinder explanations—whether regarding the test itself (confusing instructions, ambiguous multiple choice options, excessive time pressure) or personal problems (an upset stomach)—don’t come to mind for pessimists, even if they happen to be true.
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Early in life, if this pessimistic explanatory style is extreme, it can be bad news for the future and can become a formula for developing serious depression. At the University of Pennsylvania, Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman asked healthy 25-year-old college graduates to describe some of their difficult personal experiences and then examined how they explained them. The pessimists believed that things would never improve (“It won’t ever be over for me”) and generalized broadly beyond each event to reach gloomy conclusions about diverse aspects of their lives, all of which they considered their fault. Follow-up health examinations and measures of illness for all participants during the first 20 years after college showed no significant differences in their health. Between the ages of 45 and 60, however, those who had been more pessimistic at age 25 were more likely to be ill. Researchers also analyzed newspaper interviews with ballplayers from the Baseball Hall of Fame published throughout the first half of the last century. The interviews quoted the players’ explanations as they talked about how and why they won or lost games. These players were all outstanding enough to be in the Hall of Fame, but those who saw their losses as due to their personal failings, and attributed their wins to momentary external causes (e.g., “The wind was right that afternoon”), tended not to live as long as those who took credit for their successes.
Note: Pharma wants you to feel helpless. It keeps you depressed and dependent on them. That’s why they push the genetic theory so hard
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Seligman has led much of the research on optimistic versus pessimistic explanatory styles. He proposed that optimists differ from pessimists in how they perceive and explain their success and failure. When optimists fail, they think they can succeed the next time if they change their behavior or the situation appropriately. They use a rejection experience, failed job application, bad investment, or poor test result to figure out what they need to do to improve their chances on the next attempt. They then craft alternative plans and find other ways to reach their important goals, or seek needed advice until they can develop a better strategy. While the optimists deal with failure constructively, the pessimists use the same experience to confirm their gloomy expectations, believing it’s their fault, and they try to avoid thinking about it, assuming there is nothing they can do. Seligman says, “College entrance exams measure talent, while explanatory style tells you who gives up. It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.… What you need to know about someone is whether they will keep going when things get frustrating.”
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This is an equally apt description of the preschool kids who continue to wait during the Marshmallow Test. Seconds of waiting time not only measure their delay ability; how long they waited also tells us how much grit the children have, or how persistent they are as the frustration of the delay and the effort needed to stick with it keep escalating. Because optimists have higher overall expectations of success, they are more willing to delay gratification, even when it is difficult to do so. Unless children expect to succeed and get those marshmallows later, when the experimenter comes back, there is no reason for them to try to wait or work for them. Those who expect that they will be able to do whatever it takes to get their preferred rewards choose to wait and work for them; those who don’t (or who don’t trust the experimenter) take the immediately available smaller rewards by ringing the bell.
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Ervin Staub escaped from communist Hungary as a young man, and in the early 1960s he became one of my first graduate students at Stanford as well as a lifelong friend. Together we conducted experiments at Stanford to see how expectations about success influence self-control and the willingness to work and wait for delayed rewards. We found that 14-year-old eighth-grade boys who generally expected to succeed even before they saw the specific task they would have to perform chose to do cognitive tasks for which the larger but delayed reward was contingent on successful performance, not just on waiting. This was rather than settling for the smaller but immediate reward, and they chose this option almost twice as often as those with low success expectations. The boys with high expectations for success approached new tasks more confidently, as if they had already succeeded at them. They wanted to “go for it,” and they were willing to risk failure because they did not believe they would fail. Their expectations were more than fantasies: they were based on their history of previous successful experiences. Their successes fed the positive expectancies, which in turn encouraged behaviors and mind-sets that increased their chances for further success. All of which makes optimists smile even more.
Note: but what if they experience consistent failure at some point, is that confidence built on faulty foundations? Maybe not if they’ve imprinted optimism
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The findings also showed that those who started with low generalized expectations began as if they had already failed at the task. But these boys did respond positively when they actually succeeded at it, and their new success experiences significantly raised their expectations for future success. Our broad expectations for success or failure crucially impact how we approach new tasks, but our specific expectations are responsive to change when we see that we can actually succeed. The message is clear: optimists in general are better off than pessimists, but even pessimists raise their expectations when they see that they can succeed.