PART II

FROM MARSHMALLOWS IN PRE-K TO MONEY IN 401(k)

IN PART I WE saw how preschoolers manage to delay gratification, and how the skills that enable self-control can be enhanced and nurtured. While much of what makes self-control less effortful is prewired, much of it remains open to learning. The cognitive and emotional skills that make it possible for preschoolers to wait for a bigger reward pave the way for them to develop the psychological resources, mind-sets, and social relationships that can improve their chances to build the fulfilling and successful lives they want. In Part II, I look at how this works and how the ability to delay gratification protects the self by helping people control and regulate their personal vulnerabilities more effectively, cool their hot impulsive responses, and take consequences into account. I examine the journey from preschool to the rest of life, parsing the underlying connections between the seconds that children spent waiting for more marshmallows in pre-K and how they were faring at midlife. If we understand these connections, we can develop them and learn how to better help our children and ourselves.

To begin with, the hot system deserves to be appreciated, listened to, and learned from. It gives us the emotions and zest that make life worth living and allows automatic judgments and decisions that work well some of the time. But the hot system has its costs: it effortlessly makes quick judgments that feel right intuitively but are often dead wrong. It can save your life by getting you to hit the car brakes in time to avoid a collision or to duck for cover when you hear a gunshot nearby, but it can also get you into trouble. It can cause well-intentioned policemen to shoot too quickly at innocent but suspicious-looking strangers in dark alleys, drive loving couples apart with jealousy and mistrust, or lead overconfident high achievers to wreck their lives with impulsive greed or fear-driven decisions. And its excesses—the temptations it dangles that one can’t resist, the fears it too vividly creates, the stereotypes it triggers from minimal information, and the conclusions and decisions it pushes us to make too quickly—can be hazardous to health, wealth, and well-being. Part II explores some of these risks and possible ways to control them and perhaps even learn from them.

Natural selection shaped the hot system to enable survival and the spread of human DNA in a tough Darwinian world, but much later in the course of evolution, it also created the cool system. The cool system gives humans the ability to behave intelligently, with imagination, empathy, foresight, and sometimes even wisdom. It allows us to reappraise and reconstrue the meaning of events, situations, people, and our lives. The ability to think in constructive, alternative ways can change the impact of stimuli and life events on what we feel, think, and do, as the preschoolers in Part I demonstrated. Therein lies the potential for being purposeful agents of our actions, for taking charge, for exerting control, and for influencing how life plays out.

The mental mechanisms that enable self-control in the face of temptation also play a crucial role in efforts to regulate and cool down painful emotions, like heartbreak and interpersonal rejection. These mechanisms are supported by the psychological immune system, which works ingeniously to protect self-regard, reduce stress, and make most of us feel good—or at least not bad—much of the time. It usually lets us see ourselves through rose-colored glasses, which keeps depression at bay. Removing those glasses increases the risk for depression. Wearing them all the time leads to illusory optimism and excessive risk taking. If we use the cool system to monitor and correct the distortions from the rose-colored glasses, perhaps we can avoid hubris and some of the hazards of overconfidence. We can benefit from the psychological immunities that protect us from feeling terrible, that help us develop a sense of agency and efficacy in our lives, and that enable optimistic expectations that in turn reduce stress and sustain mental and physical health. I look at how these processes play out, and how they can be harnessed by the cool system to enhance our lives.

Western conceptions of traits and human nature have long assumed that self-control and the ability to delay gratification characterize individuals consistently, and will be reflected in their behavior across many different situations and contexts. This is why much shock and surprise are expressed in the media each time the world learns about another famous leader, celebrity, or pillar of society whose hidden life has been exposed, revealing what appears to be a massive failure of judgment and self-control. These people must be able to wait for their marshmallows and to delay gratification in many situations—otherwise they could not have achieved their remarkable success. Why then do smart people so often act stupidly, managing to unravel the lives they diligently constructed? What trips them up? To understand this, I look closely at what people really do, not just what they say, across different situations and over time. There is consistency in the expression of traits like conscientiousness, honesty, aggression, and sociability. But it is consistency contextualized within specific types of situations: Henry is always conscientious, if at work but not if at home; Liz is warm and friendly, if with close friends but not if at a big party; the governor is trustworthy if dealing with his state’s budget, but not if surrounded by attractive assistants. Consequently, we have to look at the particular situations in which people are or are not conscientious, sociable, and so on if we want to understand and predict what they are likely to do in the future.

The past few decades of discoveries, especially in social cognitive neuroscience, genetics, and developmental science, have opened new windows into how the mind and brain work—and they have done so in ways that make self-control, cognitive reappraisal, and emotion regulation central players in the story of who we are. It has even turned young philosophers into experimentalists, testing fresh ideas about human nature in the real world—not only who we are but also what we can become. The situations and skills that allow us to have agency, exert control, and make informed choices are far from limitless. They are hedged by the formidable constraints of living in a largely unpredictable world in which good and bad luck, as well as our social and biological histories and our current environments and relationships, make their contributions and limit our options. Yet the self-control skills we develop can make a substantial difference if we use the cool system flexibly and with discrimination, refusing to let it become rigid or allowing it to squeeze the pleasure and vitality out of the hot system.

What drives the cool system is the prefrontal cortex, as I emphasized in Part I. It enables the attention control, imagination, planning, and thinking needed to solve problems and exercise effort and self-control in pursuit of long-term goals that allow preschoolers to wait for treats. The same strategies work over the course of life—it’s just the temptations that change. How and why these strategies work, and how they might make a difference to your life, is the stuff of Part II.