PART I

DELAY ABILITY

Enabling Self-Control

PART I BEGINS IN the 1960s in what my students and I called “the Surprise Room” at Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School, where we developed the method that became the Marshmallow Test. We started with experiments to observe when and how preschoolers became able to exert sufficient self-restraint to wait for two marshmallows they eagerly wanted rather than settle for just one right away. The longer we looked through the one-way observation window, the more we were astonished by what we saw as the children tried to control themselves and wait. Simple suggestions to think about the treats in different ways made it either impossibly difficult or remarkably easy for them to resist the temptation. Under some conditions they could keep on waiting; under others they rang the bell moments after the researcher left the room. We continued our studies to identify those conditions, to see what the children were thinking and doing that allowed them to control themselves, to try to figure out just how they made their struggles with self-control easier—or bound to fail.

It took many years, but gradually a model emerged of how the mind and brain work when preschoolers and adults struggle to resist temptations and manage to succeed. How self-control can be achieved—not by toughing it out or just saying “No!” but by changing how we think—is the story of Part I. Beginning early in life, some people are better than others at self-control, but almost everybody can find ways to make it easier. Part I shows how that can be done.

We also found that the roots of self-control are already visible in the toddler’s behavior. So is self-control all prewired? Part I ends by answering that question in light of recent findings in genetics that profoundly change earlier views of the nature versus nurture puzzle. This new understanding has serious implications for how we raise and educate our children and how we think about them and ourselves, and I turn to this in subsequent chapters.