Self-control – Part 2

What cultural influences encourage the sort of self-control that leads to the rewards of delayed gratification?

Continuing this essay series on research related to self-control, Walter Mischel, author of the book The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control, writes:

The marshmallow experiments allowed us to see how children managed to delay and resist temptation, and how differences in this ability play out over a lifetime. But what about the choice itself? I started to ask that question while I was a graduate student at Ohio State University, well before I joined the Stanford faculty. I spent one summer living near a small village in the southern tip of Trinidad. The inhabitants in this part of the island were of either African or East Indian descent, their ancestors having arrived as either slaves or indentured servants. Each group lived peacefully in its own enclave, on different sides of the same long dirt road that divided their homes. As I got to know my neighbors I became fascinated by what they told me about their lives. I discovered a recurrent theme in how they characterized each other. According to the East Indians, the Africans were just pleasure-bent, impulsive, and eager to have a good time and live in the moment, while never planning or thinking ahead about the future. The Africans saw their East Indian neighbors as always working and slaving for the future, stuffing their money under the mattress without ever enjoying life. Their descriptions were strikingly reminiscent of Aesop’s classic fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The indolent, hedonistic grasshopper is hopping around, chirping happily in the summer sun and enjoying the here and now, while the worried, busy ant is toiling to put away food for the winter. The grasshopper is indulging in hot-system pleasures, while the ant is delaying gratification for the sake of later survival. Did the road that separated the two groups in this village really divide self-indulgent grasshopper types from future-oriented, hardworking ants? To check if the perceptions about the differences between the ethnic groups were accurate, I walked down the long dirt road to the local school, which was attended by children from both groups. The school was still run by the British colonial educational system, and the children were dressed in fresh white shirts or blouses. Everything seemed neat, proper, and orderly, and the children waited with clasped hands for the teacher to begin the lesson. The teachers welcomed me into their classrooms, where I tested boys and girls between the ages of 11 and 14. I asked the children who lived in their home, gauged their trust that promises made would be promises kept, and assessed their achievement motivation, social responsibility, and intelligence. At the end of each of these sessions, I gave them choices between little treats: either one tiny chocolate that they could have immediately or a much bigger one that they could get the following week. During the session they also chose between receiving $10 right then or $30 if they waited a month, and between a “much larger gift much later or a smaller one now.” The young adolescents in Trinidad who most frequently chose the immediate smaller rewards, in contrast to those who chose the delayed larger ones, were more often in trouble and, in the language of the time, judged to be “juvenile delinquents.” Consistently, they were seen as less socially responsible, and they had often already had serious issues with authorities and the police. They also scored much lower on a standard test of achievement motivation and showed less ambition in the goals they had for themselves for the future. Consistent with the stereotypes I heard from their parents, the African Trinidadian kids generally preferred the immediate rewards, and those from East Indian families chose the delayed ones much more often. But surely there was more to the story. Perhaps those who came from homes with absent fathers—a common occurrence at that time in the African families in Trinidad, while very rare for the East Indians—had fewer experiences with men who kept their promises. If so, they would have less trust that the stranger—me—would ever really show up later with the promised delayed reward. There’s no good reason for anyone to forgo the “now” unless there is trust that the “later” will materialize. In fact, when I compared the two ethnic groups by looking only at children who had a man living in the household, the differences between the groups disappeared. Beginning in early childhood, far too many people live in untrustworthy, unreliable worlds in which promises for delayed larger rewards are made but never kept. Given this history, it makes little sense to wait rather than grab whatever is at hand. When preschoolers have an experience with a promise maker who fails to keep his promise, not surprisingly they are much less likely to be willing to wait for two marshmallows than to take one now. These commonsense expectations have long been confirmed in experiments demonstrating that when people don’t expect delayed rewards to be delivered, they behave rationally and won’t choose to wait for them.

Roy Baumeister and John Tierney elaborate on this subject in their book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength:

Mischel found some support for the ethnic stereotypes, but in the process he stumbled on a much bigger and more meaningful effect. Children who had a father in the home were far more willing than others to choose the delayed reward. Most of the racial and ethnic variation could be explained by this difference, because the Indian children generally lived with both parents, whereas a fair number of the African children lived with a single mother. The value of fatherhood was also evident when Mischel analyzed just the African homes: About half of the children living with fathers chose the delayed reward, but none of the children in fatherless homes were willing to wait. Similarly, none of the Indian children living without a father were willing to wait. These findings, which were published in 1958, didn’t attract much attention at the time or in the ensuing decades, when it was dangerous to one’s career to suggest that there might be drawbacks to single-parent homes. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan was excoriated for making that suggestion.) Starting in the 1960s, changes in federal policies, social norms, and divorce rates led to a great expansion in the number of children raised by only one parent, usually the mother. No one wanted to sound critical of those mothers—and we certainly don’t want to denigrate their hard work and dedication. But eventually there were so many results like Mischel’s that the data could no longer be ignored. As a general rule—with lots and lots of exceptions, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—children raised by single parents tend not to do as well in life as children who grow up with two parents. Even after researchers control for socioeconomic factors and other variables, it turns out that children from two-parent homes get better grades in school. They’re healthier and better-adjusted emotionally. They have more satisfying social lives and engage in less antisocial behavior. They’re more likely to attend an elite university and less likely to go to prison … [T]here’s an obvious environmental factor affecting children in single-parent homes: They’re being watched by fewer eyes. Monitoring is a crucial aspect of self-control, and two parents can generally do a better job of monitoring. Single parents are so busy with essential tasks—putting food on the table, keeping the child healthy, paying bills—that they have to put a lower priority on making and enforcing rules. Two parents can divide the work, leaving them both with more time and energy to spend building the child’s character. More adult eyes make a difference—and quite a lasting difference, to judge from the results of a study that started more than six decades ago. In an attempt to prevent juvenile delinquency during the early 1940s, counselors visited more than 250 boys in their homes twice a month. They recorded observations about the family, the home, and the life of the boys. On average, the boys were about ten when the study began, and about sixteen when it ended. Decades later, when the boys had grown up and were in their forties and fifties, the notes were studied by a researcher named Joan McCord, who compared the teenage experiences with subsequent adult behavior—in particular, criminal behavior. A lack of adult supervision during the teenage years turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of criminal behavior. The counselors had recorded whether the boys’ activities outside of school were usually, sometimes, or rarely regulated by an adult. The more time the teenagers spent under adult supervision, the less likely they were to be later convicted of either personal or property crimes. The passage of decades has not erased the value of parental monitoring. A recent compilation of studies on marijuana use, totaling more than thirty-five thousand participants, showed a robust link to parental supervision. When parents keep tabs on where their children are, what they do, and whom they associate with, the children are much less likely to use illegal drugs than when parents keep fewer close tabs. Similarly, recent studies of diabetic children have found multiple benefits of parental supervision. Adolescents have higher self-control to the extent that their parents generally know where their offspring are after school and at night, what they do with their free time, who their friends are, and how they spend money … The more that children are being monitored, the more opportunities they have to build their self-control.

This provides even more evidence, explored in a previous essay series, of the vast benefits of two-parent families regarding their children’s success.

Mischel then describes further experiments that linked a tendency toward delayed gratification to decreases in cheating behavior:

Carol Gilligan, who was working toward a doctoral degree, and I collaborated on a new project, testing sixth-grade boys from two public schools in the Boston area. We wanted to see if children who consistently chose to wait for larger but delayed rewards, rather than immediately available, albeit smaller, ones, would be more able than Adam and Eve to resist a strong temptation when they ran into it. But 12-year-old schoolboys in Boston needed something more tempting than an apple. In a first session in their classrooms, the boys completed a variety of tasks, and we offered them many choices between smaller-now versus bigger-later rewards to thank them, much as I had in Trinidad. We wanted to see if their preferences for delayed-larger versus immediate-smaller rewards would be linked to how they dealt with powerful temptations in a new situation. Would those who delayed more in the first session be less likely to give in to a strong temptation in a different situation—one in which cheating was the only way to succeed? To answer this question, we set up seemingly unconnected individual sessions later in the semester, during which we introduced each child, one at a time, to a game of skill. Ostensibly, the purpose of the game was to see how effectively and quickly each boy could use a “ray gun” to destroy a rocket that had become disabled in the space race against the Soviet Union (this was big news at the time). The large toy ray gun was painted silver, mounted on a plank, and pointed toward a high-speed “rocket” target. Above the target, a row of five lights illuminated the number of points earned after each shot. Three brightly colored sportsmen badges (marksman, sharpshooter, and expert) were flashed and offered as prizes, to be awarded on the basis of the total number of points obtained. Although any young kid today would dismiss this 1960s ray gun as a quaint museum piece, at that time the 12-year-old boys found it irresistible. “Let’s pretend that the rocket is disabled and must be destroyed,” Carol would say. “To those of you who are good shots, I’m going to give this marksman badge; to those of you who are better than marksmen, I’m going to give this sharpshooter badge; and to those of you who are really good—better than marksmen or sharpshooters—I’m going to give this expert badge.” Unbeknownst to the boys, the number of points scored for each shot was random and bore no relation to their skill level, and the scores they got made it impossible to win a badge: to get a badge, they had to cheat by falsifying their scores, and to win a better badge they had to fake it even more. The boys kept their own scores while playing alone in the room, and both the timing and amount of their cheating was computed. The results were clear: the same patterns we saw in Trinidad with the “juvenile delinquents” choosing smaller immediate rewards held in Boston. Those who had consistently chosen to wait for larger but delayed rewards rather than immediate but smaller rewards in the earlier session cheated much less than those who had taken the smaller rewards. If the boys who had preferred the delayed rewards did cheat, they waited much longer before they gave in to the temptation to falsely inflate the scores they reported.

Also, any given person may effectively exercise self-control in only one or a few parts of their life.  As Mischel writes:

[M]uch shock and surprise are expressed in the media each time the world learns about another famous leader, celebrity, or pillar of society whose hidden life has been exposed, revealing what appears to be a massive failure of judgment and self-control. These people must be able to wait for their marshmallows and to delay gratification in many situations—otherwise they could not have achieved their remarkable success. Why then do smart people so often act stupidly, managing to unravel the lives they diligently constructed? What trips them up? To understand this, I look closely at what people really do, not just what they say, across different situations and over time. There is consistency in the expression of traits like conscientiousness, honesty, aggression, and sociability. But it is consistency contextualized within specific types of situations: Henry is always conscientious, if at work but not if at home; Liz is warm and friendly, if with close friends but not if at a big party; the governor is trustworthy if dealing with his state’s budget, but not if surrounded by attractive assistants. Consequently, we have to look at the particular situations in which people are or are not conscientious, sociable, and so on if we want to understand and predict what they are likely to do in the future.

In a previous essay series, we explored the benefits of charter schools, and why teachers unions oppose them.  Mischel presents further evidence of the great benefits of charter schools, including their stricter disciplinary policies that encourage self-control -- as opposed to the much more lax disciplinary policies we’ve explored previously that too often govern in public schools:

George was enrolled in Public School 156 [in New York City] … When George was nine years old, his family won the lottery that let him enroll at KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, a charter school that … he says, “saved my life.” … 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. 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.” When he came to KIPP in 2003, George wasn’t a bad student, but he had a short temper, was rude, and was really quiet. “Whenever I didn’t get what I wanted I’d really get upset, bad temper, no self-control, found everything amusing at the wrong time—laughed when people were inappropriate.” He got into trouble on his first day at KIPP and was shocked when he was told to stand at the back of the classroom for rolling his eyes at his math teacher. He was even more surprised when he was assigned homework and it was thoroughly checked the next day, something he says he had never experienced in his public school. 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.”

Important to self-control is something called “executive function,” which is the cognitive skill that lets us exert deliberate, conscious control of thoughts, impulses, actions, and emotions.  As Mischel writes:

If EF [executive function] is well developed early in life, children have a better chance to construct the lives they want. They have a foundation for building interconnected beliefs about themselves that should rank high on our wish list for those we love: a sense of personal control or mastery reflected in an “I think I can!” mind-set, and optimistic expectations about the future. It is important to understand that these enviable “resources” are the individual’s beliefs about the self, not external evaluations or objective tests of achievement or competence. Just as the negative effects of stress depend on the individual’s perceived stress, and the impact of temptations depends on how they are appraised and mentally represented, 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. 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.

One belief is called “mastery,” and it’s fundamentally linked to a subject we explored in a previous essay series on the topic of “locus of control”:

“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 that George Ramirez says KIPP taught him and that turned his life around. I first saw its importance when I was a trainee in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Ohio State University and watched my mentor, George A. Kelly, work with a very distressed young woman. “Theresa” was becoming increasingly upset and anxious, feeling that she could no longer manage her life. In the third therapy session, her agitation seemed to peak, as she exclaimed tearfully that she was afraid she was losing it and begged Dr. Kelly to answer her question: “Am I falling apart?” Kelly slowly took off his glasses, brought his face close to hers, stared straight into her eyes, and asked, “Would you like to?” Theresa was stunned. She seemed immensely relieved, as if a huge burden had dropped from her shoulders. 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 … 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. 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 … [O]ptimism is a blessing to be wished for, as long as it reasonably connects to reality.

As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, writes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow:

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer.

As Mischel summarizes:

[T]he successes and mastery experiences children have early in life increase how willing and able they become to pursue goals with persistence, develop optimistic expectations for success, and cope with the frustrations, failures, and temptations that are inevitable as they grow up. Their developing sense of control and agency and optimistic expectations become key links—the active ingredients—in the story that connects the seconds of preschool waiting time for a couple of marshmallows to the diverse positive outcomes we see as their lives evolve. And their ability to inhibit impulsive responses that could jeopardize their building of relationships allows them to develop mutually supportive, caring friendships with people who respect and value them … Regardless of age, the core strategy for self-control is to cool the “now” and heat the “later”—push the temptation in front of you far away in space and time, and bring the distant consequences closer in your mind.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll examine the stark differences between encouraging self-esteem and encouraging self-control.