Walter Mischel

Brief Biography

Walter Mischel was born in 1930 in Vienna, Austria, into a Jewish family. His father was a businessman. His brother, Theodore, was to become a professional philosopher.

Following the Anschlüss in 1938, the family emigrated to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, in New York City. There, the family opened a “five-and-dime” store, for which the young Walter used to make local deliveries.

Mischel obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New York University in 1951 and 1953, respectively. He earned his PhD in clinical psychology from Ohio State University in 1956.

Mischel’s teaching career took him from the University of Colorado (1856–1958), to Harvard University (1958–1962), to Stanford University (1962–1983), to Columbia University, where he spent the remainder of his career.

In addition to a highly discussed textbook in 1968 and a bestselling popular book late in life, Mischel published around 200 peer-reviewed journal articles. According to one prominent professional citation index, he was among the top-25 most-cited psychologists of the twentieth century.

Mischel is best know for two contributions to personality psychology.

The first was a scathing critique of the concept of the concept of static personality, which Mischel advanced in his 1968 textbook, Personality and Assessment. In this volume, he discussed the ample evidence showing that inborn personality is influenced by manifold situational factors in producing behavior.

However, rather than abandoning altogether the notion of a constant personality, Mischel proposed that what remains constant over time is the ensemble of ways in which personality may be modulated by experience into fundamental patterns of response. He labeled these characteristic behavioral patterns as “personality signatures.”

The other work for which Mischel’s name is widely known is his demonstration of the high correlation between self-control—as measured by a subject’s capacity for delayed gratification—and success in later life—as measured by SAT test scores, among other things.

The correlation uncovered by Mischel was surprisingly large and his work in this area has stood up well over several decades of further research on the neural basis of willpower.

In 2014, not long before his death, Mischel published a book presenting his work on self-control to a popular audience: The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. Following the publication of this work, Mischel gave a number of interviews to the PBS NewsHour and other popular television and radio programs.

The book described the classic experiment that Mischel devised, in which small children were presented with the option of receiving one marshmallow immediately or two marshmallows in ten minutes’ time.

Mischel later generalized the correlation he uncovered between a subject’s results on this simple test and his or her future life outcome to the social level. In doing so, he showed that the capacity for self-control and delayed gratification is also correlated with household income level.

Mischel died in London in 2018 at the age of 88.

Notable Quotes

Note: The original sources of the following quotations attributed here to Walter Mischel are provided where known. If no specific source is mentioned, then the attributed quotation may be assumed to derive from or (perhaps via paraphrase) be inspired by Mischel’s many academic and popular writings.

Brain and Behavior

The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Depression

The depressives, far from seeing themselves through dark lenses as we had presumed, were cursed by twenty-twenty vision: compared with other groups, their self-ratings of positive qualities most closely matched how the observers rated them. In contrast, both the nondepressed psychiatric patients and the control group had inflated self-ratings, seeing themselves more positively than the observers saw them. The depressive patients simply did not see themselves through the rose-colored glasses that the others used when evaluating themselves.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Genetics

This is encouraging evidence of the power of the environment to influence characteristics like intelligence. Even if traits like intelligence have large genetic determinants, they are still substantially malleable.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Environments can be as deterministic as we once believed only genes could be and . . . the genome can be as malleable as we once believed only environments could be.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Consider all the information contained within a library that houses thousands of books as a metaphor for the human body, which “houses” about twenty thousand genes. Each book in this DNA library contains words arranged into sentences. These DNA sentences are genes. . . . The sentences are further organized into paragraphs and chapters. These are modules of highly coordinated genes that function together, which are further organized into books, which are further organized into sections of the library (tissues, organs, etc.). . . . 

Here is the critical piece: the overall “experience” of the book reader visiting the library is not simply the sum of all the books in the library. The experience of the reader depends on when he visits the library, who joins him, what sections he visits, what parts of the library are open or closed at that particular time, and which books he pulls off the shelves. . . .

In short, what gets read, the genes that will and won’t be expressed, depends on the enormously complex interactions between biological and environmental influences. The possibilities are endless and the role of the environment essential. Our genetic makeup (i.e., our library) provides a stunningly nimble system for responding to the environment.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

How we vote on policy issues, for example, is influenced by whether we attribute economic and achievement inequalities primarily to genetic or environmental forces. If the differences are due to nature, society may decide to take pity on the unfortunates who lost out in the genetic roulette that produced them but could also feel that the rest of the world is not culpable for their misfortune. If it’s the environment that is mostly responsible for who we are and what we become, then is it up to us to change it to reduce the injustices it has produced? How you see the role of heredity and prewiring in willpower, character, and personality affects not just your abstract view of human nature and responsibility, but also your sense of what is and is not possible for you or your children.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Frances Champagne, a leader in research on how environments influence gene expression, is convinced that it is time to drop the nature versus nurture debate about which is more important and ask instead, What do genes actually do? What is the environment doing that changes what the genes do?

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Human Behavior

People do not behave like pawns; they respond to whatever incentives and disincentives are present.

Personality and Assessment (1968).

The key to understanding behavior lies not in personality traits per se, but in understanding the interactions between individuals and the situations they encounter.

If you can’t predict what someone is going to do in a particular situation, it’s because the situation is more important than the personality.

People have a lot more control over situations than they realize.

The real question is not what works but when and for whom does it work.

Understanding the complexities of human behavior requires looking beyond individual traits and considering the interactions between people and their environment.

The ability to adapt and respond flexibly to different situations is a hallmark of psychological health and resilience.

The ability to regulate emotions and impulses is crucial for mental health and well-being.

What we do, and how well we control our attention in the service of our goals, becomes part of the environment that we help create and that in turn influences us. This mutual influence shapes who and what we become, from our physical and mental health to the quality and length of our life.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Who we are and what we become reflects the interplay of both genetic and environmental influences in an enormously complex choreography. It is time to put away the “How much?” question because it cannot be answered simply. As the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb noted long ago, it’s like asking, What’s the more important determinant of a rectangle’s size: its length or its width?

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

When I am asked to summarize the fundamental message from research on self-control, I recall “Descartes’s famous dictum cogito, ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am.” What has been discovered about mind, brain, and self-control lets us move from his proposition to “I think, therefore I can change what I am.” Because by changing how we think, we can change what we feel, do, and become. If that leads to the question “But can I really change?,” I reply with what George Kelly said to his therapy clients when they kept asking him if they could get control of their lives. He looked straight into their eyes and said, “Would you like to?”

Ultimately, all biological processes are influenced by context, including the social-psychological environment. The environment includes everything.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Most predispositions are prewired to some degree, but they are also flexible, with plasticity and potential for change. Identifying the conditions and mechanisms that enable the change is the challenge.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

James Watson summarizes the conclusion: “A predisposition does not a predetermination make.”

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

The best way to predict future behavior is to look at past behavior.

Marshmallow Test

If the marshmallow task is about anything, it is about knowing how to delay gratification.

Interview, The Guardian (2014).

The ability to delay gratification and resist the pull of instant gratification underlies a wide range of positive outcomes, from academic success and physical health to greater happiness and life satisfaction.

The marshmallow test is not about the marshmallow. It’s about the ability to delay gratification and exercise self-control, which are critical skills for success in life.

The marshmallow test is not just about willpower; it’s also about the ability to envision and work toward future goals.

When dealing with temptations, one way to momentarily escape the hot system is to imagine how someone else would behave. It’s easier to use the cool system when making hot choices for others rather than for oneself. A researcher whose name I can’t remember but whose story I can’t forget asked preschoolers to consider a choice between a small piece of chocolate right now and a very large piece in ten minutes (he showed both pieces of chocolate to the children). When he asked a young boy, “What would an intelligent child choose?,” the child responded that he would wait; when the researcher asked, “What will you do?,” the child said, “I’ll take it now!” The same point was made in an experiment with three-year-olds.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the SAT instead of watching television, and you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.

Mischel on Mischel

The whole world opened up to me when I learned to read.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

I have an easy tendency to stumble and fall, which is not a good thing in an 84-year-old guy, so when I brush my teeth, then I do balancing exercises.

I made a pact with my three-year-old thumb-sucking daughter that if she stopped sucking her thumb, I would stop sucking my pipe.

Melancholy is not one of my emotions. Quite seriously, I don’t do melancholy.

If you can’t predict accurately how someone is going to behave in a situation, it is not because that person doesn’t have a personality, but because you’re not looking at the right dimensions of personality,

Interview, in Albert Ellis, Mike Abrams, and Lidia D. Abrams, eds., Personality Theories: A Critical Perspective (2008).

There is no “big five” trait that accurately captures the complexity of who we are.

“A cognitive–affective system theory of personality: reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure,” with Yuichi Shoda, Psychological Review, 102: 246–268 (1995).

Personality is not a fixed entity. Rather, it is an extraordinarily flexible set of cognitive and behavioral strategies that we deploy in response to the changing demands of different situations.

The problem is that too many people have a static view of personality. They think it is fixed and unchanging, but in reality, personality is dynamic and can adapt to different situations.

We are not slaves to our personality; we have the power to shape our own destinies through conscious effort and self-awareness.

Personality is not destiny; it’s the starting point for understanding behavior, not the endpoint.

The concept of “hot” versus “cool” systems helps us understand the interplay between impulsive and deliberative processes in decision-making.

Personality is not a fixed trait but rather a dynamic system of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that can change over time.

Self-Control

Self-control is not about resisting every impulse, but rather about choosing the impulses worth acting on and those best ignored.

Willpower is not just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.

Success in life often depends less on innate ability and more on the ability to regulate and control one’s behavior in the face of challenges and temptations.

Self-control is not about denying yourself pleasure; it’s about making thoughtful choices that align with your long-term goals and values.

Successful individuals are not necessarily those with the most talent, but those who have mastered the art of self-regulation and perseverance.

The ability to delay gratification is like a mental muscle that can be strengthened with practice and effort.

Self-control is a skill that can be learned and strengthened through practice and mindful awareness.

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.

Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals. It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals. It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships. It can help people avoid becoming entrapped early in life, dropping out of school, becoming impervious to consequences, or getting stuck in jobs they hate.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

The ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of future consequences is an acquirable cognitive skill.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

Regardless of age, the core strategy for self-control is to cool the ‘now’ and heat the ‘later’ — push the temptation in front of you far away in space and time, and bring the distant consequences closer in your mind.

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (2014).

If you want to know why some kids can wait and others can’t, then you’ve got to think like they think.

I think the whole point about self-control, the whole point about willpower, is to help people understand that there are endless self-nudge techniques that can be enormously helpful and are very simple.