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THE BEST-LAID PLANS

HOMER’S ANCIENT GREEK LEGEND The Odyssey tells of the adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses in the Roman version), the king of a small rugged island called Ithaca on Greece’s western coast. The king leaves his new wife, Penelope, and their infant son at home and sets sail to fight in the Trojan War. Unexpectedly, the war drags on for many years—and so does Odysseus’s journey home, which is filled with fantastic adventures of wild new loves, terrible battles, and tangles with horrific monsters. As he tries at long last to return home with his remaining sailors, they approach the land of the wondrous Sirens, whose irresistibly seductive voices and songs so enchant sailors on passing ships that they crash into the rocks and drown.

Odysseus was desperately eager to hear the Sirens’ songs, but he was also aware of the hazards. In one of the Western world’s earliest chronicles of advance planning done to resist temptation, he ordered his sailors to tie him firmly to the vessel’s mainmast and leave him bound there—“and if I beseech and bid you to set me free, then do ye straiten me with yet more bonds.” To protect themselves and assure that he remained tied, the sailors were ordered to plug up their ears with beeswax.

MR. CLOWN BOX

In the early 1970s, when the marshmallow experiments were well under way, I vaguely remembered Homer’s tales. I also wondered whether Adam and Eve might have held on to paradise longer if they had had plans at the ready to help them resist snakes and apple temptations. I started to think about the Bing preschoolers: how would they deal with a powerful tempter who seduced their attention while they struggled to avoid the heavy costs of succumbing to him? Would advance planning help them resist? At that time, Charlotte Patterson, now a professor at the University of Virginia, was my graduate student at Stanford, and together we began to ask that question. As a first step we needed a Siren-like tempter appropriate for preschoolers in the Surprise Room. He or she or it had to meet two criteria: the tempter had to be seductive but also considered acceptable to parents, the Bing Nursery School director, and the researchers, in addition to my three young daughters, who served as my advisory board. The result was Mr. Clown Box (below).

Mr. Clown Box was a large wooden box with a brightly painted clown’s face. The smiling face was surrounded by blinking lights and flanked by outstretched arms, each appearing to hold up a glass-windowed compartment. When the compartment lights turned on, tempting little toys and treats rotated very slowly on a drum inside each window. Mr. Clown Box was a big talker and a powerful tempter. A speaker hidden in his head was connected to a tape recorder and microphone in the observation room.

We wanted to simulate a situation that everyone faces repeatedly in life: when you have to resist powerful immediate temptations and seductions for the sake of more important but delayed outcomes. Think of the teenager trying to complete overdue homework who is asked to join his best friends for a movie, or the happily married older executive invited for drinks by the attractive young personal assistant after a long day together at the annual sales convention, far from home. Mr. Clown Box served as the seducer who would greatly tempt young kids.

During these studies, Charlotte played briefly with the child—in this example, “Sol,” age four—in a corner of the Surprise Room that contained both attractive and broken toys. She then seated Sol at a small table facing Mr. Clown Box. She explained that she would have to leave the room for a while, and she showed Sol his “job.” He had to work the whole time, without interruption, on a particularly boring task. For example, he might have to copy the squares from a worksheet filled with either X’s or O’s into the adjacent empty squares on the same worksheet, or put little pegs from a large pile into a Peg-Board. If he did that without interruption, then he could play with the fun toys and Mr. Clown Box when Charlotte returned; otherwise, he would be able to play with only the broken toys. She emphasized that he had to work the whole time she was out of the room in order to finish his job, and he solemnly promised he would do so. She carefully forewarned Sol that Mr. Clown Box might try hard to play with him, and she stressed that looking at, talking to, or playing with him would make it impossible for Sol to finish his job.

Charlotte then invited Sol to meet Mr. Clown Box, who lit up brightly, flashing his lights and illuminating his toy-filled windows, and introduced himself in a loud and pleasant voice: “Hi! I’m Mr. Clown Box. I have big ears and I love it when children fill them with all the things they think and feel, no matter what.” (He had obviously had at least some training in psychotherapy.) Mr. Clown Box “ahem” ed and “aha” ed encouragingly in response to whatever Sol said and engaged him in a brief, pleasant conversation in which he invited Sol to play with him. He demonstrated that a distinctive bzzt sound indicated that he was about to do something fun that Sol would want to watch, and briefly lit his display windows, letting Sol glimpse the attractive toys and treats rotating slowly within them.

A minute after Charlotte exited, Mr. Clown Box lit up, flashed his lights, and laughed: “Ho, ho, ho, ho! I love to have children play with me. Will you play with me? Just come over and push my nose and see what happens. Oh please, won’t you push my nose?”

For the next ten minutes he continued his tortures, mercilessly tempting the child, his lights turning on and off around his face and in his display windows, a bright light on his bowtie also flashing. He resumed his seductive efforts every 1½ minutes:

“Oh, I’m having such a good time! I’ll make even more fun for us if you just put down your pencil. Put down your pencil and then we’ll really have a good time. Please put down your pencil and come play with me.… Just come over and push my nose, and then I’ll do tricks for you. Wouldn’t you like to see some of my surprises? Look in my windows now.”

Eleven minutes after Charlotte’s exit, Mr. Clown Box turned off and she returned to the Surprise Room.

IF-THEN PLANS FOR RESISTING TEMPTATION

For preschoolers, the clown was probably as tough to resist as the Sirens were for Odysseus, and unlike the Greek hero tied to his mast, the kids were not bound to their chairs, nor did they have beeswax in their ears like his crew. Our question was: what could help preschoolers like Sol better resist the temptations that Mr. Clown Box would use to lure them?

Guided by the marshmallow findings, we figured that to effectively resist a hot temptation (whether to eat the marshmallow now or cave in to any other temptation), the inhibitory No! response had to replace the hot Go! response—and it had to do this quickly and automatically, like a reflex. All you needed, in the language of Hollywood’s movie industry, was a good connection, one that created an automatic link between the needed No! response and the hot stimulus (which normally triggered Go!). For example, one temptation-inhibiting plan might be to instruct the preschooler as follows:

“Let’s try to think of some things that you could do to keep yourself working and not let Mr. Clown Box slow you down. Let’s see… One thing you can do is this: when Mr. Clown Box makes that bzzt sound and asks you to look at him and play with him, you can just look at your work, not him, and say, ‘No, I can’t; I’m working.’ And when you say it, do it. He says, ‘Look,’ and you say, ‘No, I can’t; I’m working.’ ”

This type of If-Then plan specifies the tempting hot stimulus—“When Mr. Clown Box says to look at him and play with him”—and links it to the desired temptation-resisting response: “then you can just not look at him and say, ‘I’m not going to look at Mr. Clown Box.’ ” Preschoolers armed with this type of plan reduced their distraction time and kept on working, with the best results. Even when the clown succeeded in distracting them from their work, the disruption lasted on average less than five seconds, and the children inserted an average of 138 pegs into their Peg-Boards. In contrast, those without this type of plan interrupted their work for an average of 24 seconds per distraction and inserted only 97 pegs. In the preschool world of peg insertion, these were big differences. We also saw that many children who received this plan instruction innovated their own variations (“Quit that!” “Stop that!” “Dummy!”), which let them get their pegs into the holes faster, and ultimately allowed them to play happily with Mr. Clown Box as well as with the unbroken toys.

Our research with Mr. Clown Box turned out to be the opening step for an important independent research program developed many years later by Peter Gollwitzer, Gabriele Oettingen, and their colleagues at New York University. Beginning in the 1990s, they identified simple but surprisingly powerful If-Then plans for helping people deal more effectively with a wide variety of otherwise crippling self-control problems—even under very difficult and emotionally hot conditions, when they were trying to pursue important but hard to achieve goals. Now called If-Then implementation plans, these plans have helped students study in the midst of intrusive temptations and distractions, aided dieters in forgoing their favorite snacks, and enabled children with attention deficit disorders to inhibit inappropriate impulsive responses.

TAKING THE EFFORT OUT OF EFFORTFUL CONTROL

With practice, the desired action of an implementation plan becomes initiated automatically when the relevant situational cues occur: When the clock hits 5 p.m., I will read my textbook; I will start writing the paper the day after Christmas; when the dessert menu is served, I will not order the chocolate cake; whenever the distraction arises, I will ignore it. And implementation plans work not just when the If is in the external environment (when the alarm rings, when I enter the bar) but also when the cue is your internal state (when I’m craving something, when I’m bored, when I’m anxious, when I’m angry). It sounds simple, and it is. By forming and practicing implementation plans, you can make your hot system reflexively trigger the desired response whenever the cue occurs. Over time, a new association or habit is formed, like brushing teeth before going to bed.

Such If-Then plans, when they become automatic, take the effort out of effortful control: you can trick the hot system into reflexively and unconsciously doing the work for you. The hot system then lets you automatically act out the script you want when you need it, while your cool system rests. But unless you incorporate the resistance plan into the hot system, it is unlikely to be activated when you need it most. That is because emotional arousal and stress increase when you are faced with hot temptations, thus accelerating the hot system, triggering the quick, automatic Go! response, and attenuating the cool system. When the hot temptation arrives—whether from Mr. Clown Box flashing his lights in the Surprise Room, the chocolate dessert on the menu, or the attractive colleague in the bar at the business convention—the automatic Go! response is likely to win if there is no well-established If-Then plan. However, when If-Then plans are established, they work well in surprisingly diverse settings, with different populations and age groups, and they can help people more effectively achieve difficult goals—goals that they previously thought they could not reach.

One impressive example is with children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD is an increasingly common problem, and children who have it often experience many academic and interpersonal troubles. They are highly vulnerable to distraction and tend to have difficulty controlling their attention, making it hard to stay task-oriented. These cognitive limitations can undermine children with ADHD in many academic and social situations, causing stigmatization and the risk of overmedication. If-Then implementation plans have helped such children solve math problems faster, substantially improve on tasks assessing working memory, and persevere in their efforts to resist distraction under very difficult laboratory conditions. These applications illustrate the power and value of implementation plans, and paint an optimistic picture of the human potential for self-generated change. The continuing challenge is to translate these procedures from short-term experiments into long-term intervention programs that produce sustained change in everyday life.