The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-control and How To Master It

by Walter Mischel

In the high delayers, the prefrontal cortex area, which is used for effective problem solving, creative thinking, and control of impulsive behavior, was more active. In contrast, in the low delayers, the ventral striatum was more active, especially when they were trying to control their reactions to emotionally hot, alluring stimuli. This area, located in the deeper, more primitive part of the brain, is linked to desire, pleasure, and addictions.

Successful delayers created all sorts of ways to distract themselves and to cool the conflict and stress they were experiencing.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

correlations that are meaningful, consistent, and significant statistically can allow broad generalizations for a population — but not necessarily confident predictions for an individual.

If a young child is eager to delay but finds herself ringing the bell, it’s worth trying to understand the reasons.

emotional system of the brain, the limbic system.

plays a key role in fear responses and in sexual and appetitive behavior.

Learning and practicing some strategies for enabling self-control early in life is a lot easier than changing hot, self-destructive, automatic-response patterns established and ingrained over a lifetime.

This cool, controlled system is crucial for future-oriented decisions and self-control efforts of the kind identified in the Marshmallow Test.

Gender also matters. Boys and girls develop different preferences at different phases of their development, and their willingness to wait will be influenced by the available rewards: what’s rewarding to boys may be undesired by girls, and vice versa (fire engines, dolls, swords, makeup kits). But even if the reward values are equated and the motivation is the same, girls usually wait longer than boys, and their cooling strategies may differ.

The plasticity of the brain, especially in the first year of life, makes infants highly vulnerable to damage in their key neural systems if they have extremely adverse experiences, such as severe maltreatment or uncaring institutional rearing.

6 to 12 months were sleeping, their brains were scanned by fMRI. When they heard very angry-sounding speech while sleeping, the babies living with parents who had persistent conflicts, compared with those in less conflict-filled homes, had higher activation in the brain areas that regulate emotion and stress.

“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.”

As Michael Posner and Mary Rothbart showed in 2006, the circuits involved in EF are closely interconnected with more primitive brain structures that regulate the developing child’s reactions to stress and threat in the hot system.

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.

Those with the growth mind-set also sometimes felt overwhelmed by the new demands, but they responded by digging in, figuring out what it took to master the new situation, and doing it.

Projecting the self into the future, compared with simply thinking about the future, reduced tolerance for unethical behavior.

Psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman propose that when we imagine the future or think about the past we are traversing a single dimension: psychological distance.

Such high-level, abstract thinking activates the cool system and attenuates the hot system.5 It reduces the automatic preference for immediate rewards, increases attention to future outcomes, strengthens intentions to exert self-control, and helps cool down hot temptations.

The popular 2010 film The King’s Speech showed the effectiveness of direct behavior modification for helping the man who became King George VI of Britain overcome his distressing speech impediment.

To summarize, those associations can instantly and reflexively connect intense emotional reactions (especially fear) triggered by the amygdala to the stimuli that were present when the fear-producing event occurred, even though those stimuli were emotionally neutral to begin with.

It does not take experiments or philosophers to know that an excess of will can be as self-defeating as its absence.

To raise ideal kids, one Chinese American mother offers a long list of what should be forbidden, including sleepovers, play dates, TV, computer games, and any grade lower than A.

This study suggests that if you want your children to adopt high self-reward standards, it’s a good idea to guide them to adopt those standards and also model them in your own behavior.

If you aren’t consistent and are tough on your children but lenient with yourself, there is a good chance they’ll adopt the self-reward standards you modeled, not the ones you imposed on them.

The traditional belief that willpower is an inborn trait that you either have a lot of or you don’t (but cannot do much about it either way) is false.

self-control skills, both cognitive and emotional, can be learned, enhanced, and harnessed so that they become automatically activated when you need them.

Self-control involves more than determination; it requires strategies and insights, as well as goals and motivation, to make willpower easier to develop and persistence (often called grit) rewarding in its own right.

The unexpected finding is that there is great malleability in the areas in the prefrontal cortex that enable executive function.

We know today that when a preschooler manages to wait for her two marshmallows, the anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal areas of her brain must activate strongly.

In 2005, a research team under the leadership of Michael Posner conducted experiments to show how training and genetics jointly influence the cognitive and attention-control skills that let preschoolers cool their hot systems.

The same group of researchers went on to find in related studies that specific genes that influence the child’s ability to cool and control negative emotions and reduce hyperactivity also influence attention and self-control ability. The DAT1 gene in particular has a role in various dopamine-related disorders, including ADHD, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, and alcoholism.

Likewise, the normal adult and aging brain can benefit from relatively simple interventions to enhance EF. Two of the most notable are physical exercise, even in moderate amounts and over short time periods, and virtually anything that minimizes loneliness, provides social support, and strengthens the individual’s ties and connectedness to other people.

strong executive function is crucial for children to build lives that let them develop to their full potential.

The most promising route is to provide access to education as early in life as possible, which in turn can help them climb up the SES ladder. But what kind of education and with what methods?

Self-control is divided into two types of self-discipline: the ability to keep goals in mind and stay focused when working (“I paid attention and resisted distractions”) and the ability to control temper and frustration in upsetting interpersonal situations (“I remained calm even when criticized or otherwise provoked

To help narrow the ever-growing achievement gap between the well-off and the poor, President Obama called for making preschool education universally available in the United States in his 2013 State of the Union address. If this call to action translates into reality, the success of the effort will depend in part on how effectively preschools incorporate lessons from the research into their work.

The emotional brain’s predisposition to overvalue immediate rewards and to greatly discount the value of delayed rewards points to what we need to do if we want to take control: we have to reverse the process by cooling the present and heating the future.

cooled their immediate temptation by physically distancing themselves from it.

Focusing on “now” and the immediate, short-term effect (“It will feel good”) of course had the opposite effect, making the cravings impossible to resist.

To master self-control, we have to instruct ourselves. And that won’t happen naturally because in the face of temptations, the hot system dominates: it discounts delayed consequences, it activates faster than the cool system, and as it accelerates the cool system attenuates.

The mechanisms that enable these changes are still being studied, but the shift from self-immersion to self-distancing significantly reduces psychological and biological distress and lets us regain better control of our thoughts and feelings.

Elizabeth’s example highlights the importance of helping children learn early on that they have choices, and that each choice has consequences.

The biggest challenge for all of us — not just for the child — may be to figure out when to wait for more marshmallows and when to ring the bell and enjoy them. But unless we learn to develop the ability to wait, we don’t have that choice.

It is the story of how self-control can be nurtured in children and adults, so that the prefrontal cortex can be used deliberately to activate the cool system and regulate the hot system.

A second critical ingredient for their success was the motivation to sustain their effort, or grit.

Self-control skills are essential for pursuing our goals successfully, but it is the goals themselves that give us direction and motivation.

The answer to the question of whether human nature is, at its core, malleable or fixed has been an enduring concern of not just scientists but, more important, each of us in our everyday lives.

“Environments can be as deterministic as we once believed only genes could be, and … the genome can be as malleable as we once believed only environments could be.”

Those views attributed the causes of our behavior to the environment, DNA, the unconscious, bad parenting, or evolution, plus chance.