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The experience was "simplicity itself," later recalls his psychologist Walter Mischel. The main ingredient was a biscuit or a pretzel stick or – more interesting for the popular imagination – a marshmallow.
In what was called "the marshmallow test", a child was placed in a room with a treat and had a choice. She could eat the treat right away. Or, she could wait up to 20 minutes without being accompanied in the room, then receive two treats as a reward for her tolerance.
In their work at a preschool on the campus of Stanford University in the 1960s, Dr. Mischel and his colleagues observed responses as instructive as it was adorable. Some children were distracted by putting their fingers in their ears or nose. At least one child caressed the marshmallow as he needed it. Only 30% of children managed to wait for the double reward.
Dr. Mischel, who continued his career at Columbia University and passed away on September 12 at age 88, followed a cohort of children for decades and presented his findings to key readers in his 2014 book "The Marshmallow Test: of success. "
His observations, widely noted and strongly debated, were striking: the children who had found ways to delay the gratification, they found that they had more success in school, earned more money and were less prone to obesity and addiction.
"What emerged from these studies is a different view of self-control, a vision of competence" and not a matter of "cringe," said Yuichi Shoda, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington . worked with Dr. Mischel as a graduate student.
While worried parents were conducting marshmallow tests at home, policy makers, educators and motivational speakers found a compelling slogan: "Do not eat marshmallow!" Even the damn Cookie Monster, pillar to resist a cookie .
Meanwhile, some psychologists have challenged Dr. Mischel's findings, arguing that a study group from Stanford's privileged environs could hardly give reliable results. Skeptics noted that although well-to-do families can teach their children to delay gratification, in an effort to encourage financial and other responsibilities, children from poor households learn that waiting to eat may mean not eating at all. .
Dr. Mischel defended his research, pointing out that in no way did he wish to suggest that a laboratory performance – especially by a preschooler – was destiny. The question, he said, is "how can you regulate and control yourself so as to improve your life?"
Walter Mischel was born on February 22, 1930 to a Jewish family in Vienna. His home was not far from that of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. "Even as a young child, I was aware of her presence," Dr. Mischel told the British Psychological Society. "I think at a certain level I became very interested in what motivates people.
Dr. Mischel's family enjoyed a comfortable life until the rise of Nazism. His father, a businessman who had suffered from polio, was forced to limp in the streets without his cane. Dr. Mischel recalls being humiliated by members of Hitler's youth who were walking on his new shoes. The experience, he told the Guardian, made him want to understand "the favorable conditions that allow people to become winners".
After the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in 1938, the family fled the country and eventually settled in New York, where she operated a five hundred dollar store. Mr. Mischel, who became an American citizen in the 1950s, helped support the family by working in an umbrella factory and as a lift operator.
A graduate in psychology from New York University in 1951, he received a master's degree from City College, New York in 1953 and a doctorate from Ohio State University in 1956, both in clinical psychology. He taught at Harvard University before settling in Stanford.
He said he became fascinated by the development of self-control in children by watching his daughters emerge from infancy into early childhood and infancy.
"I started with a really hot issue," he told the Guardian. "I wanted to know how my three girls grew up, in a very short time, from howling, screaming, often impossible children to people able to sit and do something that forced them to focus . I wanted to understand this miraculous transformation.
The test subjects at Stanford's day nursery were his classmates. As the children grew up and noticed the correlations between their childhood self-control and their future success, he decided to pursue the question more rigorously, through a longitudinal study. .
He conceded the terms of his study group to Stanford. "It was an incredibly elitist subset of the human race, which was one of the concerns that motivated me to study children in the South Bronx – children under stress and from poverty, "he told the Atlantic in 2014. Given the same phenomena as marshmallow studies were revealing. "
Dr. Mischel has proposed strategies for delaying gratification, such as putting the object at a distance physically, removing it from sight or at a symbolic distance imagining it otherwise. A marshmallow is not a sweet treat, for example, but rather a cotton ball.
In his own life, he said he had managed to resist the chocolate mousse by imagining that the dessert was covered with roaches. A so-called "smoker of three packs a day, completed by a pipe. . . completed by a cigar, "he said, he overcame his addiction by recalling the image of a lung cancer patient he had seen at Stanford, marked with X where he would be treated by irradiation .
In addition to the "Marshmallow Test", Dr. Mischel has written and co-authored numerous texts on personality, child development and other areas of psychology research. He retired last year after more than three decades in Columbia.
His marriages with Frances Henry and Harriet Nerlove resulted in a divorce. His survivors include his partner, Michele Myers, from New York, who has lived for almost two decades; three girls from her second marriage, Judy Mischel from Chicago, Rebecca Mischel from Portland, Ore. and Linda Mischel Eisner of New York; and six grandchildren.
Linda Mischel Eisner confirmed the death and said that her father had died at his home of pancreatic cancer.
Dr. Mischel said he found hope in the work of his life. "If we have the skills to allow us to discriminate when we do or do not do something," he told New Yorker magazine, "we are no longer victims of our desires."
"It's not," he said, "about marshmallows".
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