20190315001433s.alexander_haslam 20190315001435s.larsen 20190315001437willpower
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Researchers must protect participants and be aware of appropriate methods for obtaining information. What ethical considerations are important to research? In about 2 pages, write an analysis of the ethical concerns in the 3 diverse psychological research studies below. Be sure to include a paragraph of overall ethical consideration.
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Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2012).
Contesting the ‘nature’ of conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s studies really show
. Plos Biology, 10(11), doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001426
Larsen, K. S. (1974).
Conformity in the Asch experiment
. The Journal Of Social Psychology, 94(2), 303-304. doi:10.1080/00224545.1974.9923224
Mischel, W., Ayduk, O., Berman, M. G., Casey, B. J., Gotlib, I. H., Jonides, J., & … Shoda, Y. (2011). ‘
Willpower’ over the life span: Decomposing self-regulation
. Social Cognitive And Affective Neuroscience, 6(2), 252-256. doi:10.1093/scan/nsq081
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No noticeable attempt to define any ethical considerations
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Thoroughly critiques define ethical considerations with strong supporting evidence.
Essay
Contesting the ‘‘Nature’’ Of Conformity: What Milgram
and Zimbardo’s Studies Really Show
S. Alexander Haslam1*, Stephen D. Reicher2
1 School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia, 2 School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland
Abstract: Understanding of the
psychology of tyranny is dominat-
ed by classic studies from the 1960s
and 1970s: Milgram’s research on
obedience to authority and Zim-
bardo’s Stanford Prison Experi-
ment. Supporting popular notions
of the banality of evil, this research
has been taken to show that
people conform passively and un-
thinkingly to both the instructions
and the roles that authorities pro-
vide, however malevolent these
may be. Recently, though, this
consensus has been challenged by
empirical work informed by social
identity theorizing. This suggests
that individuals’ willingness to fol-
low authorities is conditional on
identification with the authority in
question and an associated belief
that the authority is right.
Introduction
If men make war in slavish obedience to
rules, they will fail.
Ulysses S. Grant [1]
Conformity is often criticized on
grounds of morality. Many, if not all, of
the greatest human atrocities have been
described as ‘‘crimes of obedience’’ [2].
However, as the victorious American Civil
War General and later President Grant
makes clear, conformity is equally prob-
lematic on grounds of efficacy. Success
requires leaders and followers who do not
adhere rigidly to a pre-determined script.
Rigidity cannot steel them for the chal-
lenges of their task or for the creativity of
their opponents.
Given these problems, it would seem
even more unfortunate if human beings
were somehow programmed for confor-
mity. Yet this is a view that has become
dominant over the last half-century. Its
influence can be traced to two landmark
empirical programs led by social psychol-
ogists in the 1960s and early 1970s:
Milgram’s Obedience to Authority re-
search and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Experiment. These studies have not only
had influence in academic spheres. They
have spilled over into our general culture
and shaped popular understanding, such
that ‘‘everyone knows’’ that people inevita-
bly succumb to the demands of authority,
however immoral the consequences [3,4].
As Parker puts it, ‘‘the hopeless moral of the
[studies’] story is that resistance is futile’’
[5]. What is more, this work has shaped our
understanding not only of conformity but of
human nature more broadly [6].
Building on an established body of theo-
rizing in the social identity tradition—which
sees group-based influence as meaningful and
conditional [7,8]—we argue, however, that
these understandings are mistaken. Moreover,
we contend that evidence from the studies
themselves (as well as from subsequent
research) supports a very different analysis of
the psychology of conformity.
The Classic Studies: Conformity,
Obedience, and the Banality Of Evil
In Milgram’s work [9,10] members of
the general public (predominantly men)
volunteered to take part in a scientific
study of memory. They found themselves
cast in the role of a ‘‘Teacher’’ with the
task of administering shocks of increasing
magnitude (from 15 V to 450 V in 15-V
increments) to another man (the ‘‘Learn-
er’’) every time he failed to recall the
correct word in a previously learned pair.
Unbeknown to the Teacher, the Learner
was Milgram’s confederate, and the shocks
were not real. Moreover, rather than
being interested in memory, Milgram
was actually interested in seeing how far
the men would go in carrying out the task.
To his—and everyone else’s [11]—shock,
the answer was ‘‘very far.’’ In what came
to be termed the ‘‘baseline’’ study [12] all
participants proved willing to administer
shocks of 300 V and 65% went all the way
to 450 V. This appeared to provide
compelling evidence that normal well-
adjusted men would be willing to kill a
complete stranger simply because they
were ordered to do so by an authority.
Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experi-
ment took these ideas further by exploring
the destructive behaviour of groups of men
over an extended period [13,14]. Students
were randomly assigned to be either
guards or prisoners within a mock prison
that had been constructed in the Stanford
Psychology Department. In contrast to
Milgram’s studies, the objective was to
observe the interaction within and be-
tween the two groups in the absence of an
obviously malevolent authority. Here,
again, the results proved shocking. Such
was the abuse meted out to the prisoners
by the guards that the study had to be
terminated after just 6 days. Zimbardo’s
conclusion from this was even more
alarming than Milgram’s. People descend
into tyranny, he suggested, because they
conform unthinkingly to the toxic roles
that authorities prescribe without the need
for specific orders: brutality was ‘‘a
‘natural’ consequence of being in the
uniform of a ‘guard’ and asserting the
power inherent in that role’’ [15].
Essays articulate a specific perspective on a topic of
broad interest to scientists.
Citation: Haslam SA, Reicher SD (2012) Contesting the ‘‘Nature’’ Of Conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s
Studies Really Show. PLoS Biol 10(11): e1001426. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001426
Published November 20, 2012
Copyright: � 2012 Haslam, Reicher. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: a.haslam@uq.edu.au
PLOS Biology | www.plosbiology.org 1 November 2012 | Volume 10 | Issue 11 | e1001426
Within psychology, Milgram and Zim-
bardo helped consolidate a growing ‘‘con-
formity bias’’ [16] in which the focus on
compliance is so strong as to obscure
evidence of resistance and disobedience
[17]. However their arguments proved
particularly potent because they seemed to
mesh with real-world examples—particu-
larly evidence of the ‘‘banality of evil.’’
This term was coined in Hannah Arendt’s
account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann
[18], a chief architect of the Nazis’ ‘‘final
solution to the Jewish question’’ [19].
Despite being responsible for the trans-
portation of millions of people to their
death, Arendt suggested that Eichmann
was no psychopathic monster. Instead his
trial revealed him to be a diligent and
efficient bureaucrat—a man more con-
cerned with following orders than with
asking deep questions about their morality
or consequence.
Much of the power of Milgram and
Zimbardo’s research derives from the fact
that it appears to give empirical substance
to this claim that evil is banal [3]. It seems
to show that tyranny is a natural and
unavoidable consequence of humans’ in-
herent motivation to bend to the wishes of
those in authority—whoever they may be
and whatever it is that they want us to do.
Put slightly differently, it operationalizes an
apparent tragedy of the human condition:
our desire to be good subjects is stronger
than our desire to be subjects who do good.
Questioning the Consensus:
Conformity Isn’t Natural and It
Doesn’t Explain Tyranny
The banality of evil thesis appears to be
a truth almost universally acknowledged.
Not only is it given prominence in social
psychology textbooks [20], but so too it
informs the thinking of historians [21,22],
political scientists [23], economists [24],
and neuroscientists [25]. Indeed, via a
range of social commentators, it has
shaped the public consciousness much
more broadly [26], and, in this respect,
can lay claim to being the most influential
data-driven thesis in the whole of psychol-
ogy [27,28].
Yet despite the breadth of this consen-
sus, in recent years, we and others have
reinterrogated its two principal underpin-
nings—the archival evidence pertaining to
Eichmann and his ilk, and the specifics of
Milgram and Zimbardo’s empirical dem-
onstrations—in ways that tell a very
different story [29].
First, a series of thoroughgoing histor-
ical examinations have challenged the idea
that Nazi bureaucrats were ever simply
following orders [19,26,30]. This may
have been the defense they relied upon
when seeking to minimize their culpability
[31], but evidence suggests that function-
aries like Eichmann had a very good
understanding of what they were doing
and took pride in the energy and applica-
tion that they brought to their work.
Typically too, roles and orders were
vague, and hence for those who wanted
to advance the Nazi cause (and not all
did), creativity and imagination were
required in order to work towards the
regime’s assumed goals and to overcome
the challenges associated with any given
task [32]. Emblematic of this, the practical
details of ‘‘the final solution’’ were not
handed down from on high, but had to be
elaborated by Eichmann himself. He then
felt compelled to confront and disobey his
superiors—most particularly Himmler—
when he believed that they were not
sufficiently faithful to eliminationist Nazi
principles [19].
Second, much the same analysis can be
used to account for behavior in the
Stanford Prison Experiment. So while it
may be true that Zimbardo gave his
guards no direct orders, he certainly gave
them a general sense of how he expected
them to behave [33]. During the orienta-
tion session he told them, amongst other
things, ‘‘You can create in the prisoners
feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to
some degree, you can create a notion of
arbitrariness that their life is totally
controlled by us, by the system, you,
me… We’re going to take away their
individuality in various ways. In general
what all this leads to is a sense of
powerlessness’’ [34]. This contradicts Zim-
bardo’s assertion that ‘‘behavioral scripts
associated with the oppositional roles of
prisoner and guard [were] the sole source
of guidance’’ [35] and leads us to question
the claim that conformity to these role-
related scripts was the primary cause of
guard brutality.
But even with such guidance, not all
guards acted brutally. And those who did
used ingenuity and initiative in responding
to Zimbardo’s brief. Accordingly, after the
experiment was over, one prisoner con-
fronted his chief tormentor with the
observation that ‘‘If I had been a guard I
don’t think it would have been such a
masterpiece’’ [34]. Contrary to the banal-
ity of evil thesis, the Zimbardo-inspired
tyranny was made possible by the active
engagement of enthusiasts rather than the
leaden conformity of automatons.
Turning, third, to the specifics of
Milgram’s studies, the first point to note
is that the primary dependent measure
(flicking a switch) offers few opportunities
for creativity in carrying out the task.
Nevertheless, several of Milgram’s findings
typically escape standard reviews in which
the paradigm is portrayed as only yielding
up evidence of obedience. Initially, it is
clear that the ‘‘baseline study’’ is not
especially typical of the 30 or so variants
of the paradigm that Milgram conducted.
Here the percentage of participants going
to 450 V varied from 0% to nearly 100%,
but across the studies as a whole, a
majority of participants chose not to go
this far [10,36,37].
Furthermore, close analysis of the
experimental sessions shows that partici-
pants are attentive to the demands made
on them by the Learner as well as the
Experimenter [38]. They are torn between
two voices confronting them with irrecon-
cilable moral imperatives, and the fact that
they have to choose between them is a
source of considerable anguish. They
sweat, they laugh, they try to talk and
argue their way out of the situation. But
the experimental set-up does not allow
them to do so. Ultimately, they tend to go
along with the Experimenter if he justifies
their actions in terms of the scientific
benefits of the study (as he does with the
prod ‘‘The experiment requires that you
continue’’) [39]. But if he gives them a
direct order (‘‘You have no other choice,
you must go on’’) participants typically
refuse. Once again, received wisdom
proves questionable. The Milgram studies
seem to be less about people blindly
conforming to orders than about getting
people to believe in the importance of
what they are doing [40].
Tyranny as a Product of
Identification-Based
Followership
Our suspicions about the plausibility of
the banality of evil thesis and its various
empirical substrates were first raised
through our work on the BBC Prison
Study (BPS [41]). Like the Stanford study,
this study randomly assigned men to
groups as guards and prisoners and
examined their behaviour with a specially
created ‘‘prison.’’ Unlike Zimbardo, how-
ever, we took no leadership role in the
study. Without this, would participants
conform to a hierarchical script or resist it?
The study generated three clear find-
ings. First, participants did not conform
automatically to their assigned role. Sec-
ond, they only acted in terms of group
membership to the extent that they
actively identified with the group (such
that they took on a social identification)
PLOS Biology | www.plosbiology.org 2 November 2012 | Volume 10 | Issue 11 | e1001426
[42]. Third, group identity did not mean
that people simply accepted their assigned
position; instead, it empowered them to
resist it. Early in the study, the Prisoners’
identification as a group allowed them
successfully to challenge the authority of
the Guards and create a more egalitarian
system. Later on, though, a highly commit-
ted group emerged out of dissatisfaction
with this system and conspired to create a
new hierarchy that was far more draconian.
Ultimately, then, the BBC Prison Study
came close to recreating the tyranny of the
Stanford Prison Experiment. However it
was neither passive conformity to roles nor
blind obedience to rules that brought the
study to this point. On the contrary, it was
only when they had internalized roles and
rules as aspects of a system with which
they identified that participants used them
as a guide to action. Moreover, on the
basis of this shared identification, the
hallmark of the tyrannical regime was
not conformity but creative leadership and
engaged followership within a group of
true believers (see also [43,44]). As we
have seen, this analysis mirrors recent
conclusions about the Nazi tyranny. To
complete the argument, we suggest that it
is also applicable to Milgram’s paradigm.
The evidence, noted above, about the
efficacy of different ‘‘prods’’ already points
to the fact that compliance is bound up
with a sense of commitment to the
experiment and the experimenter over
and above commitment to the learner (S.
Haslam, SD Reicher, M. Birney, unpub-
lished data) [39]. This use of prods is but
one aspect of Milgram’s careful manage-
ment of the paradigm [13] that is aimed at
securing participants’ identification with
the scientific enterprise.
Significantly, though, the degree of
identification is not constant across all
variants of the study. For instance, when
the study is conducted in commercial
premises as opposed to prestigious Yale
University labs one might expect the
identification to diminish and (as our
argument implies) compliance to decrease.
It does. More systematically, we have
examined variations in participants’ iden-
tification with the Experimenter and the
science that he represents as opposed to
their identification with the Learner and
the general community. They always
identify with both to some degree—hence
the drama and the tension of the para-
digm. But the degree matters, and greater
identification with the Experimenter is
highly predictive of a greater willingness
among Milgram’s participants to adminis-
ter the maximum shock across the para-
digm’s many variants [37].
However, some of the most compelling
evidence that participants’ administration
of shocks results from their identification
with Milgram’s scientific goals comes from
what happened after the study had ended.
In his debriefing, Milgram praised partic-
ipants for their commitment to the ad-
vancement of science, especially as it had
come at the cost of personal discomfort.
This inoculated them against doubts
concerning their own punitive actions,
but it also it led them to support more of
such actions in the future. ‘‘I am happy to
have been of service,’’ one typical partic-
ipant responded, ‘‘Continue your experi-
ments by all means as long as good can
come of them. In this crazy mixed up
world of ours, every bit of goodness is
needed’’ (S. Haslam, SD Reicher, K
Millward, R MacDonald, unpublished
data).
Conclusion
The banality of evil thesis shocks us by
claiming that decent people can be
transformed into oppressors as a result of
their ‘‘natural’’ conformity to the roles and
rules handed down by authorities. More
particularly, the inclination to conform is
thought to suppress oppressors’ ability to
engage intellectually with the fact that
what they are doing is wrong.
Although it remains highly influential,
this thesis loses credibility under close
empirical scrutiny. On the one hand, it
ignores copious evidence of resistance
even in studies held up as demonstrating
that conformity is inevitable [17]. On the
other hand, it ignores the evidence that
those who do heed authority in doing evil
do so knowingly not blindly, actively not
passively, creatively not automatically.
They do so out of belief not by nature,
out of choice not by necessity. In short,
they should be seen—and judged—as
engaged followers not as blind conformists
[45].
What was truly frightening about Eich-
mann was not that he was unaware of
what he was doing, but rather that he
knew what he was doing and believed it to
be right. Indeed, his one regret, expressed
prior to his trial, was that he had not killed
more Jews [19]. Equally, what is shocking
about Milgram’s experiments is that rather
than being distressed by their actions [46],
participants could be led to construe them
as ‘‘service’’ in the cause of ‘‘goodness.’’
To understand tyranny, then, we need
to transcend the prevailing orthodoxy that
this derives from something for which
humans have a natural inclination—a
‘‘Lucifer effect’’ to which they succumb
thoughtlessly and helplessly (and for
which, therefore, they cannot be held
accountable). Instead, we need to under-
stand two sets of inter-related processes:
those by which authorities advocate op-
pression of others and those that lead
followers to identify with these authorities.
How did Milgram and Zimbardo justify
the harmful acts they required of their
participants and why did participants
identify with them—some more than
others?
These questions are complex and full
answers fall beyond the scope of this essay.
Yet, regarding advocacy, it is striking how
destructive acts were presented as con-
structive, particularly in Milgram’s case,
where scientific progress was the warrant
for abuse. Regarding identification, this
reflects several elements: the personal
histories of individuals that render some
group memberships more plausible than
others as a source of self-definition; the
relationship between the identities on offer
in the immediate context and other
identities that are held and valued in other
contexts; and the structure of the local
context that makes certain ways of orient-
ing oneself to the social world seem more
‘‘fitting’’ than others [41,47,48].
At root, the fundamental point is that
tyranny does not flourish because perpe-
trators are helpless and ignorant of their
actions. It flourishes because they actively
identify with those who promote vicious
acts as virtuous [49]. It is this conviction
that steels participants to do their dirty
work and that makes them work energet-
ically and creatively to ensure its success.
Moreover, this work is something for
which they actively wish to be held
accountable—so long as it secures the
approbation of those in power.
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The Journal of Social Psychology, 1974, 94,
303
-304.
CONFORMITY IN THE ASCH EXPERIMENT*
Oregon State University
KNUD S. LARSEN
Asch’s study* is recognized as a classic experiment in social psychology,
demonstrating the tendency of subjects to conform when exposed to .the
social pressure of a unanimous majority. Asch carried out his study during
the fifties, when McCarthyism was active and alive, a period known for its
unobtrusive students. Could the general social pressures generated toward
conformity at that time have also affected this simple perceptual task? If
so, we should expect less conformity after this last decade of student
activism. The purpose of this study was to attempt to replicate the Asch
experiment. In addition we included self-esteem as a predictor of confor-
mity, since other investigators^ have shown that self-esteem under certain
conditions is related to persuasion.
The procedure was identical to the Asch study. Cards with straight lines
were used as stimulus material. The experiment consisted of 18 trials
comparing two cards. One card had one line, the other three of varying
lengths. One of the three lines matched the length of the single line on the
other card and the S was asked to identify it. On 12 of the 18 trials several
confederates made a unanimous wrong choice prior to the 5s decision. All
5 s also completed a measure of self-esteem consisting of a semantic differ-
ential evaluating the ideal and real self. The discrepancy between the two
evalutations was considered an assessment of self-esteem.
Of the 24 participating 5s (all college students), 15 (62.5%) conformed on
one or more trials. The number of errors varied from zero to 9, the mean
being 2.38. In comparison the Asch experiment showed that 94 of 123 5s
(76.5%) conformed at least once; the number of errors ranging from zero to
12 for a mean of 4.41. Thus there was both a reduction in the number of 5s
conforming, and the amount of conformity produced. The t test between
the top and bottom half on the self-esteem measure with respect to differ-
* Received in the Editorial Office, Provincetown, Massachusetts, on September 11, 1973.
Copyright, 1974, by The Journal Press.
‘ Asch, S. E. Studies of independence and conformity: A minority against a unanimous
majority. Psychol. Monog., 9, 70, 1956.
2 Hovland, C. I., & Janis, I. L. Personality and Persuasibility.New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1959.
303
304 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
ences on conformity scores, was .08. All Asch’a5s were male, whereas 13
females and 11 males participated in this study. Of the female participants,
84.6% conformed one or more times, and the range of errors was zero to 9.
Of the male participants, 36.4% conformed one or more times with an
error range from zero to 5. The difference in conformity between sexes is
significant (chi squares = 11.52, 3.92, df = 1, p ^ 0.5). Support is therefore
found for a decrease in conformity since the 195O’s, although female
subjects conformed at levels comparable to male subjects in the Asch
study. These findings suggest the need to replicate at periodic intervals
experiments whose results are taken for granted. Different time periods
create different pressures toward conformity, which in turn may be
reflected in different levels of conformity behavior.
Department of Psychology
Oregon State University
Corvallis, Oregon 97331
�Willpower� over the life span: decomposing
self-regulation
Walter Mischel,
1
Ozlem Ayduk,
2
Marc G. Berman,
3
B. J. Casey,
4
Ian H. Gotlib,
5
John Jonides,
3
Ethan Kross,
3
Theresa Teslovich,
4
Nicole L. Wilson,
6
Vivian Zayas,
7
and Yuichi Shoda
6
1
Department of Psychology, Columbia University,
2
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley,
3
Department of
Psychology, University of Michigan,
4
Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University,
5
Department of Psychology, Stanford University,
6
Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, and
7
Department of
Psychology, Cornell University
In the 1960s, Mischel and colleagues developed a simple �marshmallow test� to measure preschoolers� ability to delay gratifi-
cation. In numerous follow-up studies over 40 years, this �test� proved to have surprisingly significant predictive validity for
consequential social, cognitive and mental health outcomes over the life course. In this article, we review key findings from
the longitudinal work and from earlier delay-of-gratification experiments examining the cognitive appraisal and attention control
strategies that underlie this ability. Further, we outline a set of hypotheses that emerge from the intersection of these findings
with research on �cognitive control� mechanisms and their neural bases. We discuss implications of these hypotheses for
decomposing the phenomena of �willpower� and the lifelong individual differences in self-regulatory ability that were identified
in the earlier research and that are currently being pursued.
Keywords: self-regulation; delay of gratification
INTRODUCTION
Resisting temptation in favor of long-term goals is an
essential component of social and cognitive development
and of societal and economic gain. In the late 1960s,
Mischel and colleagues sought to identify and demystify
the processes that underlie ‘willpower’ or self-control
in the face of temptation in preschoolers. With that
goal, Mischel developed the delay-of-gratification paradigm
(popularized in the media as the ‘marshmallow test’).
This now-classic laboratory situation measures how long
a child can resist settling for a small, immediately avail-
able reward (e.g. one mini-marshmallow) in order to get
a larger reward later (e.g. two mini-marshmallows;
e.g. Mischel et al., 1972; Mischel et al., 1989; Mischel and
Ayduk, 2004).
What began as a set of experiments with preschoolers
turned into a life-span developmental study, providing a
unique behavioral archive for tracing the development and
implications of early self-regulatory ability over the life
course. Four decades later, this research is continuing to
reveal remarkable patterns of coherence in consequential
psychological, behavioral, health and economic outcomes
from early childhood to mid-life�the current age of the
original preschool participants. Given these provocative
findings and the methodological advances now available
for probing self-control with increasing depth at multiple
levels of analysis, this longitudinal sample provides a
unique opportunity for understanding the basic cognitive
and neural mechanisms underlying ‘willpower’ and enabling
effective self-regulation. In this article, we highlight the im-
portant early findings from this research program, and then
describe a new era in this research currently being pursued
by an interdisciplinary team of investigators working with
samples from the original studies, now focused on the bio-
logical substrates of self-regulation.
To describe our sample briefly, over 500 original partici-
pants, primarily children of faculty and graduate students at
Stanford University during the late 1960s and early 1970s,
completed the delay-of-gratification task at the age of 4 years
at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School. The study was not ori-
ginally designed as a longitudinal study; consequently, re-
cords of participants’ addresses were not kept up-to-date.
Nevertheless, over one-third of the participants responded
to follow-up mailings sent to their original addresses and to
addresses identified through an Internet search about a
decade after their initial testing, and once a decade there-
after. The current data collection effort focuses on these
participants, who now reside in a variety of locations
throughout the USA and beyond.
Received 1 October 2009; Accepted 11 August 2010
Advance Access publication 19 September 2010
The Bing Longitudinal Project was supported by a number of grants from NIMH and NSF to Walter Mischel
and Yuichi Shoda, of which the most recent and active are National Institutes of Health Grant MH39349 and
National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0624305. Ayduk, Berman, Casey, Gotlib, Jonides, Kross, Teslovich,
Wilson and Zayas are listed alphabetically. Shoda served as the overall PI, funded by NSF, for the most recent
wave of data collection from the Bing longitudinal study.
Correspondence should be addressed to Walter Mischel, Department of Psychology, Columbia University,
New York, NY, USA. E-mail: wm@psych.columbia.edu or Yuichi Shoda, Dept. of Psychology, University of
Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. Email yshoda@uw.edu
doi:10.1093/scan/nsq081 SCAN (2011) 6, 252^256
� The Author (2010).Published by Oxford University Press.For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
PREDICTIVE VALIDITY OF DELAY OF GRATIFICATION:
THE LONGITUDINAL STUDIES
The significance and predictive validity of delay ability in
preschoolers for social, cognitive and mental health out-
comes in later life have been demonstrated in a variety of
domains. For example, the number of seconds preschoolers
waited to obtain a preferred but delayed treat in this diag-
nostic laboratory situation predicted significantly higher
SAT scores and better social cognitive and emotional
coping in adolescence (Mischel et al., 1988; Shoda et al.,
1990). In follow-up studies, preschool delay ability contin-
ued to predict later outcomes in adulthood including higher
educational achievement, higher sense of self-worth, better
ability to cope with stress and less cocaine/crack use particu-
larly in individuals vulnerable to psychosocial maladjust-
ment (Ayduk et al., 2000). Such findings are consistent
with prospective, longitudinal studies in separate samples
using different assessments of ‘willpower’. For instance,
Kubzansky et al. (2008) found that ratings of the ability to
stay focused on a task and persistence in problem solving at
the age of 7 years by a trained psychologist predicted physical
health 30 years later, even when controlling for childhood
social environment and child health. Another study found
that preschoolers who, after initially deciding to wait for a
more desirable delayed reward, settled for an immediately
available but less desirable reward, were 30% more likely to
be overweight at the age of 11 years than those who contin-
ued to wait for the delayed reward (Seeyave et al., 2009; see
also Francis and Susman, 2009 for a similar finding).
Especially exciting, early delay ability seems to buffer
against the development of a variety of dispositional vulner-
abilities later in life, such as features of borderline personality
disorder (Ayduk et al., 2008). Parallel findings have been
reported with diverse demographic populations, including
middle school children in the South Bronx, NY (Ayduk
et al., 2000), and children in a summer residential treatment
program for youths at high risk for problems of aggression/
externalization and depression/withdrawal (e.g. Rodriguez
et al., 1989). For example, delay ability predicted less physical
and verbal aggression, less bullying behavior and higher
self-worth and self-esteem. These findings underline the im-
portance of uncovering strategies that children can use to
self-regulate and overcome immediate temptations. These
strategies may ultimately help them later in life to overcome
increasingly demanding contexts that require exertion of
‘willpower’.
EXPERIMENTS ON COGNITIVE TRANSFORMATIONS/
REAPPRAISAL: STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE DELAY
A series of early experiments revealed a number of strategies
that enable delay of gratification, allowing individuals to
resist temptation in favor of long-term goals. Broadly speak-
ing, these strategies involve redirection of attentional focus
or altering the cognitive representation of the object of
temptation. For example, self-distraction by looking away
from the temptation can be an effective strategy to reduce
the frustration of continuing to wait; this is observed in
successful preschool delayers compared with those who
cannot delay (Mischel et al., 1972, 1989; Mischel 1974).
Another strategy is reappraisal or reframing of a situation
away from the ‘hot’, appetitive or consummatory features of
the tempting stimuli toward ‘cooler’ representations. For ex-
ample, in an effort to resist the temptation to get the one
marshmallow available immediately, rather than continuing
to wait for two marshmallows, an effective strategy is to
envision the marshmallow as a cloud or a little cotton ball,
rather than as a sweet, delectable treat. Such reappraisal
processes have been shown to be highly effective in enhan-
cing delay of gratification. The same preschool child who
yielded immediately to the temptation by representing the
rewards focusing on consummatory features (e.g. its yummy,
sweet, chewy taste) could wait for long periods of delay
for the same tempting stimulus by focusing on its non-
consummatory qualities (e.g. its shape). These results have
been fully described elsewhere (see e.g. Mischel et al., 1972;
Mischel, 1974; Mischel et al., 1989; Mischel and Ayduk,
2004). Although these experimental demonstrations have
been short term and confined to brief laboratory situations,
they suggest that the strategies required to successfully self-
regulate can be taught.
In sum, the early experiments examining delay of gratifi-
cation showed that mental representations that are ‘hot’ or
appetitive (consummatory) hinder delay because they make
it too difficult to resist the prepotent response of reaching for
the immediately available treat. In contrast, representations
based on attention to the ‘cool’, cognitive, abstract aspects of
the situation have the opposite effect (Metcalfe and Mischel,
1999; Mischel and Ayduk, 2004). Thus, it follows that delay
of gratification in this paradigm depends on the ability to
control the aspects of the situation to which one attends and
on the ability to control how it is mentally represented.
IN SEARCH OF UNDERLYING COGNITIVE MECHANISMS:
CURRENT DIRECTIONS
The ability to resist temptation in favor of long-term goals,
as observed in the delay-of-gratification task, has been sug-
gested to be a form of cognitive control (Eigsti et al., 2006).
A key component of cognitive control processes is the ability
to suppress or override competing attentional and behavioral
responses (Kahneman et al., 1983; Allport, 1987; Cohen and
Servan-Schreiber, 1992, Casey et al., 2000, 2002; Jonides and
Nee, 2006). This process has been included in a number of
theories of attention and memory (Baddeley, 1986; Shallice,
1988; Cohen et al., 1992; Desimone and Duncan, 1995) and
referred to using a variety of terms (e.g. ‘central executive’,
‘attentional bias’, ‘cognitive control’). The terminology sug-
gests a mechanism that is required to direct or guide appro-
priate actions (Miller and Cohen, 2001). For example,
Shallice (1988) proposed a ‘supervisory attention system’
as a system for inhibiting or replacing routine, reflexive
‘Willpower’over the life span: decomposing self-regulation SCAN (2011) 253
behaviors with more appropriate behaviors. Desimone and
Duncan (1995) describe top-down biasing signals as import-
ant in attending to relevant information by virtue of mutual
inhibition or suppression of irrelevant information (see also
Jonides and Nee, 2006).
Although the description of cognitive control suggests a
unitary process, the neural mechanisms underlying control
may differ as a function of the type of information being
suppressed and the stage of processing at which control must
be exerted (Casey et al., 2000; Casey 2005). A recent
meta-analysis of over 40 neuroimaging studies of a variety
of tasks measuring cognitive control supports this notion
(Nee et al., 2007). Nee et al. (2007) showed non-overlapping
patterns of brain activation across a number of cognitive
control tasks including Stroop, Go/Nogo and Flanker tasks.
This conclusion is supported by the lack of (or low) behav-
ioral correlations among diverse tasks that all allegedly
recruit cognitive control (Tipper and Baylis, 1987; Kramer
et al., 1994; Earles et al., 1997; Grant and Dagenbach, 2000;
Shilling et al., 2002). Thus, both imaging and behavioral
evidence suggests that processes involved in resolving inter-
ference come from a ‘family of functions’ rather than from a
‘single unitary construct’ (Dempster, 1993; Harnishfeger,
1995; Nigg, 2000; Nelson et al., 2003; Friedman and
Miyake, 2004; Nee et al., 2007; Nee and Jonides, 2008,
2009), and that these distinct functions can be linked to
distinct underlying neurobiology.
From a behavioral perspective, the critical component of
the delay task is to resolve the conflict between taking one
treat now vs waiting for two treats later. However, the spe-
cific cognitive information processes that enable delay of
gratification have not been well characterized. Is delay
achieved by: (i) blocking the entry of unwanted information
(e.g. shutting out information by paying attention to some-
thing else); (ii) suppressing unwanted thoughts (e.g. by
thinking about something else) or (iii) stopping an action
in favor of an alternative one (e.g. suppressing a response or
impulse)? We are using a set of laboratory procedures de-
signed to measure each of these possible cognitive processes
to further delineate the basic mechanisms underlying delay.
EXPLORING BRAIN FUNCTIONS AND STRUCTURES
UNDERLYING DELAY OF GRATIFICATION
Ultimately, our goal is to delineate the neural correlates of
these processes using magnetic resonance imaging. These
studies are underway, although we are still in the early
stages of data collection. Prior research has identified areas
of the brain that become differentially activated when people
engage in the three processes described above (blocking un-
wanted information, suppressing unwanted thoughts and
inhibiting responses), as well as connections among areas
of the brain that seem to play a key role in these tasks. We
are currently assessing these functional and anatomical fea-
tures to examine whether they are related to these three
aspects of effective self-control.
Specifically, we predict that participants with consistently
low levels of self-control, compared with their consistently
high-control counterparts, will be characterized by less
refined connectivity (e.g. less myelination and orientation
regularity) in frontostriatal (Liston et al., 2006; Casey
et al., 2007) and frontoparietal circuitry (Jonides et al.,
1998, 2000; Nagy et al., 2004), which are critical for effective
cognitive control, but elevated activity in this circuitry when
correctly performing cognitive control tasks, especially those
that require control in the face of incentives. We are testing
this prediction by conducting diffusion tensor imaging
(DTI) and functional MRI. Participants in this study have
been invited to come to the Lucas Center for Imaging at
Stanford University; several individuals have now been
scanned.
Finally, because the participants are reaching middle
adulthood and the most productive years of their lives, we
are assessing consequential outcomes such as occupational
and marital status, social, cognitive and emotional function-
ing as well as mental and physical health and behavior pat-
terns relevant to mental and physical health and economic
and social well-being.
IMPLICATIONS AND NEXT CHALLENGES
In our ongoing interdisciplinary project, we suggest that the
preschoolers who were able to delay gratification made more
use of certain inhibitory processes than did those who were
low-delayers, and that it is this difference in inhibitory ability
that persisted into adulthood and led to the sequelae of their
ability to delay gratification in preschool, such as advanta-
geous health-protective outcomes and adaptive social cogni-
tive development. The relation we propose between
cognitive control and willpower, as manifested in the
delay-of-gratification studies and their resulting sequelae, is
as follows: willpower requires skill in overcoming tempting
immediate rewards, distractions and frustrations in favor of
greater but delayed rewards. This skill, in turn, requires that
individuals encode only information from the environment
that is relevant, keeping wanted information active in work-
ing memory and suppressing unwanted information and se-
lecting desired responses while withholding responses that
are not optimal. Findings so far are encouraging but still
tentative: with further follow-up assessments we hope to
test these hypotheses with greater precision.
Concluding remarks
Taken collectively, findings from the Bing study over many
decades converge with those from other studies of ‘will-
power’ and executive functions at the social cognitive (e.g.
Mischel and Ayduk, 2004) and brain levels of analysis (Casey
et al., 1997, 2000; Ainslie and Monterosso, 2004; McClure
et al., 2004; Hare et al., 2005; Aron and Poldrack, 2006; Nee
and Jonides, 2008; Somerville et al., in press). They lead to a
clear, albeit still tentative, set of hypotheses about the
254 SCAN (2011) W.Mischelet al.
underlying cognitive mechanisms, as discussed above, that
we are currently testing.
Ultimately, it may be possible to target and harness the
underlying mechanisms into readily teachable interventions
to achieve sustained and consequential behavior change. The
early experimental studies of the cognitive strategies that
enable delay of gratification demonstrated that at least in
laboratory situations, it is possible to dramatically enhance
this ability through the use of relatively simple attention
control and cognitive re-appraisal manipulations (Mischel
et al., 1989; Mischel and Ayduk, 2004).
To recapitulate, the skills and motivations that enable the
phenomenon of ‘willpower’, and particularly the ability to
inhibit prepotent ‘hot’ responses and impulses in the service
of future consequences, appear to be important early-life
markers for long-term adaptive mental and physical devel-
opment. The health protective and other adaptive conse-
quential life outcomes predicted by delay of gratification
ability early in life, as reviewed at the start of this article,
document the importance of this ability for well-being from
childhood into mid-life.
For those who are interested in the skills, behavior pat-
terns, cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying adaptive
and healthy aging, the Bing Longitudinal cohort provides a
truly unique opportunity. As these participants move into
the next phase of the lives, the possibility that the
self-regulatory competencies reflected in the ability to delay
gratification exert adaptive and protective influences on the
aging process is a particularly exciting prospect for further
investigation. Such work is certain to benefit from interdis-
ciplinary teams working at multiple levels of analysis from
the social cognitive and behavioral, to the neural and genetic.
This work will also permit a close examination of individual
differences and psychobiological processes that underlie im-
portant outcomes, ranging from physical and mental health
and well-being to economic, social and educational achieve-
ment over the life course.
Conflict of Interest
None declared.
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