What kind of a reader are you? in class assignment

Carolyn:  “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!”
“I’ve always been really good at waiting,” Carolyn told me. “If you give me a challenge or a task, then I’m going to find a way to do it, even if it means not eating my favorite food.” 

Carolyn's Mother: “Even as a young kid, Carolyn was very patient. I’m sure she would have waited."

Craig:  “At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. “And so I just started taking all the candy.”

“I took everything I could,” he says. “I cleaned them out. After that, I noticed the teachers encouraged me to not go into the experiment room anymore.”

Mischel:  “A few kids ate the marshmallow right away,” Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers. “They didn’t even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later.” 

“There are only so many things you can do with kids trying not to eat marshmallows.”

 “It was really just idle dinnertime conversation,” he says. “I’d ask them, ‘How’s Jane? How’s Eric? How are they doing in school?’ ”
 “That’s when I realized I had to do this seriously,” he says.

Craig:  “Sure, I wish I had been a more patient person,” Craig says. “Looking back, there are definitely moments when it would have helped me make better career choices and stuff.”

Mischel: “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”
“If you want to know why some kids can wait and others can’t, then you’ve got to think like they think,” Mischel says.

 “At the time, it seemed like a mental X-ray machine,” he says. “You could solve a person by showing them a picture.”
 “The East Indians would describe the Africans as impulsive hedonists, who were always living for the moment and never thought about the future,” he says. “The Africans, meanwhile, would say that the East Indians didn’t know how to live and would stuff money in their mattress and never enjoy themselves.”
 “It went against the way we’d been thinking about personality since the four humors and the ancient Greeks,” he says.
 “I’ve always believed there are consistencies in a person that can be looked at,” he says. “We just have to look in the right way.”
 “Young kids are pure id,” Mischel says. “They start off unable to wait for anything—whatever they want they need. But then, as I watched my own kids, I marvelled at how they gradually learned how to delay and how that made so many other things possible.”

Winters:  “We recently tried to do a version of it, and the kids were very excited about having food in the game room,” she says. “There are so many allergies and peculiar diets today that we don’t do many things with food.”

Mischel:  “When you’re investigating will power in a four-year-old, little things make a big difference,” he says. “How big should the marshmallows be? What kind of cookies work best?”
“I knew we’d designed it well when a few kids wanted to quit as soon as we explained the conditions to them,” he says. “They knew this was going to be very difficult.”

“If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.

“What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

“If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”
“In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says. “The two influences are completely interrelated.”

“When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.”

“All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

Berman:  “We can’t give these people marshmallows,” Berman

Jonides:  “These tasks have been studied so many times that we pretty much know where to look and what we’re going to find,” Jonides says. 

“These are powerful instincts telling us to reach for the marshmallow or press the space bar,” Jonides says. “The only way to defeat them is to avoid them, and that means paying attention to something else. We call that will power, but it’s got nothing to do with the will.”

Shoda:  “We’re incredibly complicated creatures,” Shoda says. “Even the simplest aspects of personality are driven by dozens and dozens of different genes.”

Carolyn:  “They turned my kitchen into a lab,” Carolyn told me. “They set up a little tent where they tested my oldest daughter on the delay task with some cookies. I remember thinking, I really hope she can wait.”

Mischel:  "I’m not interested in looking at the brain just so we can use a fancy machine,” he says. “The real question is what can we do with this fMRI data that we couldn’t do before?”
“This is the group I’m most interested in,” he says. “They have substantially improved their lives.”

 

Duhkworth:   “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.”

She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control."

Levin:  “The core feature of the KIPP approach is that character matters for success,” Levin says. “Educators like to talk about character skills when kids are in kindergarten—we send young kids home with a report card about ‘working well with others’ or ‘not talking out of turn.’ But then, just when these skills start to matter, we stop trying to improve them. We just throw up our hands and complain.”

“We know how to teach math skills, but it’s harder to measure character strengths,”

Duhkworth: “When you do these large-scale educational studies, there are ninety-nine uninteresting reasons the study could fail,” Duckworth says. “Maybe a teacher doesn’t show the video, or maybe there’s a field trip on the day of the testing. This is what keeps me up at night.”

Mischel: “This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?”
“We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ ”