Chapter 18 Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social Learning Theory 561making judgments about others. Participants in this study were given just one
trait of a fictional female student and then asked to predict how warmly the
student would behave in several different situations. The single trait descriptor
each participant received was determined randomly from the following list:
friendly, a kiss-up, flirtatious, shy, or unfriendly. With just one of these traits in
mind, participants then had to predict how the fictional student would behave
with peers, with professors, with women, with men, with familiar people, and
with unfamiliar people.
What the researchers found perfectly supported the if-then framework of
person-situation interactions. For example, when the trait descriptor for the fic-
tional student was kiss-up, participants predicted that she would act very warmly
toward professors but not exceptionally warmly toward peers. In other words, if
the target of the interaction was of a high status (professor), then the student was
very warm; but if the target was not of high status, then the student was not warm.
Similarly, when the student was described as unfriendly, participants predicted she
would be rather warm toward people she knew well but not at all warm toward
unfamiliar people. These findings clearly demonstrate the average person under-
stands that people do not behave in the same manner in all situations—depending
on their personality, people adjust behavior to match the situation.
Mischel and colleagues concluded that the social-cognitive interactionist
conceptualization of the person-situation environment is a more appropriate way
of understanding human behavior than the traditional “decontextualized” views
of personality in which people behave in a given way regardless of the context.
Marshmallows and Self-Regulation Across the Lifespan
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Walter Mischel’s earliest research in personality
psychology was on delay of gratification. Recall that in his early studies with Ebbesen
(1970), Mischel found that children who were able to resist temptation (in this case,
not eating one marshmallow but rather waiting to receive two marshmallows later)
did so with the use of a variety of cognitive and behavioral strategies. Since that early
work, decades of longitudinal research has followed those preschoolers across their
lifespan to explore the mechanisms that enable effective self-regulation.
In a recent review of these follow-up studies, Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda,
and colleagues (2012) provide evidence for surprisingly significant predictive
validity of the “marshmallow test” for important social, cognitive, and mental
health outcomes across the lifespan. The list of remarkable consequences is long.
For example, the number of seconds preschoolers were able to wait to obtain the
preferred two marshmallows predicted significantly higher SAT scores when they
were in high school, and, later, higher educational achievement overall, greater self-
worth, and a better ability to cope with stress (Ayduk et al., 2000; Shoda et al., 1990).
Further, those preschoolers who gave in to the temptation of one marshmallow
were 30% more likely to be overweight by the age of 11 (Seeyave et al., 2009),
and more likely to develop features of borderline personality in adulthood (Ayduk
et al., 2008) than those who were able to wait for the delayed reward.
What enables this amazing willpower in some, but not all, of us? Mischel and
colleagues have published extensively on this question, and have concluded that
those who can resist temptation in favor of long-term goals do so with the use of