Walter Mischel

And crucially, you have to physically distance yourself from the temptation during that 10-minute window.

This protocol ties directly into the dual-system model of the brain proposed by psychologist Walter Mischel.

He's a researcher famous for the original Stanford marshmallow test with children.

Oh, right.

I really, really, really, uh, enjoyed that.

And, um, and I was, it was great to see that you, that you were kind of, um, taking the principles and replicating Walter Mischel's delayed gratification marshmallow test and so on.

And actually, I was really reflecting on gigs as you were presenting that and as I was thinking about it, because I went to one of the Oasis gigs, I think the last one at Wembley last September, and I'd had the tickets for, I mean, just months.

It was probably more than a year beforehand.

The list goes on.

Anders Ericsson, Walter Mischel.

And when I think about anything I've done, you know, it really is that expression of standing on the shoulders of giants.

You know, for me, my mentors have been everything.

I see.

And actually, when I did this, 'cause I worked with Walter Mischel, and I replicated this experiment, fun fact, marshmallows were not the most popular.

It was Oreos, but I digress.

[laughs]

Right.

So for anyone who somehow missed the premise, the original concept was pioneered by a psychologist named Walter Mischel back in the late '60s and early '70s at Stanford.

The setup is deceptively simple, really.

Walk us through it.

Now, in the history, many researchers assumed that behavior is not situation specific.

And when some researchers like Walter Mischel showed many behaviors are situation specific, They strictly opposed to it and argued that Michel was wrong and that there was an error and searched for reasons why this is an error.

Now, my conclusions after the research is that it doesn't make sense to say that social behavior is situation-specific in general or social behavior is cross-situationally consistent In general, that was the main issue of the situation specificity debate after 1968, when Michel published his book on personality and assessment.

Under some circumstances, social behavior is situation specific.

Like your traits, you have what you have and that's who you are and it's gonna control your behavior and you kind of are who you are.

And Walter Mischel, I think it was in the 60s, I believe, very, very famous paper that started kind of a shitstorm in the discipline saying that, well, when you actually look at the research of how personality impacts behavior, it kind of sucks.

It's only really responsible for about 30% of the variance in behavior, which means 30% of behavior is predicted by personality.

And so we go, then what is the other 70% made up of? And what we found is it's the power of the situation.