Delayed Gratification: The Marshmallow Test
This article about brain scans and delayed gratification I found interesting, especially this connection between imagination and delay: "The brain scan findings from 103 subjects suggest that delaying gratification involves the ability to imagine a future event clearly." That seems to me to say that those who learn to tell themselves a story about what will happen next have an advantage in contolling their desires.
The Time Paradox, by Philip Zimbardo
This is the new book by Zimbardo whichbreaks down the attitude toward time with more detail than the original Marshmallow test.
This article in USA today gives an overview of the theory.
There's a brief quiz that assesses your relation to time here.
A much longer quiz from the Time Paradox website here.
Research project
It's lengthy, but there's a survey conducted at Central Michigan University that says is designed to measure strategies people use to seek pleasure and happiness. And according to wiki, "the survey describes trait differences in the tendency to delay gratification along six categories as well as a global domain."
Success, IQ & Perseverance
This article is about recent findings that perseverance is a much better indicator of future success than IQ. The most interesting part of the article to me was the result of a study cited at the end about the effect of praising either effort or intelligence:
"For much of the last decade, Dweck and her colleagues have tracked hundreds of fifth-graders in 12 different New York City schools. The children were randomly assigned to two groups, both of which took an age-appropriate version of the IQ test. After taking the test, one group was praised for their intelligence - “You must be smart at this,” the researcher said - while the other group was praised for their effort and told they “must have worked really hard.”
Dweck then gave the same fifth-graders another test. This test was designed to be extremely difficult - it was an intelligence test for eighth-graders - but Dweck wanted to see how they would respond to the challenge. The students who were initially praised for their effort worked hard at figuring out the puzzles. Kids praised for their smarts, on the other hand, quickly became discouraged.
The final round of intelligence tests was the same difficulty level as the initial test. The students who had been praised for their effort raised their score, on average, by 30 percent. This result was even more impressive when compared to the students who had been praised for their intelligence: their scores on the final test dropped by nearly 20 percent. A big part of success, Dweck says, stems from our beliefs about what leads to success."
The truth about grit