idealawg

Criticism of Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiment

I have blogged about the famous marshmallow experiment before. Today Po Bronson, coauthor of NurtureShock, criticized the experiment. (I blogged about NurtureShock yesterday.) From Marshmallow Boy vs. The Pokemon Kid – The Neuroscience of Children’s Passions (Newsweek blog):

I was talking about Mischel’s data with Dr. David Shernoff. Shernoff has been working with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to study children’s motivational states during their school environment. Shernoff felt that Mischel’s data is an indictment of the educational system. The kids who can do well in school are the kids who can do well waiting for marshmallows – they can sit still and wait it out through long periods of disengagement. That’s not the kind of kids we should be cultivating.

Yes, kids are motivated by marshmallows and cookies. But that’s not the kind of motivation we should be focused on. That’s not the kind of motivation that fires up their attention systems and makes them operate at peak levels. Fundamentally, the Mischel paradigm measures and tests kids at a moment engineered so

5 reasons why your brain may like procrastination

Do you know why procrastinating may make your brain comfortable? Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. lists five at his blog Don't Delay (Psychology Today) in the post Quirks of the brain: Procrastination's perfect storm. The method he uses is to list the five reasons many self-help books sound alike as presented by David Rock at his blog Your Brain at Work (Psychology Today) and comment on each from his expertise on procastination. Kind of a clever idea.

Examples:

2.    Too much uncertainty feels dangerous. It feels like possible pain so we avoid it.

Task uncertainty is a major correlate of procrastination. As David put it, "it feels dangerous." We want to avoid this feeling, and we do. We procrastinate. The thing is, we can strategically reduce uncertainty rather than just run away. The uncertainty in our modern world isn't a predator lurking, but our stone-age brain doesn't know this, we simply feel the potential for disaster.

3.    Our conscious processing capacity is small, which makes us terrible at a lot of things, including predicting what might make us happy.

The planning fallacy and our poor ability at affective forecasting creates a very difficult situation for accurately setting realistic goals and sticking to them. We can enhance skills like "time traveling" to improve our predictions, but this takes practice and conscious work.

Click to read three other reasons we procrastinate. Well, at least some of us do. You?

Online presentation: “Getting Unstuck: Creative Storying at Work” with Andrew Rixon

The event will be held from 4 to 5 PM Eastern on October 14. You need to sign up for the ning in order to register. From the ning page:

This session will provide you the chance to bring along a ‘stuckness’ and see how creative storying can get you unstuck. When I find myself stuck, often it’s because of my tendency to forget that I live in an organic, complex and highly non-linear world. I have personally found that stories – if we are able to reflect, listen and find their meanings – hold the key for helping us to remember that we live and work in a complex world. By becoming aware of the processes that create stories we begin to open ourselves to the possibilities that lie within and get moving. Creative storytelling, through the genre of fairy tale, has found its way into the workplace and this session will provide you the opportunities to learn how creative storying enables movement and change.

If people got the best of your session, what would they leave with?

They will leave with a knowing of the 3 signs that we’ve forgotten we live in a complex world and how remembering these signs helps us to approach creative storying to not only get unstuck but also get moving.

About the Author

Andrew first discovered the power of storytelling when, at the age of 14 when, during a classical

How and why to affirm your values: A pivotal process

First of all, the "how" of values affirmation; here's a great exercise to help you affirm your highest values: http://www.affirmvalues.com. And the "why"? As those of you who have attended any of my programs know, I stress the importance of discovering and affirming your values both as an integral part of harnessing your will to make changes in your life and of reducing stress.

For more about harnessing your will, see the first principle here [pdf].

For more about the role of values affirmation in stress reduction, read "Affirmation of Personal Values Buffers Neuroendocrine and Psychological Stress Responses" (Psychological Science) [pdf]. Abstract:

Stress is implicated in the development and progression of a broad array of mental and physical health disorders. Theory and research on the self suggest that self-affirming activities may buffer these adverse effects. This study experimentally investigated whether affirmations of personal values attenuate physiological and psychological stress responses. Eighty-five participants completed either a value-affirmation task or a control task prior to participating in a laboratory stress challenge. Participants who affirmed their values had significantly lower cortisol responses to stress, compared with control participants. Dispositional self-resources (e.g., trait selfesteem and optimism) moderated the relation between value affirmation and psychological stress responses, such that participants who had high self-resources and had affirmed personal values reported the least stress. These findings suggest that reflecting on personal values can keep neuroendocrine and psychological responses to stress at low levels. Implications for research on the self, stress processes, health, and interventions are discussed.

Or take a look at my post Your values: One way to lessen the stress of conflict (Brains on Purpose™).

Have you ascertained and affirmed your values lately?

Although this book is written for lawyers at midlife, anyone can gain much value by using it

Why do I say "using" instead of "reading"? Because Lawyers at Midlife: Laying the Groundwork for the Road Ahead is as much a very practical workbook as it is a valuable source of information. The book contains worksheets, questionnaires, and graphs so the reader can sit down with a pencil and do some real planning. Topics covered are wide-ranging. Nothing is missing; all the ingredients are included for designing next-step scenarios.

Using this workshop in a book, you will be guided wisely through decisions about your finances, health, estate planning, and career transitions. As regular idealawg readers know, I believe that stories are an effective way to communicate information. I am happy to say the authors included several engaging examples of transitioning lawyers to accompany you on your path through the book.

Although it's written for lawyers at midlife, anyone would do well to buy this book and spend some time taking the inventories and making the plans. Don't we all owe it to ourselves and our families to stop every so often and shine our mental flashlight on the road ahead?

Buncha short, inspirational movies for you

They are here.

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Image credit: Image*After.

Blog Glob - Pay Attention: Simple Ways To Stay Focused

Excerpt:

In a New York Times article about [her new] book, Ms. [Winifred] Gallagher recommends starting the work day focusing on your most important task for a solid 90-minute block. After that, you can take a break, say, by answering email, making calls or even sipping caffeine, which also helps attention, before returning to your task. Until that break, however, be disciplined about not being distracted by anything else for those first 90 minutes; it can take the brain some 20 minutes to “reboot” after an interruption.

Time used up surfing the Web or checking Facebook is gone forever. “People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” Ms. Gallagher told the Times. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing?”

Ms. Gallagher also recommends ...

Click to read the rest of Pay Attention: Simple Ways To Stay Focused (The Juggle blog - Wall Street Journal).

Show Notion: Lawyers, don't click your life away

I thought Click, the movie starring Adam Sandler, was just another buttery popcorn-for-the-brain comedy. Then, at the recommendation of someone I respect, I watched it. This movie is a warning about how you probably do not want to live your life.

In this memorable film, Christopher Walken's character gives Adam Sandler's a remote control that allows him to click his life. Among other features, the device allows him to silence people (and dogs), stop action, and fast-forward. Although this power starts out as a great boon both professionally and personally, the ultimate results gives us all cause to think. The remote begins to learn what the Sandler character has done in the past and uses those programs for the future. 

Why do I call the movie memorable? Because ever since I watched it, I have been more mindful of when my pre-programmed remote is in charge. Our habits are those pre-programs. It may seem a bit odd to summarize an Adam Sandler comedy with words from Marcel Proust but here goes:

"We commonly live with a self reduced to its bare minimum; most of our faculties lie dormant, relying on habit; and habit knows how to manage without them."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

See the movie!

Note: Here's a very similar message from Alan Watts in a short animation titled Music and Life.

Grit, so important these days, is the focus of current edition of IN CHARACTER: A JOURNAL OF EVERYDAY VIRTUES

The Spring 2009 edition of In Character is the Grit Issue. I did not read all the articles but I am very glad I read those I did. Click on over and sample what you see. Tenacity, perseverance, hard work are all important and you will learn more about those states and traits in this Journal.

In Character has focused on other virtues in past editions. Examples:

• Courage
• Justice
• Purpose
• Loyalty

Click to see all the back editions of In Character.

Are you thriving? If not, you may want to take a look at how you see time

What's the way you see time have to do with thriving? A lot according to Philip Zimbardo. (Yes, the Philip Zimbardo of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment.) He explained at the recent First World Congress on Positive Psychology in Philadelphia. From "Psychology of thriving" (Philadelphia Inquirer):

Facts. Emotions. Logic. If you ask most people what they base their decisions on, this is the type of answer you're likely to get. But Zimbardo thinks it's not the whole story - or even most of it.

"The main thing that determines your decisions," he said, "is something you're unaware of - your perspective on time."

Imagine going out to lunch with co-workers and deciding whether to have that second martini. You could approach the decision by considering what happened last time you drank too much at lunch, or by envisioning how it would affect your work performance later in the day. You could focus on how much fun it would be right now. Or you might figure that you never get much done in the afternoon anyway, so why not?

These four responses are typical of distinct time perspectives: past, future, present-hedonistic, and present-fatalistic.

Zimbardo and his colleagues created a time-perspective survey and gave it to thousands