The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control by Walter Mischel

Author:Walter Mischel
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Psychology / Cognitive Psychology, Psychology / Developmental / Child, Science / Cognitive Science
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

PROTECTING SELF-REGARD: SELF-ENHANCEMENT

The psychological immune system finds ways for us to avoid hating ourselves for bad outcomes and credit ourselves for the good ones. It lets us attribute the bad outcomes to everything from the government, an incompetent underling, or a jealous colleague to a moment of bad luck or some other condition outside our control. It helps you fall asleep at night after reliving a work episode in which a colleague referred to your idea at the group meeting as a formula for disaster. OK, you think, perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea, but it’s forgivable because you were coming down with the flu. As social psychologist Elliot Aronson put it in the title of his book with Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me).

The psychological immune system preserves our sense of being good, smart, and worthy. Provided we are not severely depressed or dysfunctional, it allows us to see ourselves as having more positive and fewer negative qualities than most of our peers. It does not work this way with everything, though: you may see yourself as intelligent overall but incompetent with technology, or as being good at self-control when it comes to work but not when it comes to chocolate. Nevertheless, when people rate themselves on Shelley Taylor’s “How I See Myself” questionnaire, which lists 21 qualities including “cheerful,” “academically able,” “intellectually self-confident,” “sensitive to others,” and “desire to achieve,” between 67 and 96 percent rate themselves better than they rate their peers. David G. Myers, a social psychologist at Hope College, captured the gist of the multitude of studies on self-evaluation.

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