In follow-up experiments of the Marshmallow Test, Mischel found that children were able to wait longer if they changed the way they thought about the marshmallow (focusing on its similarity to a cotton ball --tasteless, inedible--, rather than on its gooey, delectable taste).
You can chill a hot object of desire by representing it to yourself in Cool, abstract terms. Don’t think of the marshmallow as yummy and chewy; imagine it as round and white like a cotton ball. Or that it is literally a cotton ball. One little girl became patient by pretending she was looking at a picture of a marshmallow and “put a frame around it” in her head. “You can’t eat a picture,” she explained.
While coolly defusing a temptation, you can also make Hot the delayed consequences of yielding to it. Mischel was a three-pack-a-day smoker ignoring all warnings about cancer until one day he saw a cancer patient on a gurney in Stanford Hospital. “His head was shaved, with little green X’s, and his chest was bare, with little green X’s.” A nurse told him the X’s were for where the radiation for the patient's cancer would be targeted. “I couldn’t shake the image. It made hot the delayed consequences of my smoking.” Mischel kept that image alive in his mind while reframing his cigarettes as sources of poison instead of relief, and he quit.
In one segment, Cookie Monster appears as a contestant on a game show and is presented with a single cookie on a plate. “This is The Waiting Game,” shouts the lantern-jawed Muppet host, “and if you wait to eat the cookie until I get back, you get two cookies.” As the host dashes away, Cookie Monster’s ordeal begins. He tries singing to himself. Then he pretends the cookie is only a picture. Next he distracts himself by playing with a toy, and finally imagines that the cookie is a smelly fish. “Me need new strategy,” he says as one mental trick gives out to another. A pair of back-up singers pops up every few seconds to croon that “good things come to those who wait.” Finally, the host returns with the second cookie. The exhausted monster’s patience has paid off.
Mischel himself served as a consultant to Sesame Street for last year’s season, and Cookie Monster’s self-mastering strategies bear the clear imprint of his thinking on this question. In Mischel’s view, emotions are the bane of self-control: These “hot” responses make us impatient and cloud our logical judgment of what’s valuable. And so in his experiments, Mischel had children try to override their emotional responses to the marshmallow by having them use “cool” strategies like singing to distract themselves, focusing solely on the treat’s colour, or pretending it was a cotton ball. When children tried these approaches, they demonstrated more willpower in resisting temptation.
Mischel is hardly alone in thinking of emotion as the villain in these scenarios. More than three centuries ago, the Jewish Dutch philosopher Spinoza (17th century) pretty well encapsulated what is still the conventional wisdom about emotions in human affairs: that “in their desires and judgments of what is beneficial, people are carried away by their passions, which take no account of the future or anything else.” As Ethan Kross, the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan, recently told me, suppressing emotion has pretty much always been advocated as a primary tool for resisting temptation.
If people don’t rest between temptations, it puts them in something of a death spiral in which each willpower success perversely increases the likelihood of willpower failure when facing the next temptation. In fact, Vohs’s most recent work shows that the people who appear the best at maintaining self-control succeed not because their willpower is actually greater, but because they employ the simple strategy of avoiding coming into contact with temptation in the first place (precommitment).
Yes, there are emotions that can lead to vice (envy, lust, anger). But
there are also emotions associated with virtue (gratitude, compassion,
love). At the same time, while it’s true that reason and willpower can
engender virtuous action—as when people adhere to a code of ethics or a
long-range plan—they can just as easily be used to motivate and justify
quite impulsive behavior. (More on this later.) The first step in
understanding how self-control really works, then, is to give up the
idea that emotions necessarily lead to impatience.
Here, to my mind, lies the key to understanding self-control’s true raison d’être. Evolutionarily speaking, the capacity for self-control didn’t arise because it increased success on standardized tests, dieting, or saving for retirement. None of those were relevant concerns for our progenitors. What did matter to one’s well-being for all of human history was the ability to navigate the social world successfully—the ability to be viewed as a virtuous, and therefore, desirable partner. A predilection to be fair, to be honest, to share, to be other-oriented to some degree, is what builds social capital. Avoid cheating on your spouse with a lover, and you will ensure long-term gains at the cost of immediate pleasure. These are the qualities people look for in friends and leaders; they’re also ones that require an ability to resist temptation.
With this view in mind, I began to design and conduct empirical research related to decision-making and impulse control about eight years ago. At the time, I was specifically interested in the dynamics of trust and cooperation, and my lab group had been accruing finding after finding showing that manipulations of specific morally toned emotions enhanced both these behaviors—behaviors that themselves directly involve delays of gratification. Take trustworthiness, for example. At heart, any decision to behave in a trustworthy manner usually pits a desire to ensure long-term cooperation against a desire for immediate selfish gain. If you loan me $200 for rent and I don’t pay you back, I’m ahead in the short term. Long term, though, I’m likely to lose much more. You probably won’t help me again, and if I were to aggregate the losses over the years from not having you as a supportive friend, the $200 I kept today will look small in comparison. Being trustworthy, then, requires that I don’t give in to a desire to keep money that wasn’t mine, but rather that I repay you at immediate cost to myself.
How did feelings of gratitude alter greedy, untrustworthy behavior? As we reported in an article published in the journal Emotion,
the results were quite clear. On average, the people who received
help—and expressed gratitude for it—following their computer crash gave
25 percent more tokens to their partners. Put simply, feelings of
gratitude nudged people to restrain their greed; the more grateful they
felt, the less selfishly they acted, and the more willing they were to
cooperate with people they didn’t know from Adam and Eve.
First, we asked participants to describe in writing one of three types of events: something that made them feel grateful, something that made them feel happy and laugh, or the events of their typical day. As you might guess, this task, which was couched as a memory experiment, really served to induce one of three emotional states: gratitude, happiness, or a relatively neutral feeling. Then, using what has become a standard method for assessing financial impulsivity, we had participants answer a series of 27 questions. Each question took the form, “Would you rather have $X now, or $Y in Z days?” In all 27 variations, Y was greater than X. So, for example, a participant might be asked if she’d rather have $55 now or $75 in 61 days—the adult analogue of one marshmallow now or two later. And just to ensure that people were motivated to tell us what they really desired, these weren’t hypothetical questions. The stakes were real. We told participants that, for some of them, one of the questions would be picked at random—and their answer honored. So, if we picked the question that had asked “Would you rather receive $55 now or $75 in 61 days?” we’d immediately give the participant $55 if she’d chosen “now,” or, 61 days later, we’d mail her a check for $75.
Here again, the impact of gratitude on self-control became apparent. People who were feeling happy were just as impatient as those who were feeling neutral. Both groups significantly discounted the value of future rewards—meaning they sold their future selves short. On average, they exhibited an annual discount factor of 0.18, meaning that they’d give up the chance to receive $100 a year from now in order to receive $18 immediately. Those who had been induced to feel grateful, however, were significantly more future-oriented. They required $30 now before forgoing the future $100 reward—a 12 percent increase, resulting only from a simple and fleeting nudge toward feeling grateful.
AT THIS POINT, YOU might be wondering what’s so special about gratitude. In reality, it’s not gratitude per se that’s important, but rather the class of emotions to which it belongs. Much as Robert Frank theorized in the 1980s, the emotions that enhance self-control are indeed the ones that are positively related to social life, whose purpose is to grease the wheels of social interaction by fostering moral behavior. While you might feel disgusted at the sight of carrion, or happy in response to a sunny day, you feel grateful when someone does something for you. You feel shame when you’re worried someone will think less of you. You feel pride when you believe you’ve succeeded in a way people will value. These and similar emotions are the ones that have helped us build social relationships for millennia, by combating impulses to be self-centered or lazy through increasing the value we attach to long-term rewards.
A quick look at the published work coming from my research group over the past decade makes the point. Our work, for example, clearly shows that pride leads people to persevere on difficult tasks. When we give participants acclaim for their performance on any type of test, they’ll work longer and harder to hone the relevant skill, with the length of time they persevere deriving directly from the amount of pride they felt when receiving acclaim from those around them. Compassion—another morally toned emotion—also leads to behaviours that go against immediate gratification. For instance, when we increase the compassion individuals feel for another by highlighting the similarities they share with him or her, they’ll expend considerably more effort to help that other person when needed, even at immediate cost to themselves. In these and similar cases, socially oriented emotions automatically facilitate decisions and behaviours that foster the long-term gains that come from building bonds with others.
You might, for instance, resist the temptation to overeat by trying to cognitively re-frame treats as unhealthy rather than delicious. Alternatively, you can go the route of focusing on the pride you felt, or will feel, on losing those initial few pounds. You might prevent yourself from making an impulse purchase by placing your money in an account with stiff penalties for early withdrawal—a type of strategy known as precommitment, which, interestingly, in and of itself implicitly acknowledges the limits of willpower. Or you might do the same by taking a few minutes to stop and count your blessings.
Which route is the better one? For two reasons, I think the less frequently advocated path—the emotional one—might just prove superior for enhancing self-control.
The first is that, unlike strategies based on cultivating emotions, those based on cognitive mechanisms involving executive control are, as you’ll recall, easily exhausted. As work by Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister, and their colleagues has demonstrated time and again, squelching desire quickly leaves willpower depleted. As if that were not problematic enough, the effects of relying on willpower to dampen emotional desires—a strategy recommended by many leading self-control theorists like Baumeister and Mischel—can be especially pernicious. Research by the Stanford psychologist James Gross, one of the nation’s leading experts on the science of emotion regulation, shows that suppressing emotions wreaks havoc on the mind and body. It hinders memory, increases physiological stress, and negatively impacts communication with others. Using this strategy, then, poses two hazards. Not only does it increase the odds that you’ll give in to temptation later; it can also debilitate thinking, learning, memory, social bonding, and communication.
SO WHAT’S THE ANSWER to the problem of self-control? Any strategy based solely on forcing adherence to a set of virtues through a bunch of cool-headed, cognitive strategies and a list of “thou shalt nots” is a fragile one. That’s not to say it won’t work at times, but it’s based on cognitive resources that can and do fail often. Of course, relying blindly on emotions would be just as foolish, as they, too, can certainly lead one astray. Rather, the answer is to cultivate the right emotions, the prosocial ones, in daily life. These emotions— gratitude, compassion, authentic pride, and even guilt—work from the bottom up, without requiring cognitive effort on our part, to shape decisions that favor the long-term. If we focus on instilling the capacity to experience these emotional states regularly, we’ll build resources that will automatically spring forth in reflexive and productive ways. In essence, we’ll be giving ourselves inoculations against temptation that, like antibodies in our bloodstream, will be ready and waiting to combat possible threats to our well-being.
We may also partially solve the question of how to instill grit. The concept of grit, which is sometimes defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” implicitly acknowledges that the capacity for self-control isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to predicting success; the motivation to resist temptation and persist is equally important. As the University of Michigan’s Ethan Kross told me, “For self-control to work correctly, a person needs two things: ability and motivation.” One or the other alone just won’t cut it. Emotions, at base, are the motivating engines of behaviour. The beauty, then, of cultivating moral, socially oriented emotions is that they will serve not only to increase the value we attach to future gains, but also automatically and efficiently drive the behaviours in question. They provide the passion for success, irrespective of whether we consciously recognize it.
The lack of attention we as a society give to learning how to use emotions to reach goals is regrettable, because if we’re going to conquer the temptation to favor short-term pleasures—from relatively minor ones like overeating and cheating to global ones like favoring immediate profit over the long-term mitigation of climate change—we’re going to need every weapon at our disposal. And while willpower certainly offers assistance, we’ve been neglecting the weapon that comes straight from our nature as innately social beings, not just rational, calculating loners. We can’t just exert self-control by willing ourselves to resist the first marshmallow or averting our eyes from it; we have to be grateful that someone’s offering it to us in the first place.
If they focused on their abstract “cool” features (“The marshmallows are
puffy and round like cotton balls”), they managed to wait longer than
the researchers, watching them through a one-way observation window,
could bear. And when they imagined that the treats facing them were
“just a picture” and were cued to “put a frame around it in your head”
they were able to wait for almost 18 minutes. When Mischel asked a child
how she managed to wait so long, she replied: “well you can’t eat a
picture.”
A third way to boost self-control is to remove the emotional components (or the “hot” attributes) of the tempting object. This sounds way more complicated than it is! As a passionate tea collector, finding new flavors gives me thrills, and every addition to my tea cupboard is exciting. In order to strip tea (or any collector’s item) of its emotional component, try to think of it in an abstract way. At the end of the day, every tea is just a mix of dried leaves used to flavour water. What is so exciting about that? And you can apply the same analytic approach to other tempting items: What is wine but fermented grape juice? What is beer but fermented hop water? What are doughnuts but pieces of deep-fried dough?
In a Japanese Zen story, a monk visits a politician who has a pretty wife, who wears fine silks and jewels, and the best perfume - moreover, the lady is rather frisky and makes advances on the monk: a serious temptation, considering his vow of chastity. That evening, while the politician is away, the wife makes advances on the monk, and nearly gets into bed with him - but then the monk imagines the lady as a corpse, foul-smelling, with brittle greenish skin full of bubbles, and maggots in her mouth and eye sockets. Obviously, this causes him to resist the temptation and preserve his chastity.
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Treat desire as something temporary - don't act on it instantly. Set a timer (the New Personality Self-Portrait advises this exercise for the Mercurial personality - similar to the 7w6 or Sexual Seven) and distract yourself or "urge surf;" don't act on the urge, but watch it rise and fall and give way to disappointment if there is any - but NOT all desires lead to disappointment. The interesting thing is that desires are temporary and they change - what I want now, whether I get it or not, will be different to what I will want in another time.
THE MERCURIAL PERSONALITY - Exercise 7
To help prevent overindulging, time it. If you want one
cookie (or one sweater) but you usually eat the whole box
(or buy up the whole shop), carry a stopwatch or other
watch that has a timer. Take one cookie (purchase one
sweater). Now set your timer to go off in one hour (or half an hour, if you can't wait).
You can have another cookie (make another purchase) one
hour/half an hour from now. Usually the urge will have passed by that
time. If not, take one more cookie (make one more
purchase) and set the timer to go off in another hour...
