Walter Mischel
Psychologist whose ‘marshmallow test’ examined why some children are better at resisting temptation
WALTER MISCHEL, who has died aged 88, was a psychologist who carried out a famous experiment to test how far young children were able to resist the lure of instant gratification when presented with something delicious to eat.
What became known as “the marshmallow test” began in the 1960s at Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School, where Mischel and his graduate students gave 653 three to five-year-olds a choice between one marshmallow on a table that they could eat immediately, or two marshmallows for which they would have to wait for up to 20 minutes while the researcher left the room.
Footage of these experiments showed the children struggling to control their urge to grab the marshmallow, some covering their eyes with their hands so that they could not see it, others distracting themselves by singing or talking to themselves, putting their fingers in their ears, kicking the table or tugging their hair. Most struggled to resist, holding out for an average of less than three minutes; a few ate the marshmallow straight away. About 30 per cent, however, held out until the researcher returned, to earn their second marshmallow.
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 two-marshmallow reward, but only some possessed the necessary self-control.
Mischel’s conclusion was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention” whereby the patient children used distraction strategies to help them forget, for a time, the temptation on offer.
Later, Mischel began to detect a link between the children’s performance as teenagers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow. Starting in 1981, he sent out a questionnaire to parents and teachers of the now high school pupils who had participated in the experiment and discovered that those who had been unable to wait seemed more likely to have behavioural problems, found it difficult to maintain friendships and performed poorly academically. The children who had more self-control had higher intellectual scores and better social and cognitive functioning. Intelligence, in other words, is largely at the mercy of self-discipline: even the brightest children still need to do their homework.
Mischel continued to track the subjects into their late thirties and found that the more impatient children tended to have greater problems with obesity, drugs, depression and relationships. Brain scans showed that their more self-disciplined peers had more activity in parts of the brain associated with effective problem solving.
Subsequently Mischel and his colleagues put forward a theory of the brain’s “hot and cold” structure. The “hot” part of the brain is the limbic system, which is impulsive and demands immediate gratification. The pre-frontal cortex is the “cold” part – reflective, calmer and more goal-orientated. Children’s intelligence and abilities, however, were not fixed traits and Mischel saw his studies less as predictors of later success or failure, but as clues to self-improvement strategies. In The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-control and How to Master it
(2014), Mischel argued that adults could learn lessons from the test when struggling to cope with everyday challenges such as quitting smoking, losing weight or overcoming relationship problems.
The trick, he argued, is to adopt similar strategies to those used by the more patient children: “You can have a plan so that if you are passing one of those attractive shop windows that will make you spend money, then you will cross to the other side of the street. If you feel you are going to lose your temper, then you will count backwards from ten or a hundred until you feel calmer.” Eventually, through practice, such strategies become automatic, allowing people to make better decisions about their lives.
Walter Mischel was born in Vienna on February 22 1930 into an assimilated Jewish family. They enjoyed a comfortable life until the
Anschluss when his father, a businessman who had suffered from polio, was made to limp through the streets in his pyjamas without his cane, and young Walter was taunted by members of the Hitler Youth.
A few weeks after the takeover, however, Walter found a certificate of US citizenship issued to his maternal grandfather decades earlier. In consequence the family was able to move to America. They settled in Brooklyn, where his parents opened a “five and dime” store.
Mischel attended New York University, then took a PHD in clinical psychology at Ohio State University.
In 1955 he travelled to Trinidad to study “spirit possession” ceremonies, basing himself in a part of the island split between people of East Indian and of African descent. Fascinated by the racial stereotypes he encountered (the East Indians would describe the Africans as impulsive hedonists; the Africans would depict the East Indians as misers who never enjoyed themselves), he took young children from both groups and offered them a small chocolate bar right away or a much bigger chocolate bar a few days later if they waited. His results failed to justify the stereotypes – other variables, such as whether or not the children lived with their father, turned out to be more important – but the experiment got him interested in the mechanics of delayed gratification.
In 1958 Mischel became an assistant professor in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, moving to Stanford in 1962 and later to Columbia University, where he became chairman of the psychology department.
The marshmallow test became one of the most famous experiments in psychology, spawning countless studies by others and becoming part of the stock in trade of business gurus urging chief executives to resist short-term strategies that boost the share price but risk long-term problems. It entered popular culture in Sesame Street episodes where the Cookie Monster learns strategies for waiting so he can join the Cookie Connoisseurs Club.
But from the beginning some psychologists challenged Mischel’s findings, with one recent study concluding that many of them were negated by including such factors as class. The researchers noted that while affluent families might teach their children to delay gratification to encourage financial and other forms of prudence, children from unstable or disadvantaged backgrounds often learn that waiting to eat might mean not eating at all. For these children, taking the marshmallow on the table, rather than waiting for an untrustworthy grown-up to reappear with two marshmallows, may be the most rational strategy. The study also found that willpower did not seem to be a clear indicator of children’s later success in life.
Mischel’s marriage to Harriet Nerlove was dissolved. He is survived by their three daughters and by his partner, Michele Myer.
Walter Mischel, born February 22 1930, died September 12 2018