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Walter Mischel Packs Just Essentials for the Tour for His Book ‘The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control’
The Wall Street Journal: Walter Mischel has flown around the world many times during his career, lecturing at universities about his psychological research into how our minds and brains enable us to exert self-control. A recent trip in the United Kingdom to promote his new book, “The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control,” brought him face-to-face with an entirely different audience. “A lot of times I’m speaking to mums who are asking how to raise their babies—not the usual question when I’m giving a talk at Yale,” says the psychology professor at Columbia University, in New York. Dr. Mischel’s life’s work started with an experiment.
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The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling
The Atlantic: When an English archaeologist named George Smith was 31 years old, he became enchanted with an ancient tablet in the British Museum. Years earlier, in 1845, when Smith was only a five-year-old boy, Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, and Hormuzd Rassam began excavations across what is now Syria and Iraq. In the subsequent years they discovered thousands of stone fragments, which they later discovered made up 12 ancient tablets. But even after the tablet fragments had been pieced together, little had been translated. The 3,000-year-old tablets remained nearly as mysterious as when they had been buried in the ruins of Mesopotamian palaces.
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Don’t Just Sit There
Slate: People hate commuting. Whether you’re inching along in traffic or avoiding eye contact with strangers on public transportation, your commute is something you’re resigned to tolerate—barely—as part of the daily grind. Ina 2004 study, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his team found that in a daily log of activities, the amount of happiness people reported while commuting is about on par with the joy of housework. More than half of Americans spend at least 40 minutes in their round-trip commute; the national average is 50 minutes, and some folks, who the Census Bureau call “megacommuters,” spend more than three hours on the road every day.
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A More Supportive World Can Work Wonders for the Aged
The Wall Street Journal: This was a week of worry for my family. We were worrying about my 93-year-old mother-in-law—a lovely, bright, kind woman in the cruel grip of arthritis, Alzheimer’s and just plain old age. Of course, this is a commonplace, even banal story for my baby boomer generation, though no less painful for that. And it’s got an extra edge because we aren’t just worried about what will happen to our parents; we’re worried about what will happen to us, not just my husband and me, but our entire aging nation. Getting old, with its unavoidable biological changes and its inevitable end, might simply seem like an inescapably tragic part of the human condition.
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People Show “Blind Insight” Into Decision Making Performance
People can gauge the accuracy of their decisions, even if their decision making performance itself is no better than chance, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the study, people who showed chance-level decision making still reported greater confidence about decisions that turned out to be accurate and less confidence about decisions that turned out to be inaccurate.
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The National Sadness of Sandy Hook
It’s been almost two years since 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and gunned down 20 children and six adults, before killing himself. It was one of the deadliest shootings in U.S. history—the worst ever in an elementary school. In the wake of this unthinkable tragedy, Americans were enveloped in a national sadness. The murders took place on December 14th. Psychological theory and common wisdom both say that the intensity of our emotions surrounding Sandy Hook should have diminished by now. But is this true?
