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

by Walter Mischel

When a four-year-old stares at the marshmallows she wants, she’s likely to focus on their hot tempting features and ring the bell; when she sees a picture of them, it’s more likely to serve as a cool reminder of what she’ll get if she waits. As Lydia said, you can’t eat a picture. And as Freud might have thought, you can’t consume a hallucinatory representation of an object of desire. In one condition of one

The power is not in the stimulus, however, but in how it is mentally appraised: if you change how you think about it, its impact on what you feel and do changes. The tempting chocolate mousse on the restaurant dessert tray loses its allure if you imagine a cockroach just snacked on it in the kitchen. Although

The marshmallow experiments convinced me that if people can change how they mentally represent a stimulus, they can exert self-control and escape from being victims of the hot stimuli that have come to control their behavior. They can transform hot tempting stimuli, and they can cool their impact by cognitive reappraisal — at least sometimes, under some conditions.

The message here is that parents who overcontrol their toddlers risk undermining the development of their children’s self-control skills, while those who support and encourage autonomy in problem-solving efforts are likely to maximize their children’s chances of coming home from preschool eager to tell them how they got their two marshmallows.

By forming and practicing implementation plans, you can make your hot system reflexively trigger the desired response whenever the cue occurs. Over time, a new association or habit is formed, like brushing teeth before going to bed.

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.2 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.

Immediate rewards activate the hot, automatic, reflexive, unconscious limbic system, which pays little attention to delayed consequences. It wants what it wants immediately and steeply reduces or “discounts” the value of any rewards that are delayed.8 It is driven by the sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch of the object of desire, whether it’s marshmallows that make preschoolers ring the bell, irresistible fudge cake on the dessert platter, or the Siren songs that drowned sailors in an ancient myth.

Who we are and what we become reflects the interplay of both genetic and environmental influences in an enormously complex choreography. It is time to put away the “How much?” question because it cannot be answered simply. As the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb noted long ago, it’s like asking, What’s the more important determinant of a rectangle’s size: its length or its width?

“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

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.18 Dweck

What you need to know about someone is whether they will keep going when things get frustrating.” This is an equally apt description

To avoid the regret my colleague felt when her trip went from the hypothetical to the reality of packing and heading off to the airport, it might have helped if, before deciding to accept, she had imagined how it would play out as if it were happening now. If you want to decide how something (a new job, an exotic trip) will feel in the future, you might try to imagine yourself doing it in the present.4 Simulate the events as vividly as possible, in great detail, by essentially pre-living them. When my graduate students are fortunate enough to have more than one job offer and are tortured about their decision, I suggest that they imagine, as concretely as they can, living life in each job, one full day at a time, as if the job were happening now. The research by Trope and his colleagues on how psychological distance influences us also speaks to why it is much easier to resist immediate temptations if we think about them in abstract, cool ways or as being far away in space and time. Such

People who want to know more are categorized as “monitors”; those who would rather not know and prefer to self-distract or suppress are “blunters.

Blunters who received minimal information and monitors who received extensive information experienced the least tension and stress during the exam and in the recovery period. Thus, when the amount of preparatory information

When facing stress, whether medical or social, monitors generally do better when they are told more, and blunters do better when they are told less. Matching the information to the individual’s style reduces stress. As with all measures of individual differences, some people fall on either extreme of the spectrum, but most are more or less in the middle range.

To resist a temptation we have to cool it, distance it from the self, and make it abstract. To take the future into account, we have to heat it, make it imminent and vivid. To plan for the future, it helps to pre-live it at least briefly, to imagine the alternative possible scenarios as if they were unfolding in the present. This allows us to anticipate the consequences of our choices, letting ourselves both feel hot and think cool. And then hope for the best.

Overall, those who had high RS but also good self-control skills coped as well in their lives as those who were low in RS.7 When high RS people with good self-control skills were faced with stress and potential rejection in social relationships, they were able to use those skills to cool their hot, impulsive first reactions, thus restraining themselves from becoming enraged and aggressive and destroying their relationships.

If we are asked to imagine how we would feel if we became paraplegic, we are apt to anticipate a terribly unhappy life, as Gilbert and other researchers have shown. If it actually happens to us, our psychological immune system fortunately helps us make the best of it, and we soon wind up feeling much better than we thought we would. The downside of this system is that it makes us poor predictors of our future happiness; the upside is that it makes us better survivors when life goes badly. But

The depressives, far from seeing themselves through dark lenses as we had presumed, were cursed by twenty-twenty vision: compared with other groups, their self-ratings of positive qualities most closely matched how the observers rated them. In contrast, both the nondepressed psychiatric patients and the control group had inflated self-ratings, seeing themselves more positively than the observers saw them. The depressive patients simply did not see themselves through the rose-colored glasses that the others used when evaluating themselves.

We see others accurately, but we wear the rose-colored glasses when we rate ourselves, if we are fortunate enough to not be depressed. In fact, this kind of inflation in self-evaluation may be what helps protect most people from being depressed.

President Clinton had the self-control and delay ability to win a Rhodes scholarship, attain a Yale law degree, and be elected to the U.S. presidency, apparently combined with little desire — perhaps no ability, and certainly no willingness — to exert self-control for particular temptations like junk food and attractive White House interns. Likewise,

To 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

Can I predict how my colleague — who is known as “the loose cannon” at department meetings — behaves at home with his children? To my own surprise, study after rigorous study failed to support the core trait assumption: people high in a trait in one kind of situation often were low in that trait in another type of situation.7 The

When asked “Who is the real Bill Clinton?” my long answer was that he is highly conscientious and self-controlled in some contexts, but not in others; both sides of him are real. If you want to add up all his conscientious behaviors regardless of the context, he will, on average, be highly conscientious — although how high depends on whom you compare him with. And how you decide to evaluate his overall behavior, as well as whether or not you like or respect his If-Then patterns, depends on you.

Evidence for this idea surfaced in a classic experiment that has become the prototype for studying ego depletion. College students taking introductory psychology at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio were required to participate in psychology experiments as part of their course, and those who went to Professor Baumeister’s laboratory for their course requirement were put into the Radish Experiment.2 The students arrived hungry because they had been told to fast before coming. Once in the lab, they were asked to force themselves to forgo the tempting chocolate chip cookies and candy and eat some radishes instead. Right after that they were asked to work on geometry problems that were actually impossible to solve. The study showed that they quit much sooner than the students who had been allowed to eat the cookies and candy.

I asked Dave Levin if KIPP schools really “save lives,” to use George Ramirez’s phrase. Dave was adamant that they don’t save anybody’s life. He insisted: “We’re the cheerleaders; the kids are playing the game. They do the heavy lifting. We set up the conditions; the hard work has to be done by each individual.” KIPP’s mission, he explained, is to help children have choice-filled lives. Choice does not mean one road for all — and it does not have to mean an Ivy League college, or even college at all. Choice is about children having genuine options in how they make their lives, regardless of their demographics.

resisting temptation is difficult because the hot system is heavily biased toward the present: it takes full account of immediate rewards but discounts rewards that are delayed.

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.

when our hot system makes us focus on the present temptation in life, there is no one to cue us to make the distant consequences hot and the immediate gratifications cool. 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. This dominance of the hot system might have served our ancestors well in the wild, but it also drives us to the default reflex of giving in to temptations, making it easy for smart people to behave stupidly. If we feel regret about our self-control failures, it will probably be fleeting, because our psychological immune system is so good at protecting and defending us, rationalizing our lack of self-control (“I had a crazy day”; “It was her fault”), and not letting us feel bad about ourselves for long. That makes it even more unlikely that we will learn to behave differently in the future.

If we persist, however, the gratification that our new behavior produces will help sustain it: the new behavior itself becomes valued, no longer a burden but a source of satisfaction and self-confidence. As with all efforts to change long-standing patterns and learn new ones, whether playing the piano or exercising self-restraint to avoid hurting the people we love, the prescription is to “practice, practice, practice” until it becomes automatic and intrinsically rewarding.

When I am asked to summarize the fundamental message from research on self-control, I recall Descartes’s famous dictum cogito, ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am.”7 What has been discovered about mind, brain, and self-control lets us move from his proposition to “I think, therefore I can change what I am.” Because by changing how we think, we can change what we feel, do, and become. If that leads to the question “But can I really change?,” I reply with what George Kelly said to his therapy clients when they kept asking him if they could get control of their lives. He looked straight into their eyes and said, “Would you like to?”