Walter Mischel

Austrian-born US clinical psychologist and personality theorist

• Born: February 22, 1930
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: September 12, 2018
• Place of death: New York City, New York

Type of psychology: Personality

In addition to his findings regarding the concept of delayed gratification, Mischel, with Yuichi Shoda, developed a dynamic theory of personality that is an alternative to the traditional, trait-based view.

Life

Walter Mischel and his family fled the Nazi regime in 1938 and eventually immigrated to Brooklyn, New York. He earned a BA in psychology from New York University in 1951 and an MA in clinical psychology from City College of New York in 1953. While a graduate student, he worked as a social worker in the slums of Manhattan. Because the methods of psychoanalysis seemed to have little utility when applied to social work, he sought a more empirically grounded doctoral program. He attained a PhD in clinical psychology in 1956 at Ohio State University, where he studied social learning theory with Julian B. Rotter and personal construct psychology with George A. Kelly. Both men greatly influenced Mischel’s subsequent scholarly development.

In the late 1960s, Mischel conducted one of the experiments that he is most well known for, which aimed to study the concept of self-control. With preschoolers as his subjects, he tested whether they would wait a longer amount of time for a greater reward (two marshmallows) or opt for immediate gratification by accepting a single marshmallow treat without having to wait. By observing whether the children could practice willpower and put off the gratification of receiving the treat for a longer period of time, he was able to gather data to offer an explanation for the capability of delaying gratification. After tracking the children as they grew up, he also learned more about correlations between the ability to practice self-control and delay gratification and other forms of cognitive and social development.

At Harvard University, he had reviewed the empirical research and concluded that most of the studies did not support the prevailing ideas about personality. He levied this serious criticism in a monograph titled Personality and Assessment (1968), which was at first disparaged. However, a long debate ensued that revolved around the personality paradox, a term coined by Daryl Bem and Andrea Allen. At the time, most theorists believed that traits or dispositions characterized a relatively stable personality structure. However, the paradox was that observed behavior was not consistent in a variety of situations. Mainstream psychologists believed that measurement error accounted for the inconsistent data. Mischel believed that the problem was not with flawed measures but with flawed thinking about the nature of personality. The search for the locus of personality consistency and a desire to understand better the organization of personality were major themes for the rest of Mischel’s career.

In 1973, he wrote an important paper titled “Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality.” He replaced traits with person variables and considered behavior in context. For example, a person may be shy in some settings and not in others. In 1995, Mischel and Yuichi Shoda wrote “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure” that resolved the personality paradox. The surprising resolution was that intra-individual profiles or patterns of responses in a variety of settings were consistent.

Mischel won many awards for his creative work. In 1982, he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, and he held an endowed chair in psychology at Columbia University. He served as president of the Association for Psychlogical Science and the Association for Research in Personality and as editor of the respected journal Psychological Review. In 2011, he received the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in psychology. He published a book about his research on delayed gratification, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control, in 2015. That same year, he, Shoda, and Philip Peake received the congressionally endorsed Golden Goose Award in recognition of the legacy of their work.

After a battle with pancreatic cancer, Mischel died on September 12, 2018, at his home in New York City, at the age of eighty-eight. He was survived by three daughters, several grandchildren, and his partner, Michele Myers. At the time of his death, he was the Robert Johnston Niven Professor Emeritus of Humane Letters at Columbia University.

Bibliography

Baumeister, Roy F., and John Tierney. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Penguin, 2011.

Carey, Benedict. "Walter Mischel, 88, Psychologist Famed for Marshmallow Test, Dies." The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/obituaries/walter-mischel-dead.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.

Cervone, Daniel, and Walter Mischel, editors. Advances in Personality Science. Guilford, 2002.

Konnikova, Maria. "The Struggles of a Psychologist Studying Self-Control." The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2014, www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/struggles-psychologist-studying-self-control. Accessed 30 Jan. 2017.

Lehrer, Jonah. "Don't! The Secret of Self-Control." The New Yorker, 18 May 2009, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/18/dont-2. Accessed 8 May 2014.

Mischel, Walter, et al. Introduction to Personality: Toward an Integrative Science of the Person. 8th ed., Wiley, 2008.

Pervin, Lawrence A., et al., editors. Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. 3rd ed., Guilford, 2008.

“Walter Mischel.” American Psychologist, vol. 38, no. 1, 1983, pp. 9–14.