Envoyé par
Alfie Kohn
Four decades ago, in the Stanford University laboratory of Walter Mischel, preschool-age children were left alone in a room after having been told they could get a small treat (say, a marshmallow) by ringing a bell at any time to summon the experimenter — or, if they held out until he returned on his own, they could have a bigger treat (two marshmallows). As the results of this experiment are usually summarized, the children who were able to wait scored better on measures of cognitive and social skills about a decade later and also had higher SAT scores. The lesson is simple, as conservative commentators tell the story: We ought to focus less on “structural reforms” to improve education or reduce poverty, and look instead at traits possessed by individuals – specifically, the ability to exert good old-fashioned self-control.[37]
But the real story of these studies is a good deal more complicated. For starters, the causal relationship wasn’t at all clear, as Mischel acknowledged. The ability to delay gratification might not have been responsible for the impressive qualities found ten years later; instead, both may have resulted from the same kind of home environment.[38]
Second, what mostly interested Mischel wasn’t whether children could wait for a bigger treat – which, by the way, most of them could[39] – and whether waiters fared better in life than non-waiters, but how children go about trying to wait and which strategies help. It turned out that kids waited longer when they were distracted by a toy. What worked best wasn’t “self-denial and grim determination” but doing something enjoyable while waiting so that self-control wasn’t needed at all![40]
Third, the specifics of the situation – that is, the design of each experiment – were more important than the personality of a given child in predicting the outcome.[41] This is precisely the opposite of the usual lesson drawn from these studies, which is that self-control is a matter of individual character, which we ought to promote.
Fourth, even to the extent Mischel did look at stable individual characteristics, he was primarily concerned with “cognitive competencies” – strategies for how to think about (or stop thinking about) the goody – and how they’re related to other skills that are measured down the road. In fact, those subsequent outcomes weren’t associated with the ability to defer gratification, per se, but only with the ability to distract oneself when those distractions weren’t provided by the experimenters.[42] And that ability was significantly correlated with plain old intelligence.[43]
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Keith Flint 1969 - 2019 
on aura plus de filles a patauger dedans
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