Books by Walter Mischel

Er viljestyrke og selvkontrol medfødte egenskaber eller noget, man kan lære at beherske?I ’Skumfidustesten – nøglen til selvkontrol’ forklarer psykolog Walter Mischel, manden bag den berømte Skumfidustest, hvad selvkontrol er og udforsker kunsten at mestre den. Skumfidustesten blev første gang udført på Standford University i 1960’erne. I forsøget præsenterede Mischel en række førskolebørn for en skumfidus og et valg: Spis denne ene skumfidus nu, eller få to senere. Det blev begyndelsen på årelange studier i samspillet mellem hjernen, genetik og den menneskelige natur. Nu præsenterer Mischel testens resultater og knytter dem til sin nyeste forskning. De børn, der var i stand til at udsætte deres behovstilfredsstillelse – at udvise selvkontrol – har nemlig vist sig på mange måder at klare sig bedre i deres voksne liv end de børn, der spiste deres skumfidus med det samme. Mischel indkredser med ‘Skumfidustesten’ således de kognitive færdigheder og mentale mekanismer, der ligger til grund for evnen til viljestyrke, og han demonstrerer, hvordan de kan inkorporeres i vores daglige liv.

After many "out-of-print" years, this volume has been reissued in response to an increasing demand for copies. This reflects that the fundamental questions that motivated this book thirty years ago are still being asked. But more important, the answers -- or at least their outlines -- now seem to be in sight. In 1968, this book stood as an expression of a paradigm crisis in its critique of the state of personality psychology. The last three decades have been filled with controversy and debate about the dilemmas raised here, and then with renewal and fresh discoveries. It therefore seems especially timely to revisit the pages which posed the challenges. Mischel outlined the need to encompass the situation in the study of personality, but with a focus on the acquired meaning of stimuli and on the situation as perceived, viewing the individual as a cognitive-affective being who construes, interprets, and transforms the stimulus in a dynamic reciprocal interaction with the social world. He focused on the idiographic analysis of personality that had originally motivated the field, and the complexity, discriminative facility, and uniqueness of the individual, and sought to connect the expressions of personality to the individual''s behavior -- that is, to what people do and not just what they say. Even the intrinsically contextualized "if...then..." expressions of the personality system -- its essential behavioral signatures -- were foreshadowed in this book that fired the opening salvo in a search for "a truly dynamic personality psychology."

A child is presented with a marshmallow and given a choice: Eat this one now, or wait and enjoy two later. What will she do? Walter Mischel's 'marshmallow test,' one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, proved that the ability to delay gratification is critical to living a successful life. This book deals with this topic.