[ad_1]
Walter Mischel, whose studies on late gratification in young children have clarified the importance of self-control in human development, and whose work has led to a reconsideration He was 88 years old.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his daughter Linda Mischel Eisner.
Mischel was probably best known for the marshmallow test, which encouraged children to wait before eating a treat. This and other events, such as this one, have increased in part due to Mischel's growing frustration with the predominant personality patterns of the mid-20th century.
A model was rooted in Freudian thought and saw people as prisms of unconscious, often contradictory desires. The other was based on personality questionnaires, or "inventories", and ranked people according to certain traits, such as carelessness or restraint, at fairly stable levels over time.
Mischel concluded that neither was particularly predictive of what people actually did in experiments, partly because the models ignored the context: the specifics of a given situation, which is What are the objectives, the
In a series of experiments at Stanford University in the 1960s, he led a research team that introduced pre-school children to treats – pretzels, cookies, marshmallow – and their asked to wait before having fun. Some of the children received strategies from researchers, such as covering their eyes or re-imagining treatment as something else; others have been left to their own devices.
Studies have shown that in all conditions, some young people were much better than others in deploying strategies – or designing their own strategies – and that capacity seemed to persist later. And the context mattered: children with reasons to be wary of researchers tended to grab the treats earlier.
The experiments did not seem essential at the time, at least alone. But in a 1973 article, Mischel brought them together with a series of other proofs to highlight a sharp critique of traits-based personality psychology.
"The proposed approach of personality psychology," he concluded, "recognizes that a person's behavior alters the situations of his life while being modified by him."
In other words, classifying people as a collection of traits was too crude to reliably predict behavior or capture their identity. Mischel proposed an "if … then" approach to assessing personality, in which a person's instincts and make-up interact with what is happening every moment, such as: If this server ignores me again, I talk to the manager. Or: If I can do my case in small group, I will do it then, rather than in front of the whole class.
At a time when traditional ideas were being tested throughout the culture, the document had the impact of a manifesto. Many in the trait-psychology camp reacted angrily, accusing Mischel of trying to destroy the pitch. On the other hand, many researchers were delighted: social psychology, the study of how situations shape behavior, had a new champion.
"For us on the ground, this paper was perhaps its biggest contribution," said Brent Roberts, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.
For the general public, it would be the marshmallow test. In the late 1980s, decades after the first experiments, Mischel and two co-authors followed with a hundred parents whose children had participated in the original studies. They found a striking correlation, although it was preliminary: Preschool children who could differ from eating tended to have higher SAT scores and were emotionally more responsive to certain measures than those who had succumbed quickly to the temptation.
The paper was cautious in its conclusions and acknowledged many flaws, including a small sample. It does not matter. It has been widely reported, and a staple of popular psychology is born: If Junior can not eat a marshmallow for 15 minutes in kindergarten, he then heads to the list of deans.
"He had a life of his own and turned into a kind of urban myth," said Yuichi Shoda, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and co-author of the paper. "It's like surveying 50 people and saying you can plan a national election based on that."
In 2014, Mischel published his own account of the experience and its reception, "The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control".
In at least one serious replication attempt, the scientists did not find the same results. However, it is generally accepted that self-discipline, persistence, courage – call it what you want – are a good indicator of success in many areas of life.
"Dr. Mischel has been one of the central pillars of the field of personality over the last 50 years, "said Roberts.
Walter Mischel was born on February 22, 1930 in Vienna, the second of two sons of Salomon Mischel, a businessman, and Lola Lea (Schreck) Mischel, who ran the house. The family fled the Nazis in 1938 and, after stops in London and Los Angeles, moved to the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in 1940.
After graduating from New Utrecht High School, Walter earned a BA in Psychology from New York University and in 1956 a PhD. from Ohio State University. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1962, at a time of growing political and intellectual dissent, soon to be inflamed in the psychology department by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (alias Baba Ram Dass), avengers of the stall era.
"The place was getting more and more crazy, it was impossible to work, and the qualities that had made it seemingly disappearing, so when an invitation came from Stanford for an interview, I had jumped on the occasion, "wrote Mischel in an autobiographical essay, published for the American Psychological Association in 2007.
At Harvard, he met and married Harriet Nerlove. The marriage ends with a divorce. In addition to Eisner, he is survived by two other daughters, Judith and Rebecca Mischel; six grandchildren; and his partner, Michele Myers.
Upon arriving in Palo Alto, California in 1977, he joined Albert Bandura, Gordon Bower, Ellen Markman, Philip Zimbardo and many other psychologists in what became a golden age. through inventive experiences and chutzpah, rather than acid journeys. Mischel has carved a figure of the Old World, with his beret and his love of wine and French art.
"It was a unique addition to the golden age of Stanford Psychology in the 1960s to 1980s," said Zimbardo. "In many ways, his style of thinking and living was mostly European. He preferred teaching seminars rather than large conferences, conducting long-term longitudinal research on smaller, more dramatic experiments.
Mischel joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1983. He became president of the department of psychology and continued to collaborate extensively with other researchers, including many former students. He finally got the status of emeritus.
"I'm happy that when I was 18, when I chose, I resisted my uncle's task," he wrote in the autobiographical essay. "The route I chose or fell on leaves me impatient every morning to work in directions I could not have imagined at the beginning, just wanting to spend more time and not spending too much on it. back. . "
Source link
