Mischel has travelled around the world to study delayed - TopicsExpress



          

Mischel has travelled around the world to study delayed gratification in various cultural and socioeconomic contexts. The principles from the marshmallow test seemed to hold universally. But, even as he was learning just how important self-control is to success in life, he couldn’t keep himself from smoking. He told himself that he was perfectly in control, that smoking kept him calm, balanced, and focussed. He convinced himself that all of those negative repercussions he had learned about had nothing to do with him. It was not until one day in the late nineteen-sixties, when he saw a man with metastasized lung cancer in the halls of Stanford’s medical school—chest exposed, head shaved, little green “x” marks all over his body, marking the points where radiation would go—that Mischel realized he was fooling himself. Finally, something clicked. From then on, each time he wanted a cigarette (approximately every three minutes, by his count) he would create a picture in his mind of the man in the hallway. As he described it to me, “I changed the objective value of the cigarette. It went from something I craved to something disgusting.” He hasn’t had a smoke since. ow.ly/CwOAA
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 23:40:10 +0000

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