and when Nancy gave me just one degree of freedom and said I could talk about

what I wanted to I decided not to talk about grit because nobody ever

asks me to come talk about

self control but indeed by the grant numbers and by the number people our

lab works more

on self control than it does on grit so

the slides are yes the slides are there

okay great so I wanna say that I made this quote up

in deference to a former APS President Walter Mischel I believe I emailed him one

day and I said

Walter can I say that you said that the most important scientific discovery

about self control

in that it can be taught and he wrote back sure

I think this is a relatively accurate statement of what Walter does believe

I'm of course the popular public knows now his a

his marshmallow test which has been on the Colbert report no fewer than three times

if you add it all up and I think that

that in some ways the predictive power of the marshmallow test

belies in a sense the most important insight from Walters decades

of research which is that

in observing these young children wait for two marshmallows

instead of one they employed an array

of ingenious strategies in order to delay longer

and Walter's strong belief was that those strategies could be

directly taught and practiced

in my own work on self-control I I beg borrow steal

I collaborate with whomever I can and about four years ago I met

the incomparable James Gross and I'm guessing that about half of you are

currently writing a paper with him

even at this moment because

because eventually everybody works with James Gross but what really struck me about him

was that he was able to bring together so many disparate findings

in self regulation now many of you know that James primarily works on grownups

and he primarily works on a emotion regulation

but the model that he's developed in that realm I think has implications for

unifying

more broadly what we would consider self-regulation or self control

the process model says that impulses develop

so they began perhaps quite weak and then

gather strength and it is by intervening

in the process of impulse generation earlier

rather than later then we can be really smart about how to exercise self control

in our lives so I'll just take you through from situation selection

which is the earliest stage at which you can intervene all the way through to

response modulation

what I mean and let me illustrate with some data that James in our lab

collected recently from a local high school where we presented to

students from ninth through twelfth grade a variety of examples

of each of the 5 stages in the process model which I'll described to you

one by one but I'll just say that when high school students read examples of

modifying their situation verses

using attention in a strategic way verses

cognitively changing the way they think about things the striking finding is that

students tell us that to choose your situation

or change your situation in ways that are very intentional

that's actually probably going to be much more effective than any of the later

cognitive strategies so this indeed is the

prediction of the process model that intervening earlier should be better

than interviewing later

I will say that we would have loved for the same students to tell us that

each of the subsequent cognitive strategies would just be a little bit

less effective

but data never cooperate exactly so I think the gist of it is that the

students have an intuition that intervening early

is better than intervening later now the first

thing that one can do according to James and the process model

is to choose your situation to choose where to be

what what do I mean by that for example

all the undergraduates who work in my lab tak an oath

that says that they will sit at the front

of the classroom the first three rows specifically

and I always get the same question oh do you mean in your class

no I don't mean in my class I mean in all of your classes

do you mean in the psychology classes

no I mean every single lecture that you attend course they want an explanation for this

and the explanation is that when I was in college

taking a class on ancient Chinese bronzes

I could do nothing more than just to sit in the front of the class to prevent

myself from

falling asleep for the entire lecture sitting in the front of the class

is putting myself in a situation where social norms and pure shame

would be working to my advantage to keep my attention on what I needed to do as

opposed to something I'd rather be doing napping

you know reading you know anything else verses the

the sort of the you know the nosebleed section so you can do things like

choose your physical situation you can also choose to some extent your social situation

recently we did a focus group of tenth and fifth-graders

at a school in New York City a tough neighborhood schools were 100 percent

free and reduced-price lunch

and I listened to a tenth-grader sagely

advised the fifth-grader if I only knew when I was your

age what I know now I would have picked my friends differently

because I got into the wrong crowd and you never can tell

yourself how much your friends are really going to influence you

so there's selecting your physical situation to advantage

going to the library instead of studying in a noisy house

choosing to sit at the front of the class verses the back to class

and you can choose your social situation to some extent

we think that these are intuitive to students who for example in the same

dataset that I mentioned to you before would

when asked about you know what tell us about self-control in your own life

and tell us a story about you had you know something that you had to

resist as a temptation what you did

I'll just read two verbatim suggestions of students

who in this open-ended prompt gave us things that we classified as being situation

selection so I would go to the library

as being in a quiet and controlled environment would make me focus

I would lock myself in a room without my phone

so that it does not become a distraction now

many students do not have the liberty

or the logistical possibility of changing

where they are and so we think that it's also important that they learned to

modify their situation

and that is to say once choosing where you are

or having it foisted upon you you can certainly change physical aspects of the situation

now Brian Wansink at Cornell University has a large number studies

that have shown that physical cues like is the glass a tall glass or short class

is the soup bowl a big bowl or small bowl

can dramatically influence eating behavior

and this is an example we think of situation modification if it's not

Brian Wansink determining the size of your soup bowl

but you know determining the size of your soup bowl so we feel like this

insight that physical cues matter can be harnessed by the individual to say

I'm going to keep the cookies in my house in a cookie jar

I can't see through unlike the cookie jar in my house

which like most cookie jars is clear and tempts me every time I walk by

in terms of students and academic success which is really where my heart is

there is the simple modification

of closing the laptop while you're sitting in lecture

on the left you have the typical scene of students with their laptops

open you know on ebay

checking their email accounts

you know I told my husband that this was generally true of professors who are

lecturing in large classes but not

not in my class where everybody was really just taking notes

and paying rapt attention to me so he

went to my class and sat in the back row and took a picture

of my class and then pointed out to me that one

intrepid student was actually watching a full-length feature

film during the hour and twenty-minute lecture which I thought was

particularly humiliating

I don't know for the student or for me but anyway it wasn't good so

you know minor this is of course only if you as a student have a conflict

you both wanna go onto Instagram and listen to doctor Duckworth tell you

what's on the final exam

and if you feel that listening to what's going to be on the final exam is

in the long run probably a better use of your time and yet you're pulled

by Instagram that's classic self-control conflict and this minor situational

adjustment can actually just make it that much easier

here are some verbatim suggestions of high school students quote I would shut

off my phone and put it under my pillow so I wouldn't be tempted

by to touch it quote I would ask my mom to take away my phone and other

distractions to make sure I can get it done

on time now I won't play this clip I'll just

you know fast forward but I'll just say that and we've been very inspired by

the behavior change work of folks like Carol Dweck and her

kind of extended family her progeny folks like Greg Walton and David Yeager

who have shown that in very carefully crafted brief

online interventions you can have you know reasonably large effects

on on behavior change so so we picked up a bunch of tips from them and we

we took the Brian Wansink Research and we created an intervention we

taught kids

how to modify their situations and I'll try to skip through the actual video we

tried to make it cool

and fun and in a one-week longitudinal field study with high school students

at baseline students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions

they learned about situation modification they learned about a later

strategy

response modulation just kinda good old-fashioned willpower don't do it

and then finally a no treatment control condition

now at baseline in addition to getting

these you know treatment assignments students

set an academic goal which they then one week later were asked to report on

and in this data you can see that self-reported goal accomplishment was

higher in the situation modification group

than either of the two comparison groups we replicated this with a large sample

of college students again those who were

given information about how they can use situation modification to meet their

academic goals

did better in doing so than two comparisons

and importantly we found what we hypothesized which is partial mediation

well we would have loved full mediation but but mediation to some extent by

self-reported temptation during that

week in other words students who learned to

turn off their cellphones put away their laptops when they're trying to read a

book et cetera

felt fewer feelings

of temptation towards those other objects and that at least partially

explained

the effect of the intervention on goal accomplishment now I should say a word

about these latter three strategies but I'll be more brief because

James and I don't believe that they're as effective as these you know earlier

upstream situational strategies

so first there is selectively attending looking at things in

in ways that you think will make it easier to do the right thing

and harder to do the wrong one so for example

at the KIPP charter schools and there are many of them in New York but they're now

all over the country

they have recognized from fairly early in their

in their establishment of these schools probably ten or fifteen years ago

they recognized that you know for sure it's hard to pay attention to your

teacher it's hard to just look at your teacher when you'd rather look elsewhere

but they also recognize that by looking at your teacher

and I'll give you an example this is a KIPP classroom

they're all looking at the teacher at KIPP they call tracking

it's tracking the teacher

that by accomplishing that you then make it easier to do what's even harder

which is to truly

you know listen and encode and engage with the academic material

in other words you can look out the window if you want to and then it's

going to be darn near impossible

to pay attention at all or to process the the history lesson

or you can track the speaker which they do it KIPP schools

and that facilitates you know downstream regulation of the things that you need to do

so selectively attending what does it look like when high school students