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What if most of what you consider your personality is actually just coping strategies that you forgot about?

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Like you think you're out there being authentic and sharing yourself with the world, but it turns out you're just sharing your survival strategies from childhood.

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So I want to start off this chapter by talking about

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Maybe the most famous psychological study.

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I don't like if it's not the most famous, it's top five for sure.

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It's known popularly as the marshmallow test.

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Right.

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So Walter Mischel was a professor at Stanford.

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He brought in a few dozen preschool kids into a room, placed a marshmallow on the table and told them that if they could wait 20 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow for free.

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He then tracked how long the kids waited and if they could wait the full amount of time.

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Now, follow-up check-ins with those children found that, in general, the children that waited the longest tended to have the best outcomes when they became adults.

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So they scored the highest on the SAT, they had the best grades, they had the most confidence, they had the best relationships, so on and so forth.

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Now, the reason this study gets broadcast so much is because it's simple to understand and it's a very neatly packaged conclusion, which is that,

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Delayed gratification in many ways is the key to life.

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If you can just learn how to delay gratification, then you'll have better outcomes at work and your relationships and so on and so forth.

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Now, what's fascinating, what never gets talked about is the fact that Walter Mischel, the lead researcher on this study, did not believe that conclusion himself.

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Because it turns out he had been running variations of the marshmallow test in a variety of different places for many, many years.

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And the outcomes were not at all consistent with what happened at Stanford.

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For example, one of the first times he ran it, he was in Trinidad and Tobago.

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And he brought children into a room, offered them candy, and promised them the double amount of candy if they could wait for a certain amount of time.

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And what was interesting in Trinidad...

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is that the one variable that correlated the most with the children who could wait versus the ones that couldn't was the children who had fathers in the home.

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So the conclusion that Walter Mischel himself came to was that delay gratification and self-discipline as we know it, it's not a personality trait.

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It's not something you're born with or not born with.

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It doesn't necessarily determine your future the way that the Big Five do.

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He saw it as an environmental adaptation.

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His argument was that the children in Trinidad, who are not able to wait for the second piece of candy, on some level, they were being rational because they had grown up in a chaotic environment where things were not dependable, where they didn't trust people, where they didn't know if future rewards were actually going to come or not.

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And so they were justified in taking the original piece of candy.

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Whereas if you go to Palo Alto, California, and you bring in a bunch of professor's children from Stanford, which is what he did,

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kids growing up in very wealthy families and extremely stable environments, and then you offer them double the reward if they can wait.

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They're growing up in a high trust environment.

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They've only known a dependability of what is promised today versus what they get tomorrow.

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And so, of course...

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they're going to be more likely to be able to wait for the second marshmallow.

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Yeah.

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So actually there was a more direct test of this about 55 years later too.

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In 2013, Celeste Kidd, she replicated this study on a small scale, but still what she varied in this study was the actual reliability.

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Because that was a hypothesis.

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Are these kids, are they really just making decisions based on how reliable they think the adults in the room are?

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And that's exactly what she found.

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So she had a reliable and an unreliable condition.

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And the kids who were in the unreliable condition where the adults lied to them first and then did the marshmallow test or the adults made good on a promise first and then they gave them the marshmallow test.

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Yeah.

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Nearly all of the kids in the unreliable condition took the marshmallow right away.

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Nearly all of the kids in the more reliable condition didn't.

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So right there, it's just an experimental setting right in the moment.

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There's no personality to vary here.

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There's no trait that really the kids have.

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It's just, do they trust this adult or not?

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Seemed to replicate.

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And then on top of that, in 2018 was really when this kind of all fell apart, or that story fell apart anyway.

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Yeah.

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It was this big study of about 900 kids, a study by Watson and colleagues, where they found that if you controlled for socioeconomic status, incomes, everything like that, right?

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There was no association between delayed gratification and any sort of outcome in the child's life at that point or later on.

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Wow.

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It really is just these kids are basing their strategies on their worldviews, on the narratives that they've come up with, their experiences.

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And it's not necessarily set in stone.

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I feel like there's two takeaways from the debunking of the marshmallow test.

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The first is, is that what we largely consider self-discipline is very dependent on the external variables around us, which we're going to come back to that in the next chapter.

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When we talk about behavior and behavioral change, I think people vastly underestimate how much the factors around them play into how well or they're able to change their behavior or not.

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But the second piece of this is, like you said, a lot of this is simply happening on an unconscious level.

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These kids are not sitting down and calculating the expected value of waiting five minutes.

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From a scale from one to ten, how trustworthy is this adult?

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Like, oh, a seven.

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Okay, then my expected value...

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No, it's just a vibe.

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And it turns out that most of our decisions, beliefs, worldviews, we experience them as vibes.

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They are happening below the surface.

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Like if this was a trilogy, this is where at the unconscious strikes back because what happens in our three layer cake of who you are right at the base layer, we are our personality traits.

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Our personality traits are a range of, uh, expected behaviors that tend to happen more often.

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than not.

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When those personality traits interact with the world, we develop certain if-then patterns to adapt to the environment around us.

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If I'm a very low extroversion person, right, I'm introverted, I'm a little bit socially anxious.

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and I keep being thrown into an environment with a lot of people around me, I'm going to develop certain if-then patterns in my behavior, in my thoughts, in my emotions that help me adapt to the environment around me.

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And because I'm introverted, those adaptations are probably going to look very different than, say, an extroverted person in the same situation.

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So let's say you're a really highly agreeable person.

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That means that you're probably going to be conflict avoidant, right?

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You're going to be very uncomfortable dealing with confrontation.

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And let's say that you are in a workplace that is very confrontational.

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It's very, a lot of status games going on, a lot of people talking shit, a lot of office politics.

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you're going to develop an adaptation to that environment as a highly agreeable person.

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You're probably going to try to stay out of things.

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You're probably just going to try to keep the peace.

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You're not going to stick your neck out.

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You're not going to take sides in any conflicts.

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And not only are you going to be predisposed to that behavior, but you are going to develop beliefs and emotional patterns that reinforce that behavior for yourself.

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So you're going to tell yourself things like, I don't stoop to that low of like talking bad about my coworkers.

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Like,

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I don't want to get involved.

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You're going to tell yourself things like, I'd rather just focus on my tasks.

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You know, maybe when people in the office start arguing, you like put your headphones in.

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Like that's a behavioral adaptation.

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Like when people are shouting or arguing or things get awkward, it's like you just check out.

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Or I can give you an example from my own life, right?

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So I'm low extroversion, so I'm an introvert, but I'm extremely high in openness to new experiences.

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So I crave novelty.

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I crave adventure.

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I crave excitement.

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And so when I was younger, I wanted to go out and party.

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I wanted to go on adventures.

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I wanted to travel.

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I wanted to do all of these things that required me to be around other people quite frequently.

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But as an introvert, the social aspect of going out all the time felt quite exhausting.

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And so I developed an adaptation to help me with that, to fulfill my need for openness to new experiences, my need for novelty, while also quelling my introversion.

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And that was...

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Alcohol.

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I started drinking a lot, right?

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At first, it was really helpful because not only did it make me less introverted when I was around other people, but alcohol itself is a novel, unique experience, right?

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It's spontaneous, it's exciting, all sorts of fun.

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Adventures happen when you're drunk.

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It helped me fulfill my need for a lot of novelty seeking and adventure, but at the same time, it kind of

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made it easier to do it as an introvert.

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I can identify quite a bit with that too, actually.

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Yeah.

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Because I feel like I'm, I like, I always want to go out and have adventures.

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I want to see the world.

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I want to do all that, but you're right.

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I'm just around people.

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I'm like, but that requires a lot of being around people.

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That's interesting too, because like when I quit drinking and I was like, well, now I'm boring and I just want to stay home and I want to introvert.

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So yeah, we'll get into changing adaptations later, but I think that's an interesting one though, because that's different traits.

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Yeah.

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The tension of those two things like comes to a head and you reconcile them in some way and it's not always healthy.

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That's interesting.

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So if that scratched an itch for you, the full episode is going to ruin you for every other podcast.

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Check out the full episode on Spotify.

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Search for Solved with Mark Manson.

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We go absurdly deep on every topic.

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So consider yourself warned.

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You won't regret it.