Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (6 page)

In fact, to uncover the antecedents of flourishing had been one of the avowed purposes of the Study at its inception. Furthermore, the early years of data collection coincided with the early years of World War II, when efficient officer selection was very much on the minds of the investigators. Typical of the time, the original Study staff expected that the gift of leadership could be predicted by a particular constellation of constitutional endowments; this meant a mesomorphic (that is, athletic) and “masculine” (that is, narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered) body build. The staff used a study of ROTC recruits to justify this expectation retrospectively in 1945; in that study, 41 percent of the men with a strongly masculine physique were considered “excellent officer material,” while not a single man who was considered weak in the so-called masculine component was equally valued.
3
However, there was no follow-up to document that these
men
actually made good officers, and as P. D. Scott implies in the epigraph of this chapter, that left this fine theory very much an open question. My intention was to pit the hard-nosed, body-build, nature values of the early Study investigators and the money-centered preoccupations of the modern business world against my own sentimental twenty-first-century values about the power of love. Which—constitution, money, or tender care—had the greatest power to predict success in the Decathlon of Flourishing? It’s better to know than to believe, at least in matters of science, and it was time for conflicting beliefs to be resolved by facts.

Section A of
Table 2.2
depicts ten characteristics, some physical and some not, that I chose to test as potential constitutional predictors of a rewarding late life. The first six had been thought likely suspects by the original Study staff, especially for predicting future officers and store managers. (This was a high priority of William Grant, the chain-store impresario who funded the Study and gave it his name; more about Grant and the first four characteristics in
Chapter 3
.) They were:
vital affect
(a rich, exuberant social presence),
sociability, masculine body build
(narrow hips, broad shoulders),
mesomorphy
(muscularity),
treadmill endurance,
and
athletic prowess.
To these I added four other constitutional or biological factors:
childhood temperament
(see
Chapter 4
),
hereditary loading for
(that is, family history of)
alcoholism and major depression,
and
longevity of parents and grandparents.

I also included three variables to test the effect of socioeconomic status on the men’s future. Parental
social class
was assessed by paternal income, occupational status, neighborhood, and a home visit. The
education
of each parent was also assessed.

That done, the Australian challenge could no longer be avoided. And this brought me straight back to my initial problem, the one that had foiled my simple group-to-group comparison and driven me to Olympic elaborations. Namely, there were no data available—
the
Study
had collected no data
—that directly addressed the amount or quality of the love that the College men had received as children.

Table
2.2
What Variables Predict a High Decathlon Score at Age 60–80?

Very significant = p<.001; Significant = p<. 01; NS = Not significant.

*
“Items” refers to the number of Decathlon events predicted significantly by the antecedent variable.

**
See
Chapter 8
.

I had to find a way to test definitively my impulsive assertion that warm intimate relationships are the most important contributing factor in the establishment of a good life. Relational warmth is tough to measure even in the twenty-first century, and we’ve been working on
it
for a long time. In 1940 no one had even put forth the concept of attachment, certainly not the biometric psychologists or the Freudian psychoanalysts to whom the Study first gave ear. But more on that later. What matters here is that only four objective measures of relationship skills had been gathered before the measures of Decathlon success were obtained, so I had to content myself with those. They became my third set of predictors.

The men and their parents were not accessible to the Study until the men were in college, at which time both men and parents were interviewed in depth. These interviews were the first indicators the Study had of the men’s early home life, and of their relationships with their parents and siblings—obviously important predictive variables. Yet the men’s childhood environments were not assigned nuanced numerical scores at the time they were assessed; that was done only after I joined the Study. (I will describe our after-the-fact scoring of the men’s childhoods in
Chapter 4
.)

The second relational predictor was the Study staff’s consensus rating (as the men finished their senior years at about age twenty-one) of the men’s overall “soundness.” That rating had been based on a 1-to-3 scale as follows:

1 = A man seen as without “serious problems in handling problems that might confront them.”

2 = A man seen as “lacking in warmth in his touch with people,” or too “sensitive.”

3 = A man seen as “markedly asocial,” or manifesting “marked mood variations.”

The third predictor was the maturity or immaturity of the men’s
involuntary coping style
(perhaps better known as
defensive style
) between ages twenty and thirty-five. This was assessed by me retrospectively
when
the men were forty-seven from information provided earlier (retrospective data
analyses
are permissible in a prospective study; retrospective
data
are not). This too will be explained more fully (in
Chapter 8
); keep in mind that this chapter is a sketch, a roadmap of terrain that we will cover in more detail later on. For now, what matters is that our defensive styles influence our relationships. Mature coping (sometimes called
defense
) mechanisms like humor and patience tend to attract other people; immature coping mechanisms like projection and hypochondriasis, while temporarily soothing to their users, appear self-centered to other people and tend to alienate them.

The final predictor was warm adult relations between ages thirty and forty-seven. Although this variable was not assessed until 1975, when the men were in midlife, we included it because there really were no earlier objective variables reflecting capacity for close attachment. This crude scale asked six objective, if simplistic, yes-or-no questions:

• Had the man been married for more than ten years?

• Was he close to his children?

• Did he have close friends?

• Did he maintain pleasant contact with his family of origin?

• Did he belong to social organizations?

• Did he play games with others?

WHAT VARIABLES PREDICT SUCCESS?

Table 2.2
sets out the seventeen variables that we tested for their power to predict flourishing late in life—ten constitutional variables that recreated the worldview of the early investigators, three socioeconomic
variables that recreated the worldview of modern social psychology (and possibly the
Australian Business Review
), and finally the four available relational variables that reflected the view of attachment theorists and ethologists. I admit readily that these were sketchy, but they were the only ones available to us; any measures of relationship that post-dated the Decathlon would of course not be predictive. The table also indicates how each variable associated with the total Decathlon score.

As the table indicates, the ten constitutional variables and the three social variables were of limited predictive use. The two manifestations of the body-build hypothesis so beloved of the original researchers had no significant correlation at all with later success. Nor did the measures of socioeconomic status. Alcoholism and depression in family histories proved irrelevant to Decathlon scores at eighty, as did longevity. The sociable and extraverted personality type that was so esteemed in the Study’s selection process (see
Chapter 3
) did not correlate with later flourishing either. (We’ll see in the last chapter, though, that
Extraversion
when measured by a sophisticated psychological “instrument” did prove very significant.) In fact, of the thirteen constitutional/socioeconomic factors that we tested for their predictive strength, only four correlated significantly with the total Decathlon scores, and those only with one or two events apiece. The correlations between the constitutional and socioeconomic variables and Decathlon success were weak and scattershot.

The four measures of relationship, however, were all highly predictive of Decathlon success. Each of these four variables predicted at least six events apiece, and collectively they predicted all ten. Furthermore, each relationship predictor correlated highly significantly with the other three, suggesting that they had something in common. In short, it was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives, as can be seen in
Table 2.3
.

Table
2.3
Childhood Predictors of Flourishing in Old Age

Very Significant = p<.001; Significant = p<. 01; NS = Not Significant.

Here’s a concrete example, to make these abstractions a little more vivid. We found, for instance, that there was no significant difference between the maximum earned incomes of the men with IQs of 110–115 and the incomes of the men with IQs of 150-plus. Nor was there a significant difference between the maximum earned incomes of men with mesomorphic (muscular) physiques and men with ectomorphic (skinny) or endomorphic (plump) physiques, or between
men
with blue-collar fathers and men with fathers from the upper class (
Table 2.2
).

On the other hand, the men who had good sibling relationships (one factor of a warm childhood; see
Table 2.2
and
Appendix C
) when young were making an average of $51,000 (in 2009 dollars) more a year than the men who had poor relationships with their siblings, or no siblings at all. The men from cohesive homes made $66,000 per year more than men from unstable ones. Men with warm mothers took home $87,000 more than those men whose mothers were uncaring. The fifty-eight men with the best scores for warm relationships were three times more likely to be in
Who’s Who,
and their maximum income—between the ages of fifty-five and sixty, and in 2009 dollars—was an average of $243,000 a year. In contrast, the thirty-one men with the worst scores for relationships earned an average maximum salary of $102,000 a year. The twelve men with the most mature coping styles reported a whopping $369,000 a year; the sixteen men with the most immature styles a much more modest $159,000. These same variables were equally able to predict warm relationships at the end of life.

So my rash contention held up. Nurture trumps nature—at least for predicting late-life success as the Decathlon embodied it. And the aspect of nurture that is most important of all is a warm and intimate relational surround (environmental childhood strengths,
Appendix C
). There is another piece to be reckoned with too. In a moment I will offer a life story to illustrate it, and what these actualities look like in the real world. But first let me offer one caveat, and then an illuminating historical aside.

The caveat: Throughout this book I will seem to be saying that the mentally healthy have better characters than the mentally unhealthy. This sounds like victim-blaming, but it is not a moral judgment. It is a reflection of a tough and pragmatic reality: that empathy
is
easier for those with full (literally and figuratively) stomachs. Someone who is already suffering the stresses of (literal and figurative) hunger is more likely to respond self-protectively or to lash out when punched in the gut.

The historical aside: I was chary from the beginning of the body-build approach to prediction, and of some of the other cherished hypotheses from the early days of the Study. Remember that in the thirties and forties constitutional medicine and physical anthropology were very much in the theoretical driver’s seat; it wasn’t only in Germany that people were preoccupied with the fine points of putative racial superiorities. But since the data were so extensive, and since I was in the neighborhood anyway while constructing the Decathlon, I decided to test out the relationship, so confidently assumed at the time, between officer potential and body build.