Patience--Waiting for the Marshmallo!
In the late nineteen-sixties, four year old Carolyn Weisz was invited into a "game room" at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow.
A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.
What started as a simple experiment with children and treats, became a landmark study suggesting that the ability to wait—to be patient—was a key character trait that might predict later success in life.
Most of the children struggled to resist the treat and held out for an average of less than three minutes. "A few kids ate the marshmallow right away," Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers. "They didn't even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later." About thirty per cent of the children, however, were like Carolyn. They successfully delayed gratification until the researcher returned, some fifteen minutes later. These kids wrestled with temptation, but found a way to resist.
As the years passed, Mischel would occasionally ask his three daughters, all of whom attended Bing, about their friends from nursery school. "I'd ask them, 'How's Jane? How's Eric? How are they doing in school?' " Mischel began to notice a link between the children's academic performance as teen-agers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow. "That's when I realized I had to do this seriously," he says. Starting in 1981, Mischel sent out a questionnaire to all the reachable parents, teachers, and academic advisers of the six hundred and fifty-three subjects who had participated in the marshmallow task, who were by then in high school. He asked about every trait he could think of, from their capacity to plan and think ahead to their ability to "cope well with problems" and get along with their peers. He also requested their S.A.T. scores.
Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
There have been many write ups on this experiment and what it might "mean." But the part I found exciting was the comment made by Mischel, who is particularly excited by the example of the substantial subset of people who failed the marshmallow task as four-year-olds but ended up becoming high-delaying adults. "This is the group I'm most interested in," he says. "They have substantially improved their lives."
At the time, psychologists assumed that children's ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel's conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the "strategic allocation of attention." Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow - the "hot stimulus" - the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from "Sesame Street." Their desire wasn't defeated - it was merely forgotten. "If you're thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you're going to eat it," Mischel says. "The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place."
In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it's what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. (When Odysseus had himself tied to the ship's mast, he was using some of the skills of metacognition: knowing he wouldn't be able to resist the Sirens' song, he made it impossible to give in.) Mischel's large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification. "What's interesting about four-year-olds is that they're just figuring out the rules of thinking," Mischel says. "The kids who couldn't delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that's a terrible idea. If you do that, you're going to ring the bell before I leave the room."
According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. "If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television," Mischel says. "And you can save more money for retirement. It's not just about marshmallows."
Subsequent work by Mischel and his colleagues found that these differences were observable in subjects as young as nineteen months. Looking at how toddlers responded when briefly separated from their mothers, they found that some immediately burst into tears, or clung to the door, but others were able to overcome their anxiety by distracting themselves, often by playing with toys. When the scientists set the same children the marshmallow task at the age of five, they found that the kids who had cried also struggled to resist the tempting treat.
The early appearance of the ability to delay suggests that it has a genetic origin, an example of personality at its most predetermined. Mischel resists such an easy conclusion. "In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation," he says. "The two influences are completely interrelated." For instance, when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto. "When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much," he says. "And if you don't practice then you'll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won't develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won't become second nature." In other words, people learn how to use their mind just as they learn how to use a computer: through trial and error.
But Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks - such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame - he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn't been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. "All I've done is given them some tips from their mental user manual," Mischel says. "Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it."
Mischel is following up with fMRI testing. "The real question is what can we do with this fMRI data that we couldn't do before?" Mischel is applying for an N.I.H. grant to investigate various mental illnesses, like obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit disorder, in terms of the ability to control and direct attention. Mischel and his team hope to identify crucial neural circuits that cut across a wide variety of ailments. If there is such a circuit, then the same cognitive tricks that increase delay time in a four-year-old might help adults deal with their symptoms.
To read the entire article, please go to: http://www..sott.net/articles/show/184366-Don-t-The-secret-of-self-control-
Addendum from: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8jm52/dont_the_secret_of_selfcontrol/
I don't know if you can ever "fix" it, but you can mitigate the negative effects. I grew up with ADHD and was medicated with Ritalin. In high school I had extreme impatience and a general lack of interest in my academic pursuits. I was horrible at delaying gratification. I could not save money. I had debt, etc. Through disciplined training and a lot of "thinking about thinking" as the article says I have been able to achieve much more time efficiency in my life and rehabilitate many of my bad habits. I now save a lot of money and can control my impulsiveness to a great degree. The more you control the impulsiveness and the more you concentrate on thinking your decisions through the less impulsiveness you feel. I am to a point now where only the smallest things even tempt me. It is hard, at first. But take it from a previous low delayer... you can most certainly train yourself.. and it has many benefits to your life and happiness. I find I regret low delay decisions greatly and it is through the backdrop of the poor choices you make without thinking them through that you can introspect and learn from your mistakes. I think the will and ability to accept these things about yourself makes you better at coping with them.
It is hard, but you can do it.
Side Note: I think many of the things I have learned the hard way could be taught to young children and young adults struggling with real attention deficit disorder to greatly improve their early life. Mental exercises, ways of thinking about a particular problem. Parents creating situations for very young (3 and 4) year old children to think about problems that involve delayed gratification. I try these things with my son and can tell it has made a big impact. He often begs for something and it would be convenient for us to do it later so we offer something better or more grandiose if he can wait. More often than not now he will accept the better thing if he waits until we get home or what have you. It is all about creating situations that stimulate your child. Oh and you can just directly discuss these things with many 3 and 4 year olds. The concepts are probably a little big for him, but he understands far more of complex things that I would expect him to. I can explain complex things to him and days later see him applying these concepts to other areas. It is amazing what children can do if you simply give them information and see what they can do it with it. You have to do it so you don't overwhelm them or constantly just try to tell them random stuff, but every good opportunity I can I teach him complex things and ask him to think about problems that are hard for him. As a parent you have an almost intuitive understanding of where your child's limits are in his thinking and reasoning skills if you stop to pay attention to them. It is always the after result that amazes me. To see him grow in leaps and bounds with his reasoning skills in a matter of a week or two based on a little seed you plant. It isn't like an adult that can slowly build knowledge of a complex topic. I think of adult knowledge as something you build with complex small piece lego sets. Children build with giant sized Duplo and you can see the blocks snap in place some weeks. It gives you great insight into yourself as well. MY son is a huge part of why I have pushed myself to be a gratification delayer.. my choices are no longer just affecting me or my wife (adults). --bnelson
