Fluent Essays

Summary-response: A minimum of 3 pages total. Summarize the main point of each article.Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. L. (1989). Delay of gratification in children. Science, Vol. 244, May, 1989. pp. 933–938 Delay of gratification in children By Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Monica Rodriguez Born in Vienna in 1930, Walter Michel fled the Nazi occupation with his parents when he was eight years old. He spent the remainder of his childhood in Brooklyn, NY. After receiving a PhD in clinical psychology from Ohio State University, he taught at Colorado University, Harvard University, Stanford, and Columbia University, where he worked until his death in 2018. Ironically, the advocate of delayed gratification was a smoker of three packs of cigarettes a day throughout his life. ABSTRACT: To function effectively, individuals must voluntarily postpone immediate gratification and persist in goal-directed behavior for the sake of later outcomes. The present research study analyzed the nature of this type of future-oriented self-control and the psychological processes that underlie it. Enduring individual differences in self-control were found as early as the preschool years among children. Those 4-year-old children who delayed gratification longer in certain laboratory situations developed into more cognitively and socially competent adolescents, achieving higher scholastic performance and coping better with frustration and stress. Experiments in the same research program also identified specific cognitive and attentional processes that allow an individual to effectively self-regulate him or herself early in the course of a child’s development. Condensed version of the original research article For almost a century, the infant has been characterized as impulse-driven, unable to delay gratification, oblivious to logic and reality, and ruled entirely by a desire for pleasure and immediate satisfaction. The challenge has been to clarify how individuals, while remaining capable of great impulsivity, also become able to control their actions for the sake of future consequences and goals, managing at least sometimes to forgo more immediate gratifications to take account of possible future outcomes. The nature of this future-oriented self-control, which develops over time and then coexists with more impetuous behaviors, has intrigued psychologists studying childhood development, who have made it central in theories of socialization and in the very definition of the self. Such goal-directed, self- imposed delay of gratification is widely presumed to be important in the prevention of serious developmental and mental health problems, including those directly associated with lack of resilience, behavior disorders, poor social responsibility skills, and a variety of addictive and antisocial behaviors. To explain how people manage to exercise self-control, concepts like willpower or ego strength are common, although these terms are labels that do not explain the phenomenon. Some people adhere to difficult diets, or giThe excerpt below is from Walter Mischel’s best-selling book The Marshmallow Test, which was written twenty-five years after his original scholarly article that we’ve just read. This book was intended to bring his theories about delayed gratification to a much larger audience and to give, not just children, but all of us, advice about how to improve our willpower and apply it to such everyday problems as weight gain, smoking, and overcoming heartbreak. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (excerpt) WALTER MISCHEL (1) It began in the 1960s with preschoolers at Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School, in a simple study that challenged them with a tough dilemma. My students and I gave the children a choice between one reward (for example, a marshmallow) that they could have immediately, and a larger reward (two marshmallows) for which they would have to wait, alone, for up to 20 minutes. We let the children select the rewards they wanted most from an assortment that included marshmallows, cookies, little pretzels, mints, and so on. “Amy,” for example, chose marshmallows. She sat alone at a table facing the one marshmallow that she could have immediately, as well as the two marshmallows that she could have if she waited. Next to the treats was a desk bell she could ring at any time to call back the researcher and eat the one marshmallow. Or she could wait for the researcher to return, and if Amy hadn’t left her chair or started to eat the marshmallow, she could have both. The struggles we observed as these children tried to restrain themselves from ringing the bell could bring tears to your eyes, have you applauding their creativeness and cheering them on, and give you fresh hope for the potential of even young children to resist temptation and persevere for their delayed rewards. * * * (2) than 550 children who were enrolled in Stanford University’s Bing preschool between 1968 and 1974 were given the Marshmallow Test. We followed a sample of these participants and assessed them on diverse measures about once every decade after the original testing. In 2010, they reached their early to mid-forties, and in 2014, we are continuing to collect information from them, such as their occupational, marital, physical, financial, and mental health status. The findings surprised us from the start, and they still do. (3) In the first follow-up study, we mailed small bundles of questionnaires to their parents and asked them to “think about your child in comparison to his or her peers, such as classmates and other same-age friends. We would like to get your impression of how your son or daughter compares to those peers.” They were to rate their children on a scale of 1 to 9 (from “Not at all” to “Moderately” to “Extremely”). We also obtained similar ratings from their teachers about the children’s cognitive and social skills at school. (4) Preschoolers who delayed longer on the Marshmallow Test were rated a dozen years later as adolescents who exhSummary/Response Essay for the Marshmallow Test/Success Writing Project For this assignment, you will write an academic essay suitable for a class in psychology, sociology, education, or an English composition course. In the first part of the essay, you will summarize the readings from the Success Writing Project. It is important to be clear, direct, and impartial when you summarize. In the next part of the essay, you will discuss your response to something that you found interesting about the research. In this portion, you will discuss your thoughts on the articles. You should clearly state what you found to be interesting and then develop your thoughts on the issue. The next paragraph provides some examples of what you might discuss in your response. For example, do you agree or disagree with one of the findings or the research methodologies? If so, state the point of agreement and disagreement and present an argument to support your position. Another possibility: Do you have a related experience the connects to something in the readings to share? If so, explain the connection between your experience and the readings and describe it in detail. Do you have a proposal for how parents or educators can use the research findings to better parent or teach children? If so, present the proposal and persuade your reader why it is a good proposal. Importantly, your response should NOT simply repeat or restate a summary of the articles. To prepare you should • read each article several times, • review the tips for summarizing and the summary you wrote of Kidd’s research, • review your notes from our discussions, and • draft an outline before you write. (Turn this in for my feedback) The following is the BASIC OUTLINE. Use this as the starting point. Remember the PIE model. (You will find a template for the outline by clicking “NEXT.” I. Introduction II. Summary of Mischel et al’s research (You can combine the two articles into one paragraph or discuss each one separately) III. Summary of Kidd’s research IV. Summary of research described in Calarco’s article V. Summary of “We didn’t eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us.” VI. Your Response. (1 or 2 paragraphs). Extra credit is you bring in an additional academic source to support your discussion. VII. Conclusion Please pay special attention to information about the due dates. I will explain them in class and they are available within the essay’s dropbox on Canvas.Calarco, J. M. (2018, June 1). Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmallow-test/561779/ Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test Affluence—not willpower—seems to be what’s behind some kids capacity to delay gratification. JESSICA MCCRORY CALARCO JUNE 1, 2018 The marshmallow test is one of the most famous pieces of social-science research: Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell her that she can have a second one if she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room. Whether she’s patient enough to double her payout is supposedly indicative of a willpower that will pay dividends down the line, at school and eventually at work. Passing the test is, to many, a promising signal of future success. But a new study, published last week, has cast the whole concept into doubt. The researchers—NYU’s Tyler Watts and UC Irvine’s Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan—restaged the classic marshmallow test, which was developed by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s. Mischel and his colleagues administered the test and then tracked how children went on to fare later in life. They described the results in a 1990 study, which suggested that delayed gratification had huge benefits, including on such measures as standardized test scores. Watts and his colleagues were skeptical of that finding. The original results were based on studies that included fewer than 90 children—all enrolled in a preschool on Stanford’s campus. In restaging the experiment, Watts and his colleagues thus adjusted the experimental design in important ways: The researchers used a sample that was much larger—more than 900 children—and also more representative of the general population in terms of race, ethnicity, and parents’ education. The researchers also, when analyzing their test’s results, controlled for certain factors—such as the income of a child’s household—that might explain children’s ability to delay gratification and their long-term success. Ultimately, the new study finds limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes. Instead, it suggests that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is largely shaped by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success. The marshmallow test isn’t the only experimental study that has recently failed to hold up under closer scrutiny. In the case of this new study, specifically, the failure to confirm old assumptions pointed to an important truth: that circumstances matter more in shaping children’s lives than Mischel and his colleagues seemed to appreciate. This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test 1 We Didn’t Eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us. · Credit...Illustration by Tom Gauld By Michael Bourne · Jan. 10, 2014 In a series of famous experiments in the 1960s and ’70s conducted by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel, preschoolers were invited to sit alone in a room furnished only with a small desk. On the desk sat two marshmallows (or equivalently tempting treats) and a bell. The researcher told each child that he had to leave, but that when he returned, she could eat both marshmallows. If she wanted one marshmallow before then, however, she could ring the bell and eat one, but not both. Then the researcher shut the door, leaving the child alone with the forbidden marshmallows. Some children gobbled a marshmallow the minute the door was closed, while others distracted themselves by covering their eyes, singing and kicking the desk. One resourceful child somehow managed to take a nap. But here’s the part that made the experiment famous: In follow-up studies, children who had resisted temptation turned out years later to be not only skinnier and better socially adapted, but they also scored as much as 210 points higher on their SATs than the most impatient children in the studies did. I think I speak for thousands of my fellow Americans when I say that the first time I read about Mischel’s marshmallow study — in Daniel Goleman’s best seller, “Emotional Intelligence” — I imagined myself at age 4, staring at that fateful marshmallow. The tale of the marshmallows, as presented in Goleman’s book, read like some science-age Calvinist parable. Was I one of the elect, I wondered, a child blessed with the moral fortitude to resist temptation? Or was I doomed from age 4 to a life of impulse-driven gluttony? Clearly I’m not alone in this reaction. Search for “marshmallow experiment” on YouTube, and you’ll find page after page of home-video versions of the experiment in which 4-year-olds struggle not to eat a marshmallow. The marshmallow study has been the subject of TED talks. The New Yorker published a long article about it. Radiolab did a show on it. If you doubt the ubiquity of the Mischel study, try this simple experiment: Put a few social-policy geeks in a room and ask them about willpower, then see how long it takes before somebody brings up the 4-year-olds and the marshmallows. My bet is you wouldn’t have to wait more than a minute or two. The marshmallow study captured the public imagination because it is a funny story, easily told, that appears to reduce the complex social and psychological question of why some people succeed in life to a simple, if ancient, formulation: Character is destiny. Except that in this case, the formulation isn’t coming from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus or from a minister preaching that “patience is a virtue” but from science, that most modern of popular religions. But science isn’t religion or philosophy; it’s science. And in this case, as remarkable as Mischel’s experiments were, ou