Mischel had nothing against hippies, but he wanted modern psychology to be rigorous and empirical.
In 1958, Mischel became an assistant professor in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard.
Unlike the broad traits supposedly assessed by personality tests, self-control struck Mischel as potentially measurable.
And so, in 1962, Walter Mischel moved to Palo Alto and went to work at Stanford.
If Mischel and his team succeed, they will have outlined the neural circuitry of self-control.
Mr. Mischel, who is originally from Vienna, hasn't performed the marshmallow test on French children.
Later, I emailed Walter Mischel, the world's leading expert on how children learn to delay gratification.
Walter Mischel is a slight, elegant man with a shaved head and a face of deep creases.
While Mischel was beginning to dismantle the methods of his field, the Harvard psychology department was in tumult.
Mischel and his team hope to identify crucial neural circuits that cut across a wide variety of ailments.
Mr. Mischel is most famous for devising the "marshmallow test" in the late 1960s when he was at Stanford.
Mischel attended New York University, studying poetry under Delmore Schwartz and Allen Tate, and taking studio-art classes with Philip Guston.
Subsequent work by Mischel and his colleagues found that these differences were observable in subjects as young as nineteen months.
But Mischel noticed that academic theories had limited application, and he was struck by the futility of most personality science.
But occasionally Mischel would ask his three daughters, all of whom attended the Bing, about their friends from nursery school.
According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test.
Mischel argues that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework.
After publishing a few papers on the Bing studies in the early seventies, Mischel moved on to other areas of personality research.
Mischel perfected his protocol by testing his daughters at the kitchen table.
Volunteers were tested for standard personality traits, and Mischel compared the results with ratings of how well the volunteers performed in the field.
As it happened, Mr. Mischel, 80 years old and a professor of psychology at Columbia University, was in Paris, staying at his longtime girlfriend's apartment.
Mischel is particularly excited by the example of the substantial subset of people who failed the marshmallow task as four-year-olds but ended up becoming high-delaying adults.
Mischel is also preparing a large-scale study involving hundreds of schoolchildren in Philadelphia, Seattle, and New York City to see if self-control skills can be taught.
There is something deeply contradictory about Walter Mischel a psychologist who spent decades critiquing the validity of personality tests inventing the marshmallow task, a simple test with impressive predictive power.
As Walter Mischel showed in a series of groundbreaking studies, children who can delay gratification are more likely to go to college and less likely to end up in jail.
Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home.
Although his research was supposed to involve the use of Rorschach tests to explore the connections between the unconscious and the behavior of people when possessed, Mischel soon grew interested in a different project.
Following up in the mid-1980s, Mr. Mischel and his colleagues found that the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning, and didn't "tend to go to pieces under stress, " as their report said.
And so, last year, Mischel, who is now a professor at Columbia, and a team of collaborators began asking the original Bing subjects to travel to Stanford for a few days of experiments in an fMRI machine.
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