Shanker – self-regulation and self-control

One of the questions that we’ve been asked over and over again is how does self-regulation relate to self-control, in fact a lot of people confuse the two, and we know from some research that started to be done in the 1970’s and has been followed ever since, that children around the age of 4 start to differentiate in their self-control. What does that mean?  

Well, an American psychologist called Walter Mischel designed this classic experiment where you say to a child: “Well you can have one marshmallow now, or if you wait until I return in 15 minutes I’ll give you a couple marshmallows”. And then you watch the children Now, think about this task first of all. This is a classic psychology task where really it’s designed to create an anxiety, so what you’re doing is you’re leaving a child alone with a temptation in front of them, and you know, the promise of a future reward if he can control his impulse to grab the marshmallow.  

So, what do we learn from this task? Well it turns out that about 30% of all 4 year olds can wait, and around 70% can’t. So that’s interesting, it’s telling us that children are starting to differentiate in their self-control already by the age of 4. Then Moffat went a step further- what are the long-term implications? Well, we know that the children who wait, the 30%, score on average 201 points higher on their college entrance exams. We know that they have much lower incidence rates of physical and mental health problems, much less vulnerable to, much less vulnerable to risky behaviors, drugs, alcohol, much more likely to engage in pro-social behaviors, have a family life, earn more money, they’ll have a better life.  

So, for developmental scientists that’s both fascinating and disturbing. We want to know okay, why? Why do these 30% have good self-control? We do these other 70%, why do these other 70% suffer? So we did some interesting things. We took the 30% who do well and we tire them. We tire them with just having them do arithmetic questions, which is very tiring for a little kid and then have them re-do the test. And guess what? They can’t wait. And then we took the other 70% and we rest them up. We rest them up with active stretching and yoga, and deep breathing, and soft music, and have them re-do the test, and guess what? A majority can now wait.  

Okay, so what’s going on? What’s happening is the more drained we are, the more anxious we are, then more vulnerable we are to impulses, the harder it is to control, the harder it is to delay gratification. So the point is let’s figure out what the drains are. I think what the Mischel task is telling us is that the reason why children are differentiating at the age of 4 is because they’re dividing into those two groups I mentioned before- the 30% are the kids that are burning 8 liters per 100, the 70% are varying degrees the kids that are burning 40 liters per 100. And so what we have to do is if we want them to develop self-control, and we have all this research telling us how important it is, we’ve got to figure out why are they burning 40.