La~mour

Friday, May 12, 2006

Self Control?

How good are you at Self Control?

Around 1970, the psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of four-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmellow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmellow. But if they did not ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmellows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes--desperately trying to exercise self control so that they can wait and get two marshmellows. Their performance varied. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15min.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and has, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years on and were more likely to hav drug problems at age 32.

The Mischel experiments are worth noting because people in the policy world spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve education, how to reduce poverty, how to make the most of the nation's human capital. But when policymakers address these problems, they come up with structural remedies: cut class sizes, create more charter schools, raise teacher say, mandate daycare, try vouchers.

The results of these structural reforms are almost always disappointingly modest. And yet policymakers rarely ever probe deeper into problems and ask core question, such as how do we get people to master the sort of self-control that leads to success? To ask that question is to leave the policymakers' comfort zone---which is the world of inputs and outputs, appropriations and bureaucratic reform---and to enter the murky world of psychology and human nature.

And yet the Mischel experimens tell us that self-control is essential. Toung people who can delay gratification can sit through boring classes to get a degree. They can perform rote tasks in order to, say, master a language. They can avoid drugs and drink.

But for people without self-control, school is a series of failed ordeals: No wonder they drop out. Life is a parade of foolish decisions: teen pregnancy, drgus, gambling, truancy and crime.

If you are a policymaker and you are not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you're just playing with proxy issues---not the crux of the problem.

The research we do have on delayed gratification tells us that differences in self-control skills are deeply rooted but also malleable. Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine-months. But there is no consensus on how much of the ability to self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.

The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlateswith socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes so much worse in delayed gratification tests than those from middle-class homes. That is probably beacuse children from poorer homes are more likely to have their livesdisrupted by marital breakdown. violence, moving etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.

The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emrge early and persist, that ability can be inproved with conscious effort. Moral lecturers do not work. Sheer willpower does not seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmellow did not stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to distract themselves, and think about other things.

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, is creating stable, predictable environments for children in which good behaviour pays off---and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it over time.

Somehow we have entered a world which we obsess over structural reforms and standardised tests, but skirt around the moral and psychological traits that are at the heart of actual success. Mr Mischel tried to interest New York schools in programmes based on his recearch. Needless to say, he found almost no takers.

LA~mour at 3:10 PM