by David Brooks
At first the coach called her Little Mac, since her attitude was like John McEnroe’s, but one day it got scary. It was the spring of her sophomore year, and her team was playing at an upper-middle-class school in the suburbs. By this point, Erica was the second-ranked girl on the team, playing a singles match late in the afternoon. Her coach watched her first service game from behind the fence and had a sinking sensation right away. Her first serve went long. Her second serve hit the bottom of the net. By the time she was down three games to zero, her form was in disarray. On volleys, her shoulder was flying open. On serves, her arm was dipping down, and she was practically serving sidearm, blasting the ball anywhere but into the other court.
Her coach told her to count to ten, relax, and regain her composure, but she looked at him like a feral animal, her brows furrowed with rage and frustration. Soon she was standing flatfooted awaiting the serve, paying more attention to her own frustration than to the ball. Her returns hit the net, went long or wide, and after each one she’d bark, “Fuck!” to herself.
The coach started peppering her with advice. Keep your shoulder in. Move your feet. Work on your toss. Rush the net. But she was stuck in some spiral of disorganization. She hit the ball as hard as possible, and each error seemed to vindicate some tide of self-hatred rising inside. For reasons that would never be clear, she began sabotaging her own game, hitting volleys deep into the fence behind the court, not even trying to return serves she could have made a try at. She stomped off the court during side changes and threw her racket on the ground beneath her chair. After one bad volley, she wheeled and threw her racket against the fence. Her coach lit into her: “Erica! Grow up or get out!”
Erica hit the next serve for an ace and glared at him. Her next serve was in, but was called out. “Are you fucking crazy?” Erica screamed. All games stopped. Erica slammed her racket to the ground. “Are you fucking crazy?” She stormed the net and looked like she was going to throttle anybody who got in her way. Her opponent, the line judge, her teammates—everybody physically recoiled. She was overflowing with steam and fury.
She knew at that very moment she was doing wrong, but it felt so good. She wanted to punch someone and see a face explode in a flash of blood. She felt some surge of power and domination as she looked at the people drawing back nervously around her. She was looking for somebody to humiliate.
For several long seconds, nobody approached. Eventually, she stormed off the court and sat in her chair, looking down. She blamed everybody but herself. The assholes of the world, the ball, the racket, her opponent. Finally, her coach came over, as furious as she was. He grabbed her arm and barked, “You’re outta here. Let’s go.”
She yanked it away. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” But she got up and started walking toward the bus, three strides ahead of him. She slammed her fist against the metal side of the bus as she stepped on, and stomped on down the aisle. She threw her gear against the wall, and herself onto the back bench. She sat there for an hour and a half, while the rest of the matches finished, and then stewed silently as they all rode back to school.
THERE WAS NO REACHING her that afternoon. She had no remorse. No fear of getting into trouble at the Academy or at home. She was stubborn, unyielding, and harsh when anybody tried to talk with her.
By the time the team got back to school, everybody was talking about how Erica had gone crazy on the court. The next day they stopped the school, which is what the administrators did when something terrible had happened. Classes were cancelled, and every student and teacher gathered for an hour in the gym for an assembly on sportsmanship. They never mentioned Erica’s name, but everybody knew she had caused it. Teachers and administrators pulled her aside that day—some harsh, some soft—but none of what they said registered.
Temperament
By the next evening, though, the whole episode was beginning to look different. Erica cried into her pillow. She felt a wave of humiliation and shame.
By this age, her mother, Amy, was no match for Erica. Her personality wasn’t as strong. But she knew what it was like to behave in ways that were inexplicable to yourself. She wondered if she’d simply passed these genes on to her daughter, and all Erica’s fine qualities were about to be overshadowed by the dark ones inherited from dear old Mom.
She also wondered if these were just the storms of Erica’s adolescence, or whether this would be her life now and forever. All human beings have inherited from the distant past an automatic ability to respond to surprises and stress, the so-called fight-or-flight response. Some people, even from the earliest age, seem to flee from stress and pain. Some, like Erica, fight.
Some newborns startle more easily than others. Their heart rate shoots up more than others when confronted with strange situations, and their blood pressure rises. Their bodies react more vividly. In 1979 psychologist Jerome Kagan and his colleagues presented five hundred infants with a series of unfamiliar stimuli. About 20 percent of the babies cried vigorously and were labeled “high reactive.” Another 40 percent showed little response and were labeled “low reactive.” The rest were in between.
A decade or so later, Kagan ran the same children through a battery of experiences that were designed to induce performance anxiety. About a fifth of those who had been labeled “high reactive” still responded sharply to stress. A third of the “low reactives” still maintained their sense of calm. Most of the kids had matured and were now in the middle range. Very few of the kids had jumped from the high reactive to low reactive or vice versa.
In other words, kids are born with a certain temperament. That temperament is not a track that will guide them through life. It is, as E. O. Wilson has argued, a leash. Erica, like all kids, was born with a certain disposition, whether to be high strung or preternaturally calm, whether to be naturally sunny or naturally morose. Her disposition would evolve over the course of her life, depending on how experience wired her brain, but the range of this evolution would have limits. She might grow from high strung to moderately tempered, but her personality would probably not flip from one extreme to another. And once that basic home state was established, her moods would oscillate around that mean. She might win the lottery and be delighted for a few weeks, but after a time she would return to that home state and her life would be no happier than if she’d never won it. On the other hand, she might lose a husband or a friend, but she would, after some period of grief and agony, return to that home state.
Amy was worried. Erica had some dangerous fire inside. Even early on, it was clear that Erica’s moods oscillated more wildly than most. She seemed to startle intensely when something unexpected happened (people who startle easily experience more anxiety and dread through life). Some researchers distinguish between dandelion children and orchid children. Dandelion kids are more even-tempered and hardier. They’ll do pretty well wherever you put them. Orchid children are more variable. They can bloom spectacularly in the right setting or wither pitifully in the wrong one. Erica was an orchid, perched dangerously between success and catastrophe.
As Amy sat there, wondering blankly about Erica’s future, she was experiencing that pervasive depth of worry that the parents of adolescents all know. She herself had been one of those kids who became overly defensive at the first sign of perceived frustration, who misinterpret normal situations as menacing ones, who perceive anger when it isn’t there, feel slights that aren’t intended, who are victim to an imagined inner world, which is more dangerous than the outer world they actually inhabit.
People who live with that sort of chronic stress suffer cell loss in their hippocampus, and with it loss of memory, especially the memory of good things that have happened to them. Their immune systems weaken. They have fewer minerals in their bones. They accumulate body fat more easily, especially around the middle. They live with long-term debilitating deficits. A study of engineers who worked up to ninety hours a week for six months on an extremely stressful project had higher levels of cortisol and epinephrin
e, two chemicals associated with stress, for up to eighteen months later, even though all of them had taken four- to five-week vacations after the project was over. The effects of stress can be long lasting and corrosive.
That night, a full thirty hours after the tennis meltdown, Amy still wasn’t sure how much she could ease her daughter’s stress and shame. So she just sat there with her hand on Erica’s back, and rather pitifully helped her cope. After about fifteen minutes, they were both a little restless, and they got up and started making dinner. Erica made a salad. Amy got the pasta out from the pantry. She and Erica were doing something together. They were doing something that calmed their minds and restored their equilibrium. Somehow, Erica was seeing the world calmly again. At one point while she was slicing tomatoes, Erica looked up and asked her, “Why am I a person I can’t control?”
This was actually quite an important question. Research by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman found that self-control is twice as important as IQ in predicting high-school performance, school attendance, and final grades. Other researchers disagree that self-control trumps IQ, but there is no question self-control is one of the essential ingredients of a fulfilling life.
“It feels like it wasn’t even me,” Erica told her mother during one of their conversations about the event. “It was like it was some strange angry person who had hijacked my body. I don’t understand where this person came from or what she was thinking. I’m afraid she’s going to come back again and do something terrible.”
The Famous Marshmallow
Around 1970 Walter Mischel, then at Stanford and now at Columbia, launched one of the most famous and delightful experiments in modern psychology. He sat a series of four-year-olds in a room and put a marshmallow on the table. He told them they could eat the marshmallow right away, but that he was going to go away and if they waited until he returned he would give them two marshmallows. In the videos of the experiment you can see Mischel leave the room, and then the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes, and banging their heads on the table, trying not to eat the marshmallow on the table in front of them. One day, Mischel used an Oreo instead of a marshmallow. A kid picked up the cookie, slyly ate the creamy filling and carefully put it back in its place. (That kid is probably now a U.S. senator.)
But the significant thing is this: the kids who could wait several minutes subsequently did much better in school and had fewer behavioral problems than the kids who could wait only a few minutes. They had better social skills in middle school. The kids who could wait a full fifteen minutes had, thirteen years later, SAT scores that were 210 points higher than the kids who could wait only thirty seconds. (The marshmallow test turned out to be a better predictor of SAT scores than the IQ tests given to four-year-olds.) Twenty years later, they had much higher college-completion rates, and thirty years later, they had much higher incomes. The kids who could not wait at all had much higher incarceration rates. They were much more likely to suffer from drug- and alcohol-addiction problems.
The test presented kids with a conflict between short-term impulse and long-term reward. The marshmallow test measured whether kids had learned strategies to control their impulses. The ones who learned to do that did well in school and life. Those that hadn’t found school endlessly frustrating.
The kids who possessed these impulse-control abilities had usually grown up in organized homes. In their upbringing, actions had led to predictable consequences. They possessed a certain level of self-confidence, the assumption that they could succeed at what they set out to do. Kids who could not resist the marshmallows often came from disorganized homes. They were less likely to see the link between actions and consequences and less likely to have learned strategies to help them master immediate temptations.
But the crucial finding concerned the nature of the strategies that worked. The kids who did poorly directed their attention right at the marshmallow. They thought if they looked right at it they could somehow master their temptation to eat it. The ones who could wait distracted themselves from the marshmallow. They pretended it wasn’t real, it wasn’t there, or it wasn’t really a marshmallow. They had techniques to adjust their attention.
In later experiments, Mischel told the children to put a mental frame around the marshmallow—to imagine that what they were seeing was a picture of a marshmallow. These children could wait on average three times longer than the children who did not imagine a picture. Children who were told to imagine the marshmallow was a fluffy cloud could also wait much longer. By using their imagination, they encoded their perceptions of the marshmallow differently. They distanced themselves from it and triggered different, less-impulsive models in their heads. The children who could control their impulses triggered cool ways of perceiving the marshmallow. The children who could not triggered hot ways: they could see it only as the delicious temptation it really was. Once those in the latter group engaged these hot networks in their brain, it was all over. There was no way they were not going to pop the marshmallow into their mouths.
The implication of the marshmallow experiment is that self-control is not really about iron willpower mastering the hidden passions. The conscious mind simply lacks the strength and awareness to directly control unconscious processes. Instead, it’s about triggering. At any moment there are many different operations running or capable of running at an unconscious level. People with self-control and self-discipline develop habits and strategies that trigger the unconscious processes that enable them to perceive the world in productive and far-seeing ways.
Character Reconsidered
Human decision making has three basic steps. First, we perceive a situation. Second, we use the power of reason to calculate whether taking this or that action is in our long-term interest. Third, we use the power of will to execute our decision. Over the centuries, different theories of character have emerged, and along with them, different ways of instilling character in the young. In the nineteenth century, most character-building models focused on Step 3 of the decision-making process—willpower. Victorian moralists had an almost hydraulic conception of proper behavior. The passions are a wild torrent and upstanding people use the iron force of will to dam it, repress it, and control it.
In the twentieth century, most character-building models focused on Step 2 of the decision-making process—the use of reason to calculate interests. Twentieth-century moralists emphasized consciousness-raising techniques to remind people of the long-term risks of bad behavior. They reminded people that unsafe sex leads to disease, unwanted pregnancy, and other bad outcomes. Smoking can lead to cancer. Adultery destroys families and lying destroys trust. The assumption was that, once you reminded people of the foolishness of their behavior, they would be motivated to stop.
Both reason and will are obviously important in making moral decisions and exercising self-control. But neither of these character models has proven very effective. You can tell people not to eat the French fry. You can give them pamphlets about the risks of obesity. You can deliver sermons urging them to exercise self-control and not eat the fry. And in their nonhungry state, most people will vow not to eat it. But when their hungry self rises, their well-intentioned self fades, and they eat the French fry. Most diets fail because the conscious forces of reason and will are simply not powerful enough to consistently subdue unconscious urges.
And if that is true of eating a fry, it is also true of more consequential things. Preachers issue jeremiads against the evils of adultery, but this seems to have no effect on the number of people in the flock who commit the act—or on the number of preachers themselves who do it. Thousands of books have been written about the sin of greed, but every few years greed runs self-destructively rampant. There is near-universal agreement that spending on material things doesn’t produce joy and fulfillment, and yet millions of people run up huge credit-card debt. Everyone knows killing is wrong, and yet genocide happens. Terrorists convince themselves it is righteous to murder the innocent.
For decades people have tried to give drug users information about the dangers of addiction; teenagers, information on the risks involved in unprotected sex; students, about the negative consequences of dropping out of school. And yet the research is clear: Information programs alone are not very effective in changing behavior. For example, a 2001 survey of over three hundred sex-education programs found that, in general, these programs had no effect on sexual behavior or contraceptive use. Classroom teaching or seminar–consciousness raising has little direct effect on unconscious impulses. Sermons don’t help either.
The evidence suggests reason and will are like muscles, and not particularly powerful muscles. In some cases and in the right circumstances, they can resist temptation and control the impulses. But in many cases they are simply too weak to impose self-discipline by themselves. In many cases self-delusion takes control.
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century character-building models were limited because they shared one assumption: that Step 1 in the decision-making process—the act of perception—is a relatively simple matter of taking in a scene. The real action involved the calculation about what to do and the willpower necessary to actually do it.
But, as should be clear by now, that’s wrong. The first step is actually the most important one. Perceiving isn’t just a transparent way of taking in. It is a thinking and skillful process. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes, they are linked and basically simultaneous. The research of the past thirty years suggests that some people have taught themselves to perceive more skillfully than others. The person with good character has taught herself, or been taught by those around her, to see situations in the right way. When she sees something in the right way, she’s rigged the game. She’s triggered a whole network of unconscious judgments and responses in her mind, biasing her to act in a certain manner. Once the game has been rigged, then reason and will have a much easier time. They will be up to the task of guiding proper behavior.
