School is the ultimate
marshmallow test. I’m sure you all
remember Walter Mischel’s marshmallow test in which an experimenter gives a
child one marshmallow and leaves the room saying that the child will get two
marshmallows if he or she doesn’t eat the marshmallow while the experimenter is
out. Resisting the temptation to eat one
marshmallow is taken as a measure of self-control.
School requires doing lots of
things in the short-term that are less fun than what you could be doing, but
lead to better long-term outcomes.
Studying for an exam is less fun than watching YouTube videos or playing
video games. But, people who get a
college education typically make more money and have more satisfying careers
than those whose education stops at high school.
A paper by David Yeager, Marlone
Henderson, David Paunesku, Gregory Walton, Sidney D’Mello, Brian Spitzer, and
Angela Duckworth in the October, 2014 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explored
motivations that would focus students on schoolwork rather than tempting
alternatives.
These researchers distinguish
between two kinds of motivations:
self-interested and self-transcendent.
Almost every student has a self-interested motive for education. They want to learn to make themselves smarter
or to help them get a job. Only a subset
of students, though, has a self-transcendent motive in which they also want
their education to allow them to help make the broader world a better place and
to help others. The question is whether
this added “purpose” would influence students’ motivation to study.
In a field study, over 1,000
high-school seniors from a low SES background were studied. These students were all planning to go to
college the following fall. The
participants were given questionnaires to assess whether they had a
self-transcendent motive for their education, or just a self-interested
motive. They were also asked about other
motivations for going to college like extrinsic motivations such as being able
to move out of their parents house or to make new friends. Participants filled out a self-control
measure that examined their perceptions of how well they control their
behavior. They participated in a task in
which they had the chance to either do math problems (which they were told
would strengthen their basic skills and help them academically) or to do
something tempting like watch videos or play a video game. Finally, the experimenters measured how many
of these students were enrolled in college the next fall.
Having a transcendent purpose for
their learning predicted participants’ scores on the self-control
measures. It also predicted the
likelihood that students would do math problems rather than watch videos or
play a game. Finally, the more that
students had a purpose, the more likely they were to be enrolled in college in
the Fall.
Of course, it is hard to draw
strong conclusions just based on a correlational field study like this. In a second study, ninth-grade students were
given an exercise to get them to think about having a broader purpose to their
education. This exercise had them write
about how their education in high school would allow them to help others and
make the world a better place. A control
group wrote about differences between middle school and high school. The researchers then measured the students’
grades in science and math classes at the end of the term. The students who did the purpose intervention
had higher grades at the end of the term than those who did the control manipulation. This manipulation was most effective for the
students with the lowest GPA before the intervention was done.
Two other studies used college
students. These studies encouraged
participants to develop a purpose for their education. One study demonstrated that participants
spent more time on study questions if they were told to think about the
transcendent purpose for their education than if they were not. A second study found that students were
better able to resist tempting alternatives to work when they thought about the
transcendent purpose for their education than when they did not.
What does all of this mean?
Success in school requires
pushing off many enjoyable moments for the future in order to focus on
learning. Certainly, many learning
activities are enjoyable. But, learning new
skills and facts also requires a lot of tedious and frustrating
activities. These desirable difficulties
are a part of the learning process. To
stay motivated to engage in these tasks for the long-term, it is crucial to
have a broader purpose for education. It
is not enough just to want a job or to make money. It is also important to want to do things for
others and to make the world a better place.
As humans, we find these transcendent goals highly motivating.
And, of course, this works for
things beyond school. Work is another
aspect of life that can often be tedious and frustrating. People who succeed in the workplace are also
those people who see their work as having a higher calling to help others and
to improve the world.