Nationality American | Name Walter Mischel Role Psychologist | |
 | ||
Fields Personality psychology, Social psychology Books The Marshmallow Test: Mas, Personality and Assessment, Introduction to personality, Essentials of Psychology Similar People Julian Rotter, Yuichi Shoda, Albert Bandura, George Kelly, Gordon Allport | ||
Walter mischel the marshmallow test
Walter Mischel ( [ˈmɪʃəl]; born February 22, 1930) is an Austrian-born American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. He is the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Mischel as the 25th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Contents
- Walter mischel the marshmallow test
- Walter mischel clarifies his theory of personality
- Early life
- Professional career
- Contributions to personality theory
- Situation and behaviour
- Self control
- Media appearances
- Personal life
- References
Walter mischel clarifies his theory of personality
Early life
Mischel was born on February 22, 1930 in Vienna, Austria, When he was 8 years old his Jewish family fled with him to the United States after the Nazi occupation in 1938. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York and studied under George Kelly and Julian Rotter at The Ohio State University, where he received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1956.
Professional career
Mischel taught at the University of Colorado from 1956 to 1958, at Harvard University from 1958 to 1962, and at Stanford University from 1962 to 1983. Since 1983, Mischel has been in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University.
Mischel was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991. In 2007, Mischel was elected president of the Association for Psychological Science. Mischel's other honors include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists, the Distinguished Contributions to Personality Award of the Society of Social and Personality Psychologists, and the Distinguished Scientist Award of American Psychological Association's Division of Clinical Psychology. He is past editor of Psychological Review and past president of the American Psychological Association Division of Social and Personality Psychology and of the Association for Research in Personality.
Mischel is the recipient of the 2011 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for his studies in self-control.
Contributions to personality theory
In 1968, Mischel published the controversial book, Personality and Assessment, which created a paradigm crisis in personality psychology. The book touched upon the problem in trait assessment that was first identified by Gordon Allport in 1937. Mischel found that empirical studies often failed to support the fundamental traditional assumption of personality theory, that an individual's behavior with regard to an inferred trait construct (e.g. conscientiousness; sociability) remained highly consistent across diverse situations. Instead, Mischel cautioned that an individual's behavior was highly dependent upon situational cues, rather than expressed consistently across diverse situations that differed in meaning. Mischel maintained that behavior is shaped largely by the exigencies of a given situation, and that the notion that individuals act in consistent ways across different situations, reflecting the influence of underlying personality traits, is a myth.
Situation and behaviour
(see main article Person–situation debate)
Mischel made the case that the field of personality psychology was searching for consistency in the wrong places. Instead of treating situations as the noise or "error of measurement", Mischel's work proposed that by including the situation as it is perceived by the individual and by analyzing behavior in its situational context, the consistencies that characterize the individual would be found. He argued that these individual differences would not be expressed in consistent cross-situational behavior, but instead, he suggested that consistency would be found in distinctive but stable patterns of if-then, situation-behavior relations that form contextualized, psychologically meaningful "personality signatures" (e.g., "s/he does A when X, but does B when Y").
These signatures of personality have been in fact revealed in a large observational study of social behavior across multiple repeated situations over time. Contradicting the classic assumptions, the data showed that individuals who were similar in average levels of behavior, for example in their aggression, nevertheless differed predictably and dramatically in the types of situations in which they exhibited aggression. As predicted by Mischel, they were characterized by highly psychologically informative if-then behavioral signatures. Collectively, this work has allowed a new way to conceptualize and assess both the stability and variability of behavior that is produced by the underlying personality system, and has opened a window into the dynamic processes within the system itself.
Self-control
In a second direction, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mischel pioneered work illuminating the ability to delay gratification and to exert self-control in the face of strong situational pressures and emotionally "hot" temptations. His studies with preschoolers in the late 1960s, often referred to as "the marshmallow experiment", examined the processes and mental mechanisms that enable a young child to forego immediate gratification and to wait instead for a larger desired but delayed reward. Continuing research with these original participants has examined how preschool delay of gratification ability links to development over the life course, and may predict a variety of important outcomes (e.g., SAT scores, social and cognitive competence, educational attainment, and drug use), and can have significant protective effects against a variety of potential vulnerabilities. This work also opened a route to research on temporal discounting in decision-making, and most importantly into the mental mechanisms that enable cognitive and emotional self-control, thereby helping to demystify the concept of willpower. Comedy Central Television's Stephen Colbert interviewed Dr. Mischel on the Colbert Report on September 25, 2014. In this interview, Mischel's work with preschoolers and gratification was highlighted humorously with Colbert acting the part of an impulsive child.
Media appearances
Dr. Mischel appeared on The Colbert Report in September 2014 to discuss his studies shortly after the release of his first book meant for the eyes of the public, "The Marshmallow Test". On June 24, 2016, Walter was interviewed for the Invisibilia Podcast "The Personality Myth" on National Public Radio. He discussed the way that personality works and how it can change over time when a person is presented with new situational circumstances.
Personal life
Walter Mischel lives on Manhattan Island in New York City, and enjoys painting and travel. He has three children: Linda Mischel, Rebecca Mischel, and Judy Mischel. Walter speaks several languages, including English and French, and spends time in Paris, France on a regular basis.