The Marshmallow Test Quotes

“This is encouraging evidence of the power of the environment to influence characteristics like intelligence. Even if traits like intelligence have large genetic determinants, they are still substantially malleable.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“What we do, and how well we control our attention in the service of our goals, becomes part of the environment that we help create and that in turn influences us. This mutual influence shapes who and what we become, from our physical and mental health to the quality and length of our life.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“In the human body, each of approximately a trillion cells holds within its nucleus a complete and identical sequence of DNA. That is about 1.5 gigabytes of genetic information, and it would fill two CD-ROMs, yet the DNA sequence itself would fit on the point of a well-sharpened pencil.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals. It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals. It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships. It can help people avoid becoming entrapped early in life, dropping out of school, becoming impervious to consequences, or getting stuck in jobs they hate.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“the ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of future consequences is an acquirable cognitive skill.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-control and How To Master It

“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.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“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?”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“I think therefore I can change”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“This is how Laibson explains his procrastination: He can exercise today (his effort cost is –6) to gain delayed health benefits (for him a future value of +8). The net benefit of exercising today for someone with his present bias is (–6 + ½ [8] = –2). In this equation, the future value of +8 was halved because of the automatic discounting of the future, making –2 the net benefit of his exercising today. In contrast, exercising tomorrow has a delayed effort cost of –6 and a delayed benefit of +8, both of which are halved because they are in the future (½ [–6 + 8] = +1). For Laibson the resulting net value for putting off going to the gym is +1, which is better than the –2 net value for exercising today. Consequently, he is rarely at the gym.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-control and How To Master It

“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.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-control and How To Master It

“In July 2012, in San Jose, California, twenty-one people had to be treated for burns after attempting to walk on hot coals, as inspired by a motivational speaker extolling the power of positive thinking.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“How we vote on policy issues, for example, is influenced by whether we attribute economic and achievement inequalities primarily to genetic or environmental forces. If the differences are due to nature, society may decide to take pity on the unfortunates who lost out in the genetic roulette that produced them but could also feel that the rest of the world is not culpable for their misfortune. If it’s the environment that is mostly responsible for who we are and what we become, then is it up to us to change it to reduce the injustices it has produced? How you see the role of heredity and prewiring in willpower, character, and personality affects not just your abstract view of human nature and responsibility, but also your sense of what is and is
not possible for you or your children.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“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.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“When dealing with temptations, one way to momentarily escape the hot system is to imagine how someone else would behave. It’s easier to use the cool system when making hot choices for others rather than for oneself. A researcher whose name I can’t remember but whose story I can’t forget asked preschoolers to consider a choice between a small piece of chocolate right now and a very large piece in ten minutes (he showed both pieces of chocolate to the children). When he asked a young boy, “What would an intelligent child choose?,” the child responded that he would wait; when the researcher asked, “What will you do?,” the child said, “I’ll take it now!” The same point was made in an experiment with three-year-olds.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“the more it is clear that they inseparably shape each other.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“most predispositions are prewired to some degree, but they are also flexible, with plasticity and potential for change. Identifying the conditions and mechanisms that enable the change is the challenge.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“James Watson summarizes the conclusion: “A predisposition does not a predetermination make.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“Ultimately, all biological processes are influenced by context, including the social-psychological environment. The environment includes everything”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“Frances Champagne, a leader in research on how environments influence gene expression, is convinced that it is time to drop the nature versus nurture debate about which is more important and ask instead, What do genes actually do? What is the environment doing that changes what the genes do?”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“In short, what gets read, the genes that will and won’t be expressed, depends on the enormously complex interactions between biological and environmental influences. The possibilities are endless and the role of the environment essential. Our genetic makeup (i.e., our library) provides a stunningly nimble system for responding to the environment.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“Here is the critical piece: the overall “experience” of the book reader visiting the library is not simply the sum of all the books in the library. The experience of the reader depends on when he visits the library, who joins him, what sections he visits, what parts of the library are open or closed at that particular time, and which books he pulls off the shelves.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“The sentences are further organized into paragraphs and chapters. These are modules of highly coordinated genes that function together, which are further organized into books, which are further organized into sections of the library (tissues, organs, etc.).”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“which “houses” about twenty thousand genes. Each book in this DNA library contains words arranged into sentences. These DNA sentences are genes.”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

“Consider all the information contained within a library that houses thousands of books as a metaphor for the human body,”
― Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control