The Social Animal (20 page)

This was actually quite an important question. Research by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman found that self-control is twice as important as IQ in predicting high-school performance, school attendance, and final grades. Other researchers disagree that self-control trumps IQ, but there is no question self-control is one of the essential ingredients of a fulfilling life.

“It feels like it wasn’t even me,” Erica told her mother during one of their conversations about the event. “It was like it was some strange angry person who had hijacked my body. I don’t understand where this person came from or what she was thinking. I’m afraid she’s going to come back again and do something terrible.”

Around 1970 Walter Mischel, then at Stanford and now at Columbia, launched one of the most famous and delightful experiments in modern psychology. He sat a series of four-year-olds in a room and put a marshmallow on the table. He told them they could eat the marshmallow right away, but that he was going to go away and if they waited until he returned he would give them two marshmallows. In the videos of the experiment you can see Mischel leave the room, and then the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes, and banging their heads on the table, trying not to eat the marshmallow on the table in front of them. One day, Mischel used an Oreo instead of a marshmallow. A kid picked up the cookie, slyly ate the creamy filling and carefully put it back in its place. (That kid is probably now a U.S. senator.)

But the significant thing is this: the kids who could wait several minutes subsequently did much better in school and had fewer behavioral problems than the kids who could wait only a few minutes. They had better social skills in middle school. The kids who could wait a full fifteen minutes had, thirteen years later, SAT scores that were 210 points higher than the kids who could wait only thirty seconds. (The marshmallow test turned out to be a better predictor of SAT scores than the IQ tests given to four-year-olds.) Twenty years later, they had much higher college-completion rates, and thirty years later, they had much higher incomes. The kids who could not wait at all had much higher incarceration rates. They were much more likely to suffer from drug- and alcohol-addiction problems.

The test presented kids with a conflict between short-term impulse and long-term reward. The marshmallow test measured whether kids had learned strategies to control their impulses. The ones who learned to do that did well in school and life. Those that hadn’t found school endlessly frustrating.

The kids who possessed these impulse-control abilities had usually grown up in organized homes. In their upbringing, actions had led to predictable consequences. They possessed a certain level of self-confidence, the assumption that they could succeed at what they set out to do. Kids who could not resist the marshmallows often came from disorganized homes. They were less likely to see the link between actions and consequences and less likely to have learned strategies to help them master immediate temptations.

But the crucial finding concerned the nature of the strategies that worked. The kids who did poorly directed their attention right at the marshmallow. They thought if they looked right at it they could somehow master their temptation to eat it. The ones who could wait distracted themselves from the marshmallow. They pretended it wasn’t real, it wasn’t there, or it wasn’t really a marshmallow. They had techniques to adjust their attention.

In later experiments, Mischel told the children to put a mental frame around the marshmallow—to imagine that what they were seeing was a picture of a marshmallow. These children could wait on average three times longer than the children who did not imagine a picture. Children who were told to imagine the marshmallow was a fluffy cloud could also wait much longer. By using their imagination, they encoded their perceptions of the marshmallow differently. They distanced themselves from it and triggered different, less-impulsive models in their heads. The children who could control their impulses triggered cool ways of perceiving the marshmallow. The children who could not triggered hot ways: they could see it only as the delicious temptation it really was. Once those in the latter group engaged these hot networks in their brain, it was all over. There was no way they were not going to pop the marshmallow into their mouths.

The implication of the marshmallow experiment is that self-control is not really about iron willpower mastering the hidden passions. The conscious mind simply lacks the strength and awareness to directly control unconscious processes. Instead, it’s about triggering. At any moment there are many different operations running or capable of running at an unconscious level. People with self-control and self-discipline develop habits and strategies that trigger the unconscious processes that enable them to perceive the world in productive and far-seeing ways.

Human decision making has three basic steps. First, we perceive a situation. Second, we use the power of reason to calculate whether taking this or that action is in our long-term interest. Third, we use the power of will to execute our decision. Over the centuries, different theories of character have emerged, and along with them, different ways of instilling character in the young. In the nineteenth century, most character-building models focused on Step 3 of the decision-making process—willpower. Victorian moralists had an almost hydraulic conception of proper behavior. The passions are a wild torrent and upstanding people use the iron force of will to dam it, repress it, and control it.

In the twentieth century, most character-building models focused on Step 2 of the decision-making process—the use of reason to calculate interests. Twentieth-century moralists emphasized consciousness-raising techniques to remind people of the long-term risks of bad behavior. They reminded people that unsafe sex leads to disease, unwanted pregnancy, and other bad outcomes. Smoking can lead to cancer. Adultery destroys families and lying destroys trust. The assumption was that, once you reminded people of the foolishness of their behavior, they would be motivated to stop.

Both reason and will are obviously important in making moral decisions and exercising self-control. But neither of these character models has proven very effective. You can tell people not to eat the French fry. You can give them pamphlets about the risks of obesity. You can deliver sermons urging them to exercise self-control and not eat the fry. And in their nonhungry state, most people will vow not to eat it. But when their hungry self rises, their well-intentioned self fades, and they eat the French fry. Most diets fail because the conscious forces of reason and will are simply not powerful enough to consistently subdue unconscious urges.

And if that is true of eating a fry, it is also true of more consequential things. Preachers issue jeremiads against the evils of adultery, but this seems to have no effect on the number of people in the flock who commit the act—or on the number of preachers themselves who do it. Thousands of books have been written about the sin of greed, but every few years greed runs self-destructively rampant. There is near-universal agreement that spending on material things doesn’t produce joy and fulfillment, and yet millions of people run up huge credit-card debt. Everyone knows killing is wrong, and yet genocide happens. Terrorists convince themselves it is righteous to murder the innocent.

For decades people have tried to give drug users information about the dangers of addiction; teenagers, information on the risks involved in unprotected sex; students, about the negative consequences of dropping out of school. And yet the research is clear: Information programs alone are not very effective in changing behavior. For example, a 2001 survey of over three hundred sex-education programs found that, in general, these programs had no effect on sexual behavior or contraceptive use. Classroom teaching or seminar-consciousness raising has little direct effect on unconscious impulses. Sermons don’t help either.

The evidence suggests reason and will are like muscles, and not particularly powerful muscles. In some cases and in the right circumstances, they can resist temptation and control the impulses. But in many cases they are simply too weak to impose self-discipline by themselves. In many cases self-delusion takes control.

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century character-building models were limited because they shared one assumption: that Step 1 in the decision-making process--the act of perception--is a relatively simple matter of taking in a scene. The real action involved the calculation about what to do and the willpower necessary to actually do it.

But, as should be clear by now, that’s wrong. The first step is actually the most important one. Perceiving isn’t just a transparent way of taking in. It is a thinking and skillful process. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes, they are linked and basically simultaneous. The research of the past thirty years suggests that some people have taught themselves to perceive more skillfully than others. The person with good character has taught herself, or been taught by those around her, to see situations in the right way. When she sees something in the right way, she’s rigged the game. She’s triggered a whole network of unconscious judgments and responses in her mind, biasing her to act in a certain manner. Once the game has been rigged, then reason and will have a much easier time. They will be up to the task of guiding proper behavior.

For example, some students walk into a classroom with no innate respect for whatever teacher they may find there. When they get angry or frustrated, they’ll curse at the teacher, ignore him, humiliate him, or even punch or throw a chair at him. Other students, on the other hand, do walk into the room with an innate respect for the teacher. They know, without thinking about it, that they are supposed to defer to him—that there are certain ways you act in front of a teacher and certain ways you don’t. They may get angry or annoyed, but they will express those feelings out of class. It would never occur to them to scream, curse, or throw a chair at a teacher. If someone were to do it in their presence, they’d gasp with shock and horror.

Where did that innate respect come from? How did it come to be that the mere act of seeing the teacher triggered certain parameters in their minds? The answers are lost in Gloomy Prospect. The answers are lost in the midnight river of the unconscious. But somehow, over the course of their lives, they have had certain experiences. Maybe they came to respect the authority of their parents and now extend that mental frame to authority figures in general. Maybe they have absorbed certain stories in which they observed people treating teachers in a certain way. Maybe they have absorbed certain small habits and norms about classroom behavior that put a leash on the sort of behavior they consider unacceptable there. Out of these myriad influences, a certain pattern of perception has emerged, a certain way of seeing. Having learned to see a teacher in a certain way, they would never even consider punching one in the face, except in the realm of faraway fantasy, which they know they will never enact.

Similarly, upright people learn to see other people’s property in a way that reduces the temptation to steal. They learn to see a gun in a way that reduces their temptation to misuse it. They learn to see young girls in a way that reduces the temptation to abuse them. They learn to see the truth in a way that reduces the temptation to lie.

This learning-to-see model emphasizes that it is not one crucial moment that shapes a character. Character emerges gradually out of the mysterious interplay of a million little good influences. This model emphasizes the power of community to shape character. It’s very hard to build self-control alone (and if you’re in a community of obese people, it’s very hard to stay thin alone). It also emphasizes the power of small and repetitive action to rewire the fundamental mechanisms of the brain. Small habits and proper etiquette reinforce certain positive ways of seeing the world. Good behavior strengthens certain networks. Aristotle was right when he observed, “We acquire virtues by first having put them into action.” The folks at Alcoholics Anonymous put the sentiment more practically, with their slogan “Fake it until you make it.” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia puts it more scientifically: “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.”

People looked at Erica strangely in the days and weeks after the explosion. Erica looked at herself strangely. But months passed. Life at the Academy meant following a thousand small rules. Don’t start eating until everybody at the cafeteria table is seated. Always put your paper napkin on your lap first. Always stand up when a teacher enters the room. Never chew gum when you are in uniform, even if you’re just walking home. It’s not how Academy students conduct themselves.

These thousand little rules became second nature to Erica, as to almost all the students. She found her diction changing, especially when she addressed strangers. She found her posture evolving, so that she adopted an almost military bearing.

These little routines were almost always about self-discipline in one way or another. They were about delaying gratification or exercising some small act of self-control. She didn’t really think about them this way. The rules were just the normal structure of life for a student such as herself. But they had a pervasive effect on how she lived at school, eventually at home, and even on the tennis court.

By junior year, Erica wasn’t quite so obsessed with tennis, but she had developed a way of mentally preparing for each match. She was using what you might call the Doctrine of Indirect Self-Control. She was manipulating small things in order to trigger the right responses about the big things.

She’d sit on the bench before a match and play in her head the voices of airplane pilots she had heard, mostly in the movies. They always had such a deliberately calm manner as they came over the intercom. It put her in the right frame of mind. Then she would go through certain tricks and habits, match after match: Always lay your water bottles in the same spot near the net. Always put your racket cover under your chair with the same side facing up. Always wear the same mismatched sweatbands on your wrist. Always step over the lines on the way onto the court. Always draw a line with the right sneaker at the spot from which you will do your serving. Always think about serving five aces in a row. If you don’t actually feel you’re going to serve aces, just pretend. If your body impersonates an attitude long enough, then the mind begins to adopt it.