Chapter 18 Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social Learning Theory 549invaded Austria in 1938. That same year, the Mischel family fled Austria and moved
to the United States. After living in various parts of the country, they eventually
settled in Brooklyn, where Walter attended primary and secondary schools. Before
he could accept a college scholarship, his father suddenly became ill, and Walter
was forced to take a series of odd jobs. Eventually, he was able to attend New York
University, where he became passionately interested in art (painting and sculpture)
and divided his time among art, psychology, and life in Greenwich Village.
In college, Mischel was appalled by the rat-centered introductory psychology
classes that seemed to him far removed from the everyday lives of humans. His
humanistic inclinations were solidified by reading Freud, the existential thinkers,
and the great poets. After graduation, he entered the MA program in clinical psy-
chology at City College of New York. While working on his degree, he was
employed as a social worker in the Lower East Side slums, work that led him to
doubt the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory and to see the necessity of using
empirical evidence to evaluate all claims of psychology.
Mischel’s development as a cognitive social psychologist was further
enhanced by his doctoral studies at Ohio State University from 1953 to 1956. At
that time, the psychology department at Ohio State was informally divided into the
supporters of its two most influential faculty members—Julian Rotter and George
Kelly. Unlike most students, who strongly supported one or the other position,
Mischel admired both Rotter and Kelly and learned from each of them. As a con-
sequence, Mischel’s cognitive social theory shows the influence of Rotter’s social
learning theory as well as Kelly’s cognitively based theory of personal constructs
(see Chapter 19). Rotter taught Mischel the importance of research design for
improving assessment techniques and for measuring the effectiveness of therapeu-
tic treatment; Kelly taught him that participants in psychology experiments are like
the psychologists who study them in that they are thinking, feeling human beings.
From 1956 to 1958, Mischel lived much of the time in the Caribbean, study-
ing religious cults that practiced spirit possession and investigating delay of grati-
fication in a cross-cultural setting. He became determined to learn more about why
people prefer future valuable rewards over immediate less valuable ones. Much of
his later research has revolved around this issue.
Next, Mischel taught for 2 years at the University of Colorado. He then
joined the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, where his interest in per-
sonality theory and assessment was further stimulated by discussions with Gordon
Allport (see Chapter 12), Henry Murray, David McClelland, and others. In 1962,
Mischel moved to Stanford and became a colleague of Albert Bandura (see Chap-
ter 17). After more than 20 years at Stanford, Mischel returned to New York,
joining the faculty at Columbia University, where he remains as an active researcher
and continues to hone his cognitive social learning theory.
While at Harvard, Mischel met and married Harriet Nerlove, another graduate
student in cognitive psychology. Before their divorce, the Mischels collaborated to
produce three daughters and several scientific projects (H. N. Mischel & W. Mischel,
1973; W. Mischel & H. N. Mischel, 1976, 1983). Mischel’s most important early
work was Personality and Assessment (1968), an outgrowth of his efforts to identify
successful Peace Corps volunteers. His experiences as consultant to the Peace Corps
taught him that under the right conditions, people are at least as capable as standard-
ized tests at predicting their own behavior. In Personality and Assessment, Mischel