Psychologist tested human behaviour with marshmallows
Walter Mischel, whose studies of delayed gratification in young children clarified the importance of self-control in human development and whose work led to a broad reconsideration of how personality is understood, died Wednesday at his home in New York City. He was 88.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter Linda Mischel Eisner said.
Mischel was probably best known for the marshmallow test, which challenged children to wait before eating a treat. That test and others like it grew in part out of Mischel’s deepening frustration with the predominant personality models of the mid-20th century.
One model was rooted in Freudian thinking and saw people as prisms of unconscious, often conflicting desires.
The other was based on personality questionnaires, or “inventories” and categorized people as having certain traits, like recklessness or restraint, at levels that were fairly stable over time.
Neither model was particularly predictive of what people actually did in experiments, Mischel concluded, in part because the models ignored context: the specifics of a given situation, who is there, what a person’s goals are, the rewards and risks of acting on impulse.
In a series of experiments at Stanford University beginning in the 1960s, he led a research team that presented preschool-age children with treats — pretzels, cookies, a marshmallow — and instructed them to wait before indulging themselves. Some of the children received strategies from the researchers, like covering their eyes or re-imagining the treat as something else; others were left to their own devices.
The studies found that in all conditions, some youngsters were far better than others at deploying the strategies — or devising their own — and that this ability seemed to persist at later ages. And context mattered: Children given reason to distrust the researchers tended to grab the treats earlier. The experiments did not seem seminal at the time, at least on their own.
But in a 1973 paper, Mischel assembled them with a raft of other evidence to level a sharp critique of standard, trait-based personality psychology.
“The proposed approach to personality psychology,” he concluded, “recognizes that a person’s behaviour changes the situations of his life as well as being changed by them.”
In other words, categorizing people as a collection of traits was too crude to reliably predict behaviour, or capture who they are.
Mischel proposed an “If ... then” approach to assessing personality, in which a person’s instincts and makeup interact with what’s happening moment to moment, as in: If that waiter ignores me one more time, I’m talking to the manager. Or: If I can make my case in a small group, I’ll do it then, rather than in front of the whole class.
In an era when traditional ideas were on trial across the culture, the paper had the impact of a manifesto. Many in the trait-psychology camp reacted with anger, accusing Mischel of trying to tear down the field. On the other side, many scholars were delighted: Social psychology, the study of how situations shape behaviour, had a new champion.
“For us in the field, that paper was perhaps his biggest contribution,” Brent Roberts, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, said.