Q&A With Dr Walter Mischel, author of The Marshmallow Test - ANSWERS BACK

[TinaMumsnet]

A child is presented with a marshmallow and given a choice: Eat this one now, or wait and enjoy two later. What will she do? And what are the implications for her behaviour later in life?

The Marshmallow Test is the fascinating new book by world renowned psychologist Walter Mischel. Dr. Mischel will be joining us for a Q&A and answering your questions about the topics in this book; delayed gratification, willpower and theory of mind - as well as what children's behaviour might indicate about their future decisions. If you have a question for Mischel do post it up on this thread.

The book giveaway is now closed.

I got my book a couple of days ago - crazy busy weekend means I haven't started it yet, but should be able to this evening. Looking forward to it.

I haven't had chance to do my review of the book yet, suffice to say it was a very interesting read! Proper review later.

A question for Dr Mischel - Given that the "marshmallow now" vs "marshmallow later" behaviour is contingent on trust, and that future-planning can be dependent on getting people to visualise themselves at that point in time, what advice would you give for politicians coming up for election next year, on issues like climate change and "austerity"? There always seem to be a lot of "marshmallow now" promises in the run-up to the election, and the longer-term issues get overlooked - are they correct in the apparent assumption that voters are not to be trusted to hold out for "marshmallow later"?

Also interested to hear the reply to slightlyglitterstained's advertising question posted above!

I would like to know does this test work with children that learn at a slower pace than most children that are the same age? Children that might have learning difficulties due to the way their brain works? Children that are impulsive and don't think before they react?

As gorgeously said. Is there a way of learning or encouraging self-discipline as an adult for a particular area, whether that is dieting, smoking, drug abuse, etc?

Thanks to all those who have sent in questions to Dr Mischel so far. As the books only arrived last week, we're extending the Q&A for another week - so please get all your qs in before 10am Monday, 20 October. We'll post up his answers before the end of the month. Please note that Dr Mischel may not be able to answer all the questions but will get through as many as possible in the time he has allocated to the Q&A.

I would have definitely eaten the first mm, I have always had a terrible sweet tooth and waiting would have been too hard.

Thinking of my (now adult) children, I would guess the eldest would have eaten the first (she has a slightly defiant 'I'll do what I like' attitude), the second would have waited (easier going, very bright), the third would have reacted to how the question was phrased ('here's a lovely mm but you'll get two if you wait', he would have eaten it; 'here's a mm but you'll get two if you wait', he'd have waited.).

Surely intelligence influences the results, and also a sweet tooth?

Anyone watching this morning? Talking about the marshmallow test later.

Just to add I would have definitely eaten the first mm, I have always had a terrible sweet tooth and waiting would have been too hard and there is always a risk of something interrupting the plan so that the second part cannot be completed so you don't get any mm.

Sorry haven't read the book yet.

I would still, now eat the first marshmallow!
Lifes too short to wait around hoping for a second marshmallow.
Seize pleasure when it arises I say.

DH and I have just had a discussion about whether to use an unexpected windfall to go on holiday or make capital repayments on the mortgage. Who would like to guess what side I was on?

I wonder if you place in the family affects your response, the first born would be confident of getting the second mm, but maybe a third born might not risk the older ones getting there first and just go for the one!

Dr Mischel

Last night I attended your discussion with Oliver Burkeman at the School of Life. I had learnt about your 'marshmallow' research at University, but last night really brought it to life. I wanted to ask the following question but didn't get time: You mentioned that you had conducted some research with people being treated for depression. Has your work over the years led you to draw any correlations between depression and executive function, or are there too many variables?

Thank you again for a fascinating evening; I look forward to reading your book.

Really enjoyed this book. It has been a while since I read any psychology and it was a great way to renew an interest. Very interesting to read details of the various studies and especially the tactics employed by the children to distract themselves. Made me think about my own DDs, both of whom have excellent self control in the face of temptations such as marshmallows but keep putting off homework in favour of technology.

Anyone who is hoping for a self-help style book may well be disappointed but I could barely put it down and have been looking into studies mentioned myself to find out more.

This Q&A is now closed and we have sent the questions over to Dr Mischel. We'll post the answers up on this thread when we have them back. Thanks to everyone who took part!

Just finished the book a very interesting read, if you didn't win try and get a copy well worth it

This book was a great read and has made me look at both my DDs behaviour and my own. I have tried implementing the If-Then approach with some success in relation to my sugar addiction and am now able to avoid the corner shop on my way home, even overcoming my advanced ability to justify anything I fancy (which is also covered in the book).

Just finishing up the book and enjoyed it - found it quite entertaining, which I was surprised by. Where do the reviews go - on this thread or elsewhere?

I'd also like to know whether reviews are supposed to go on this thread or is there another one somewhere for reviews?

I'm just coming towards the end of this now too. Would have finished it a while ago, but was so busy at work. A week off this week though means I've ploughed through it!

A very interesting read. Was talking about it with my mum the other day. We're both in agreement that I think I would have waited whereas my brother would have eaten the first marshmallow!

I also would like to know where the review needs to go...

We now have the answers back and will be posting them up shortly. If you'd like to post a review, you can do so here. Thanks to everyone who took part!

@fredfredgeorgejnr

Surely it's a test of reliability of the adults in the childs life? If a child is always being told "We'll go to the park later", "we'll have some chocolate after dinner", and then the adult doesn't deliver. Then the child will react differently to one who does get what they are given...

So, how is this parental reliability controlled for in any conclusion in lifetime success, I would hypothesise that an unreliable parent is likely to have a lower attaining child for so many reasons beyond the self control of the child.

A child who has unreliable parents who consistently fail to keep their promises is going to have a hard time creating strong trust relationships. If you don’t believe that people will keep their promises, and don’t develop trust, there’s no reason to delay gratification when dealing with them.
“The importance of trust—and how to build it-- is one of the main themes in my new book The Marshmallow Test. In the test itself, the relationship between the researcher and child is pre-established as a trusting relationship. The researchers are part of the nursery school and they have played together with each child many times, always keeping their promises.

In the procedure for the test there is a bell and, before the “waiting game” starts, the child rings the bell – called the Bring Me Back bell, many times. . And when the child rings the bell the researcher who stepped out will jump back in and say ‘You see, you brought me back!’ – this is done until the children know the researcher comes back and keeps his promises. Also, both the delayed two marshmallows and the one marshmallow are right there in front of the child. There is no question of ‘will the marshmallows come back?’ They are there with the child already. In the hundreds of children tested, not a single child has violated “the rules of the game“ and eaten all three.

Also not everybody likes marshmallows. The kids always have the opportunity to choose the goody that they really want. Some choose marshmallows but some choose other treats such as pretzels or graham crackers or mints. There are all kinds of combinations.

On the Marshmallow Test if a child cannot wait, it may be, for example. because she forgot to go to the bathroom. If she does wait, however, you know that she has a critically important cognitive competence for doing well in life – known as 'executive function.’ Executive function involves three steps that are tapped by the Marshmallow Test. If the child waits. You know that:

1. She (he) can keep a goal in mind- “I am waiting for two marshmallows.”
2. She is able to inhibit the interfering responses that prevent her from reaching this goal –“ I can’t think ‘yummy, chewy and sweet’ or how good it would be to eat.’
3. In addition to keeping the goal in mind, she has to control her attention to make the task easier for herself and to monitor her progress towards the goal. She has to turn what is otherwise an unbearably effortful and stressful situation – waiting in an empty room for a temptation in front of her--, into an easy task. The kids who waited managed this by turning away from the temptations, singing songs, playing with their toes, exploring their nasal cavities or ear canals, talking silently to themselves, and so on with amazing creativity.

There are endless ways that young children by age four are already able to use their attention control skills and imagination to transform the situation so that they reduce their stress and make the delay easier for themselves. This is the self-control skill that is tapped by the Marshmallow Test. If a child knows how to do this at age four he certainly has an advantage, and is more ready for school and new learning experiences. He is also more able to inhibit negative emotions like anger and aggression, and to take account of the delayed consequences of what he does.

The good news is that the necessary cognitive skills for self-control are easy to teach and can be learned particularly well by kids when they are young. The Marshmallow Test discusses how this works and can be nurtured, how parents can help to increase the child’s self-control skills, build trust and help him see that there are clear consequences to his behaviour: ‘If I do good I get good consequences’. If I behave badly, I don’t.’ 0ver time, he develops stable expectations and sees 'there is a relationship between what I do and what I get'. He develops a growing sense of mastery and agency—as someone who, through his own behaviour and self-control, and efforts, can reach his goals, and succeed.

@slightlyglitterstained

if self-control can be taught by teaching people to re-frame how they see a desirable object, how will advertisers respond to that? As our understanding of triggers for behaviour grows, so too does the sophistication of all the techniques that corporations use to encourage us to choose their products.

Can learning self-control help to "ad-proof" our children, or will it be a constantly escalating arms race?

I think that is a deep question. Advertisers fully recognise the importance of how we frame a stimulus, particularly when they are framing hot temptations such as tasty snack foods that long-term can make us obese. They frame them in ways that make them irresistible. But we can counter-attack if we do our own re-framing of products that are constantly being made to tempt us – eating things we shouldn’t be eating, smoking stuff we shouldn’t be smoking. We can quit smoking if we manage to transform how we think about a cigarette, changing it from a soothing temptation to a terrible slow-acting poison. For example, imagine yourself diagnosed with lung cancer being wheeled in the hospital to the next radiation treatment, —and hold on to that image each time you are about to reach for a cigarette.

I wrote the Marshmallow Test to share with readers the various ways that you can learn to better control your problematic behaviours, emotions and temptations, and help your children to do the same, Chapters 18, 19 and 20 speak directly to the questions you are asking, and identify the essential skills and strategies for making self-control easier.

@JavaSparrow

Dr Mischel, how do you feel about the irony of your self control test being used to encourage people to abandon self control and tempt them buy the "treat"?

One of the main reasons that I wrote this book at this point is because there have never been more temptations available than now. We need to have automatic, reflexive ways of fighting against that to protect us from temptations to over-drink, over eat, over smoke, over purchase and spend on our credit cards.

Companies frame their products so they look so incredibly tempting and appeal to our 'hot' impulses ('I want that now!'). Understanding how self-control works, what makes it hard, and what makes it easy, helps us to more effectively control our temptations, rather than having them control us. It lets us decide and choose, rather than have the advertisers controlling what we do and choosing what we buy.

@Gorgeously

Can this book help with willpower when it comes to dieting?! Any top tips?! :o

In the book I discuss dieting problems, in my own case with pastries and products I grew up adoring – pasta, really good bread, rolls, croissants, cakes and pastries. I developed what turned out to be celiac disease, a severe allergic reaction to gluten. To combat this disease the only thing you can do is to give up anything that has wheat flour in it, or barley and rye, because these are the foods that contain gluten.

Children and adults who have this allergy develop serious problems with digestion, sometimes also with skin eruptions, which was my version. To resist all the tempting foods that contain gluten you have to do a reframing so that these temptations are seen not as temptations but as poisons. Turning pasta into poison was easy because in my version of coeliac disease, eating gluten soon makes my skin feel as if it was covered with acid. A delicious non-gluten free pizza becomes a terrible burn a few hours later. That makes it much easier to give up. Dogs who eat something that gets them sick will never go near it again. It’s built into us. It’s no great feat of willpower; it’s an easy re-framing.

It’s a different story when the negative consequences are very delayed. If you hit a giant bag of potato chips and gobble them down – there are no immediate consequences – it feels great! So we need to do a re-representation of the chip as something that is the road to terrible health problems and obesity. When framed in that way rather, rather than feeling “crunchy, delicious, salty” etc it helps to be reminded of the delayed consequences and to make those as hot and vivid as possible.

I know that when I enter a restaurant, unless I have a specific plan rehearsed ahead of time, even though I walk in saying to myself ‘no chocolate mousse tonight’--my good intention is going to go the way New Year Resolutions go. When it’s the end of the meal and the waiter comes with the pastry tray and puts it near me and I see that chocolate mousse, the only way to resist it is if before entering the restaurant, I rehearse my ‘If-Then’ plan. So I decide ahead of time 'IF the waiter brings the dessert tray with the chocolate mousse on it THEN I will order the fruit salad'. It’s a well rehearsed, reflexive, automatic and there in my hot system – the emotional part of my brain. It’s a useful simple strategy and it has been shown that if you rehearse specific 'IF-THEN' plans like that it can make self-control much easier. IF I’m approaching that bar THEN I cross the street. IF someone offers me a cigarette, THEN I say 'I don’t ever smoke’. If such plans are rehearsed and made automatic they work and become habits like brushing your teeth before you go to bed. It becomes an automatic well-rehearsed plan – even if you’re tired and exhausted, you brush your teeth.

@dashoflime

I would like to ask Dr. Mischel:

Would he prefer to have a marshmallow now, or two marshmallows later?

I think there are often times in life when I absolutely prefer one marshmallow now to two later. A life in which we don’t have times where we go for the here and now is as sad as one in which you cannot delay gratification. A life of over-control that is entirely driven for future consequences can be as unfulfilling as a life where we become victims of the temptations all around us. The goal of the Marshmallow Test research and my book is to help us understand more clearly what gives us freedom of choice. So YOU can decide ‘Do I really want this now?’ Self-control allows us to have true choice to say yes or no to the diverse hot temptations – some of which we surely want to enjoy and some of which we surely want to resist, given the long-term consequences to which they lead.

@yummum120

I would like to know does this test work with children that learn at a slower pace than most children that are the same age? Children that might have learning difficulties due to the way their brain works? Children that are impulsive and don't think before they react?

There is some very good news here in results from educational efforts to help impulsive children, and those who have difficulty with learning and who develop at a slower pace. Excellent methods have been developed to help kids increase their ability to self-control, and they have been particularly effective for children who struggle, making it easier and less stressful for them to learn and achieve in preschool and much beyond.