In this brilliant book, Walter Mischel surveys the current state of knowledge on mastery of self control. It is a profoundly optimistic book that argues that the ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of future rewards is an acquirable cognitive skill.
This is hardly an obvious conclusion: the marshmallow test itself is a now famous experiment which presented pre-schoolers with a choice between a single marshmallow on demand, or two marshmallows if they could delay eating the first one for 20 minutes.
READ REMARKS....The test turned out to correlate with SAT scores, social and cognitive functioning, and sense of self worth.
