Self-Control In Kids Predicts Future Success

SpuriousLogic writes "A new study suggests that a child's future success depends on the amount of self-control they exhibit. From the article: 'The international team of researchers looked at 1,037 children in New Zealand born in the early 1970s, observing their levels of self-control at ages 3 and 5. At ages 5, 7, 9 and 11, the team used parent, teacher and the children's own feedback to measure such factors as impulsive aggression, hyperactivity, lack of persistence and inattention. At age 32, they used physical exams, blood tests, records searches and personal interviews of 96% of the original participants to determine how healthy, wealthy and law-abiding the subjects had turned out to be. The results were startling. In the fifth of children with the least self-control, 27% had multiple health problems. Compare that with the fifth of kids with the most self-control — at just 11%. Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth. And 43% of the bottom fifth had been convicted of a crime, far outstripping the top fifth's 13% rate.'"

Comments

First post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Self control? What's that?

Re:First post!

[supertrinko]

If ever a first post should be modded funny...

Re:First post!

[Anonymous Coward]

not enough candy!

Re:First post!

[Jalfro]

Actually a very perceptive question. How do they define self control? How do they measure it? Without knowing this, the story is meaningless.

Causation is not Correlia

[ShakaUVM]

"Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth."

Well, that may very well be the problem right there. Ditto for the fact that kids with low self control probably came from low-income families, too.

That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal experience.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[hedwards]

That's what I was thinking. Kids with self control problems in school often come from backgrounds where sitting still and having self control isn't valued. But beyond that, of course if they're still having trouble with self control as adults their income is going to suffer, people who can't or won't fit the business world are going to be making less money whether or not it's warranted. Businesses just aren't in the practice of hiring people they don't think fit their business.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? I think it's very clear from the research: kids with little self control clearly caused themselves to grow up in a single-parent home. I mean, how else could you possibly interpret that data?

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[aliquis]

I haven't RTFA or RTFFP.

Anyway, what I wonder in this case is how much is genetics and how much is environment. Though they don't say anything about anything of it, just how they act as kids.

But for instance genetics may not decide whatever your parents separate or not (or maybe it does if they are more "explosive" characters themselves .. And you get that), but eventually that may affect how you interact with other persons.

Personally I feel pretty fucked up now at the age of 31. I've had a somewhat weird life as kid but I didn't felt weird or remotely as bad back when I was say 20.

Way too little real interaction with other people in my life, work/job/whatever, love, death, sadness make you behave weird. It could had changed and some people could probably had helped but it kinda scares them away because what are they supposed to see in someone such as myself?

Crap :(

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[agm]

"Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth."

Well, that may very well be the problem right there.

It says the study subjects offspring were raised in single parent homes, not that the study subjects themselves were raised in a single parent home.

It also says an annual income of below $15000. Given this was in New Zealand, I doubt very much this is true. $15,000 NZD is not much at all. Perhaps they converted it to some other currency?

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[b4upoo]

I suppose that the very moment a punch is about to strike would be a lousy time to suffer loss of concentration.
                    I suspect that not only do the low testing subjects suffer from social and psychological problems but many probably carry very hard to diagnose medical problems as well. And being that they may reflect their parents status it is likely that the money needed for good medical care was never available to them from birth onward. It is just another proof that socialized medicine is not optional but something that must happen to improve our society.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who had martial arts forced on him as a kid -- because apparently I couldn't be allowed to make my own decisions -- let me say that I hated it. Even at a very young age I realized that boxing was a far more practical and effective discipline.

About the only thing I liked about it was some of the other kids I met. Amusingly, it was a diminutive 14 y/o girl who was the fiercest and most naturally skilled fighter I've met to this day. Kids who didn't know her were terrified, and the adults were all humble towards her (more like awed, literally). Sadly she fell victim to some debilitating disease and died not long after. It felt like Jesus had died... utterly incomprehensible (if you believe in that mystic crap, that is).

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[noidentity]

Never mind that, the things they call success are those things that self-control plays a central role in: following the law, and being financially and healthfully well-off. Up next, they found that kids who breathed oxygen had a much higher survival rate into adulthood than kids who breathed argon.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

"Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth."

Well, that may very well be the problem right there.

It says the study subjects offspring were raised in single parent homes, not that the study subjects themselves were raised in a single parent home.

It also says an annual income of below $15000. Given this was in New Zealand, I doubt very much this is true. $15,000 NZD is not much at all. Perhaps they converted it to some other currency?

That probably means they're on the dole.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Kell Bengal]

I know exactly how you feel. You grow up a product of your environment and you don't really look back until you're 30 and realise what could have been, if things had been different. I certainly grew up in the shadow of potential I was supposed to be meeting, even when I wasn't encouraged at home and being bullied mercilessly. I think it's insane how we expect children to learn and study at school and then send them home to parents who tell them that hard work is dumb. Even with the best genetics in the world, those kids are going to have it tough later in life.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

I had plenty of self control and restraint as a kid. I'm still a failure by even most lenient standards. 33, unemployed for most of my life and leaving home for only two years.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Joe Tie.]

I think the most annoying part is having to then watch other people deal with the same stuff that messed you up. I mean, I have sympathy. But watching people struggle with far less severe deaths when they're in their late 20s as I did when I was five? It's hard to not wonder if these faces are the same as the kids on the playground who wound up shunning me because they felt like death was contagious.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary wasn't too clear, but the kids with self control were far more likely to be single parents (they were kids in the 70s) vs those with high levels of self control.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[tsm_sf]

Even at a very young age I realized that boxing was a far more practical and effective discipline.

It seems to me that the "effectiveness" of any martial art has everything to do with the particular instructor's point of view. Some emphasize the "martial" more than the "art", and vice versa. The most striking example of this for me was a fencing class I took years ago where the instructor devoted half of each class to what was basically dirty street fighting with a rapier. Useless in a practical sense, and entirely contrary to the spirit of the sport, but it was exactly as much fun as it sounds.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[ShakaUVM]

>>As someone who had martial arts forced on him as a kid

Well, that's the problem. Kids that don't want to be in martial arts are often the worst students in the class, anyway, and can disrupt the entire atmosphere of a school.

You can't punish them by sitting out of a class, because, well, they don't want to be there, and their parents are just using martial arts as an afterschool babysitting program.

That said, for kids that do want to be there, but have behavioral or attention problems, martial arts is great. It's amazing how much hyperactivity vanishes when you make them duck walk around the mat a few times.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[dogmatixpsych]

If you read the research article (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108) - [note: open access, so you can download the pdf or read the full text online] - the researchers state the annual income was 20,000 NZD, which is roughly 15,000 USD ("For example, by adulthood, the highest and lowest fifths of the population on measured childhood self- control had respective rates of multiple health problems of 11% vs. 27%, rates of polysubstance dependence of 3% vs. 10%, rates of annual income under NZ $20,000 of 10% vs. 32%, rates of offspring reared in single-parent households of 26% vs. 58%, and crime conviction rates of 13% vs. 43%.") So yes, it was converted for an American audience.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[dogmatixpsych]

The researchers controlled for childhood income (socioeconomic status {SES}) and IQ. The low self control kids were more likely than high self control kids to become single parents (58% versus 26%) and have very low income (32% versus 10%). Yes, the low self control kids were more likely to be brought up in low SES homes and were more likely to have lower IQs but the researchers controlled for that in all analyses: "Dunedin study children with greater self-control were more likely to have been brought up in socioeconomically advantaged families (r = 0.25, P
Anyway, the regression coefficients for the study are generally quite modest, but it's an interesting finding (one that's been replicated many times, actually). I would like to have seen better statistical analyses though (some multi-level modeling would have been more elegant).

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[demonlapin]

socialized medicine is not optional

It's New Zealand. They already have that. Try again. Here's a better answer for you:

Some people are just bad protoplasm. Ask a doctor or nurse (or anyone else who sees everyone in society, from top to bottom - but I can't think of another field that does) about it. If your genes are bad, nothing about you will work right: you'll be dumb, you'll be ugly, you'll be unhealthy. By contrast, good looks, good health, and good intelligence tend to go together, because people who have good genetics will express all the right genes at the right time during development and end up symmetrical and well-wired (barring some freak accident).

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[lightspeedius]

At 30 things CAN be different.

Unless of course you've got a mortgage... which maybe the point of mortgages.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Bureaucromancer]

Let me just say, as a fencer, that that sounds truly awesome. Albeit a complete waste of time and effort, but still awesome.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the kids themselves they are talking about, but rather their offspring. The offspring of kids with low self-control were more likely to grow up in single-parent homes. This is not such an obvious statement as you make it out to be.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Hognoxious]

I don't know what Sibelius has to do with it.

But I'd have thought that if there is causation, a correlation is quite likely to follow. Or is Ohm's law just a coincidence?

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[ColdWetDog]

If your genes are bad, nothing about you will work right: you'll be dumb, you'll be ugly, you'll be unhealthy. By contrast, good looks, good health, and good intelligence tend to go together, because people who have good genetics will express all the right genes at the right time during development and end up symmetrical and well-wired (barring some freak accident).

Back to Biology 101 for you. Not even close. Health and intelligence are not genetically linked (Stephen Hawkings, anyone?). Attractiveness and intelligence are not genetically linked (Paris Hilton for the win).

Yes, there are unfortunate people with 'piss poor protoplasm' (the technical term). These people have a much harder time being 'successful' because they're often sick or disabled. However, I can think of a number of individuals with chronically poor health who have managed to make enormous contributions to society. Furthermore, there are many perfectly healthy, perfectly attractive, perfectly stupid people running amok in the world, Sarah Palin being the perfect example. There are many, many extremely intelligent people whose physical attributes would never raise the pulse of bystanders. And yes, if you're attractive AND intelligent you have some advantages that most people don't have but that has nothing to do with genetic linkages to the two traits.

Stop reading Playboy. It's messing up your mind.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Sulphur]

Doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal experience.

Karate means never having to say you are sorry.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[SplashMyBandit]

Average income is a poor measure (brought down by non-working youth, elderly and unemployed). Median income is better, and is around $NZ 38 k IIRC (disclaimer: I'm from New Zealand). If we get selective and choose "median income of the working population" I think it goes up to around $NZ 45 k. So the figure you get depends on whether you take median or mean, and which population you use for your sample (make sure when doing comparisons with other countries that you are using the same 'statistics', or the comparison becomes less accurate).

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[arivanov]

The data is right, the conclusion is wrong.

The data clearly shows that US and UK schools fail miserably in educating the potential top 5% percentile of students (ditto for bottom 5%). The best students (especially male ones) are guaranteed to be in that "lack of self control" bucket. They are bored. Anyone who had a smart boy will tell you that based on experience (girls are slightly better at faking interest).

I have seen it first hand with my 8 year old. He was assigned exactly in that bucket and had an "impossible to educate, needs psychiatric assessment" label in 2 schools. The lot - refuse to sit, lashing out, etc. Guess what, his granny taught him to read in another language with a different alphabet in 3 weeks at the age of 6. He has now managed to compensate for the 2 years when the teachers had him labelled as "impossible" and get back to his class level in English (4 years in 2) and to a level which is at least a year ahead of where he should be in math.

I really hate to think where he could have been if his teachers did not assign him to the "non-compliant, belongs to the never succeed bucket" in his last year at the nursery.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the parent. I am 29, and I begun a process to make some changes in my life. Stuff I pined over in my mid 20s as though I was helpless, I am currently changing. I got at least another 30 years to go, I'll be damned if I spend those years feeling helpless in my situation.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sorry for your circumstances, but you should not view tragedy on a sliding scale. The gravity of the cause is irrelevant if it produces the same feelings in the recipient of these unfortunate happenings. For example; If two people feel that they cannot go on with their life, and they wish to end them, arguing over who's cause is more deserving of such feelings is really pointless and does no one any good. If a person wants to kill themselves because kids tease them about being fat or being a "faggot." Or because their whole family was murdered and they saw the whole thing with their two eyes, all these are potential tragedies. We should not forsake the first two by telling them to deal with it, because the third somehow got through it. All need help, and all should receive it. You should never try to quantify circumstances. Bad is bad, and that's enough.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Aceticon]

It has more or less been known for quite a while that things like self-control are correlated with success. More specifically we're talking about things like the ability to delay self-gratification (i.e. "you can have a cookie now before dinner or a big slice of cake as desert, which do you prefer?").

[I think almost all of us know somebody that never seems to be able to save enough to go on those dream vacations he/she always wanted and yet throws away money in thrifles and things that he/she only uses for about a week.]

More widelly, this is part of the whole EQ (Emotional Quotient) theory, which also states as predictors of success other things such as being an optimist.

These things are in fact believed to be learned traits, so it wouldn't be surprising that, for example, children whose parents have self-control problems themselves ("just give a cookie to the kid so that he shuts up") will end up with low self-control.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

>>That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal >>experience.

How do you keep at it if you don't have discipline and self-control in the first place?

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[matt4077]

The sentence is talking about the kid's offspring, i. e. their kids, not the initial subjects of the study.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[gtall]

Just for the record, you do realize your argument is full of holes. You have a statistical study of...err...one. And they did a statistical study, they never said "if you have no self-control as a kneebiter, then you will become a wanker".

It is precisely because these are statistical studies that they may not apply in your particular case. It doesn't apply in any other particular case either even if the tyke had no self-control and became a wanker. However, if smoking causes cancer in X % of the cases, you might wish to consider not smoking. You might even die in your nineties after having smoked your entire adult life.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[zakeria]

Rubbish ADHD is not cured or improved buy any activity and if it is then it was not ADHD or ADD in the first place!

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[tehcyder]

That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal experience

You can only cure something that is a disease, not an excuse by middle class parents for the stupidity and poor behaviour of their spoiled offspring.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[tehcyder]

Anyway, what I wonder in this case is how much is genetics and how much is environment.

All, none, or a mixture, depending on your political preference.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[tehcyder]

At 30 things CAN be different.

Unless of course you've got a mortgage... which maybe the point of mortgages.

If you've got a mortgage, doesn't that mean that you've succeeded, at least in material terms?

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[tehcyder]

I really hate to think where he could have been if his teachers did not assign him to the "non-compliant, belongs to the never succeed bucket" in his last year at the nursery

I think you've expressed that backwards, but in any case, evaluations made at nursery are hardly a psychiatric sentence for the rest of your life, they're just part of an on-going process to identify children who are having particular problems at a particular time.

If a kid is particularly bright and is bored, that does not mean that they will present in the same way as a kid that is particularly intellectually and/or emotionally troubled, by the way.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[tehcyder]

If your genes are bad, nothing about you will work right: you'll be dumb, you'll be ugly, you'll be unhealthy. By contrast, good looks, good health, and good intelligence tend to go together, because people who have good genetics will express all the right genes at the right time during development and end up symmetrical and well-wired (barring some freak accident).

I think the slashdot readership probably disproves that little theory.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[tehcyder]

Most martial arts and boxing aren't that different. Classic western boxing doesn't involve use of the feet and legs, but that's about it. It's about hurting your opponent very quickly, and being fit enough so that you can stay on your feet while you do so.

Something like kung fu is just boxing with kicks and sticks (i.e. what you'd do in a real fight anyway).

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[tehcyder]

>>That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal >>experience.

How do you keep at it if you don't have discipline and self-control in the first place?

Because self-control and self-discipline are learned skills, like everything else.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[turkeyfeathers]

Makes sense -- who wants to stay in a home with a twitchy kid? One of the parents clearly drew the short straw and the other got to leave.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Kashgarinn]

You're reading too much into this from your own perspective.

Your perspective is that you have an intelligent, but out of control individual, you're assuming all individuals who lack self-control are the same as the individual you know, and that if only the needs of these individuals are met, everyone would be better.

The thing is.. and this is the big thing.. individuals who are just as intelligent, but do not lack self-control have more control over their lives in the future.

It's the difference between being intelligent, finding school boring and lashing out at the environment because you're bored, or being intelligent, finding school boring, but enduring that anyway and taking what you can from it.

In your case, I'd try and develop the kids self-control. Intelligence is a fine tool to cut through obstacles, but self-control is the tool to cleave mountains.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[TheRaven64]

It means that you've lost some flexibility, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have much material wealth. When I first started looking, about 18 months ago, a friend of mine in a minimum wage job was offered a mortgage (ironically, she quit that job, started her own business earning much more and became classed as a bad lending risk as a result). They were offering mortgages with a loan to value ratio of 9:10. A cheap flat here cost £50-60K, so you could have had a minimum wage job for 5 years, saved 10% of your income each year, and bought one with a mortgage. At the current interest rate, you might even be better off: I'm paying about half in interest what I was paying in rent before I bought - and living somewhere much nicer.

And, conversely, if you own a house and don't have a mortgage, you're probably doing a bit better than someone with a mortgage (although, at the moment, you still might be better off buying a second house with a mortgage, renting it out, and selling it when the market improves)

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[osgeek]

Yeah, as much as divorcing parents tell the kids, "it's not your fault." Sometimes the little shits are exactly the cause of marital misery. :)

I'll just leave this right here,

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[hedwards]

Yeah right. Around here if you weren't picked out as gifted by age 7, chances are it wasn't going to happen and that you'd be stuck in regular classes for the rest of your schooling. Likewise children who are tagged as unstable or lacking in self control tend to be treated as such and deprived of the opportunities that other students have. I think that you're vastly underestimating the effect that being seen as an outsider has.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

"if you have no self-control as a kneebiter, then you will become a wanker"

Which is basically the problem with the study: it doesn't conclude that. It concludes that having no self-control as a kneebiter correlates to becoming a wanker as an adult, but no causation is probed (I'd say, that it is caused more by deficient parentship, but we all know that trash parents relates to trash children, so no grant for that).

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[delt0r]

You grow up a product of your environment and you don't really look back until you're 30 and realize what could have been..

They could have been much much worse... You could have been born in a worse family, or in a worse country. Or you could have had mind shattering trauma earlier or worse... etc.

The thing about "imagine how awesome things would if...." fail to even acknowledge how good things *are*.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Quirkz]

I think you're right. The GP assuming that acting impulsively is a sign of intelligence. It's only one counter-example, but my own story opposes his. I was a bright kid. I was bored constantly in school. I didn't disrupt things, I just sat there being bored. Sometimes teachers would let me read a book in class, and I wasn't so bored. Others didn't like me reading, so I had to pretend to pay attention and do slightly less fun things like doodle or whatever. It's definitely not necessary to be disruptive just because you're bored.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe lack of discipline is being diagnosed as ADHD.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[mcvos]

Useless? I disagree. Fighting is not merely about proper technique. It's at least as much about having a good "feel" for the fight, pulling dirty tricks and thinking outside the box. Medieval swordfighting manuals feature quite a bit of wrestling and dirty tricks, and with good reason. Your opponent isn't always in front of you at the correct distance, on a even ground.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Have Brain Will Rent]

I don't have any argument with what you are saying but I want to add that one of the things that goes along with ADHD is a lessening of impulse control - I suppose because it is hard for your brain to keep in control if it is constantly being distracted.

So it may be that no matter what the parents do - short of trying to address the underlying cause as best as possible - they may be unable to "fix" the self-control issue. And in how many cases are the effects on life being seen by the study the result strictly of self-control alone or of ADHD?

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[the entropy]

True, however this particular sample is all people who were kids in 1970, so they're all in the same age bracket(no elderly or non-working youth). I think average income is a good measure in such a case.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[SplashMyBandit]

Average income is fine within the sample, it is a crap measure when comparing between different populations - as readers are almost certainly going to do by comparing the income vs. that of their own country or their own income. Just lettin' folks know the figures have to be treated with caution - in the reader's mind they should always be qualified/tagged with the conditions they were calculated for.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal experience.

"yeah yeah yeah, patience; when do I get to beat people up?"

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. I had so much self control as a kid I had nicknames to that regard. I was extremely successful in my early career, but since then it's been nothing but down hill. I'm now entering my 7th year of absolutely zero progress in my career, although my academic career is mediocre (which is better than nothing). The real reason some kids are successful and others aren't is their parents. I'd say it's 99% dependent upon how much time parents invest with their kids.

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[Anonymous Coward]

This study is better done, I think.

Study: Family History Of Alcoholism Raises Risk Of One-Man Show

http://www.theonion.com/articles/study-family-history-of-alcoholism-raises-risk-of,18863/

Re:Causation is not Correlia

[badkarmadayaccount]

Mountains are best cleaved with thermonuclear weapons.

Self Control In Kids ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

Self control in kids will eventually lead to self control as adults? This can predict future success ... as in success in staying out of prison.

Shocking

[2.7182]

And you know what? That kid in elementary school that was the first to try smoking? He works in a Walmart now.

Re:Shocking

[flink]

Well, the shocking thing is how early the amount of self control one has appears to be "set". Most of us have little to no awareness and certainly no control of how we are raised before we are 3, yet it appears that a major facility that determines how successful we will be for the rest of our lives is already well established by this age.

Re:Shocking

[siddesu]

Not really, in my country he runs the second-largest telecom. The second and the third to smoke are government ministers.

/ really.

Re:Shocking

[c0lo]

Those with enough self control to not eat badly all the time and to exercise regularly are healthier. Those with enough self control to apply themselves to their schoolwork before playing are more successful. I would never have guessed.

You have an answer, don't you? What do you make of it?

Re:Shocking

[aliquis]

Those with enough self control to not pull out their penis for a masturbation frenzy and/or rubbing against her as soon as they spot a chick got a better chance of dating her?! :D

(Personally I obviously have no idea. ... I'm just going on, guessing and creating my own theories. ... Plus I've never get to date a girl so I don't know which version works ;D)

Re:Shocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Bunga Bunga!

Re:Shocking

[demonlapin]

how we are raised before we are 3

I suspect that parenting has little to do with it. People are who they are, and very little that parents do will fundamentally change it. Yes, you can be a really bad parent. Yes, you can be a really great one. But the vast majority of us will be neither, and won't really change who our children are. Talk to people who have children in their 30s - and they'll tell you all about how Susie was "always like that".

Re:Shocking

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's just you having juvenile fantasies.

Re:Shocking

[TapeCutter]

I have kids in their 30's and a couple of grandkids and I think you're dead wrong. In my experience it's very rare that the apple falls far from the tree but it won't mature unless it rolls out of the tree's shadow.

Re:Shocking

[demonlapin]

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but OK. Dead wrong about what? You don't think your kids are anything like who they were when they were 5? I'm curious to know.

Re:Shocking

[mikael_j]

That was a Berlusconi reference. Try googling "bunga bunga party".

Re:Shocking

[TheRaven64]

Did your parents talk in pseudo-philosophical metaphors when you were a very small child?

Translation: Fat people have poor health

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, in other words, fat people are in poor health.

Amazing.

Shocking

[stevie.f]

Those with enough self control to not eat badly all the time and to exercise regularly are healthier. Those with enough self control to apply themselves to their schoolwork before playing are more successful. I would never have guessed.

If that were true...

[zerointeger]

Then that chef Ramsey dude wouldn't be richer then dirt. /fail

Re:If that were true...

[c0lo]

Then that chef Ramsey dude wouldn't be richer then dirt. /fail

Yeah, buddy, go ahead and, possibly, abuse everybody the way Ramsey does. Should be a behavior required for being successful - my manager seems to think so as well.
Just let aside the pesky control on yourself and, for God's sake, don't take any time to think what Ramsey actually controlled in himself to acquire his kitchen management skills; this is a too deep detail, can't be important if it is non-obvious.

Re:If that were true...

[Anonymous Coward]

Richer than dirt? Isn't the idiom 'poorer than dirt'?

Re:If that were true...

[FrootLoops]

I've always read Ramsay as being remarkably self-controlled in his own way. He only screams at people who make mistakes--he's an extreme perfectionist. He thinks it ultimately helps them to hear the truth and lets his anger out at them simultaneously. He also keeps a pretty good clamp on his emotions on some talk shows I've seen (when the host is making food with him and they're just awful in comparison), which is evidently difficult for him.

Also, the correlation is not 1. That is, a self-controlled kid could still end up in a minimum-wage job in their 40's.

Re:If that were true...

[germansausage]

Richer than dirt - not exactly raising the bar very high now are we?

Re:If that were true...

[Hognoxious]

He only screams at people who make mistakes--he's an extreme perfectionist.

Yeah, when you're reheating ready meals it's important to get it *just* right.

Re:If that were true...

[FrootLoops]

That link repeatedly misspells "lasagna", misspells "all", and speculates rampantly. My point is a random person's blog post isn't exactly the best source. A hopefully more reputable source gives Ramsay's side,

Then there was the “boil-in-the-bag” fiasco, when it was revealed that one of Ramsay’s restaurants, Foxtrot Oscar, in Chelsea, West London, used preprepared food that was heated and sold with mark-ups of up to 586 per cent. Ramsay tells me that there was pressure on him to apologise publicly. “Apologise for what?” he says, almost spluttering with indignation. “When I was working at the Gavroche all those years ago, the duck terrine wasn’t made there. It was made outside, then brought to the restaurant wrapped in plastic. This is standard practice. What on earth was the fuss about? That doesn’t make the food bad. We were doing wonderful navarins. It really annoyed me.”

It seems Ramsay doesn't see this practice as an imperfection ("We were doing wonderful navarins"). The food was also prepared specifically for Ramsay's restaurants--it's not TV dinner-style food, like your link sounds like it's implying.

Re:If that were true...

[Anonymous Coward]

> richer then dirt.

Richer THAN dirt. THAN.

We can see that you didn't pay much attention to your books as a child.

Re:If that were true...

[Hognoxious]

He'd made such a fuss about things being "freshly prepared". I suppose that means that it was fresh at the time it was prepared.

Worse, he'd criticized others for doing the same thing, the hypocritical scotch cunt.

Re:If that were true...

[FrootLoops]

Maybe; I'd have to find more information than it's worth to strongly agree or disagree. Your link and its comments certainly suggest what you said, but I don't believe their objectivity. Ramsay is easy to hate since he criticizes the "little guy" most people identify with, and so he's easy to misinterpret. I can at least imagine him yelling at someone for something quite similar to this situation (though different, at least in his mind) and his detractors latching on to the similarity and calling him a hypocrite for it all. Or, perhaps he's inconsistent, or a liar--though I have no evidence for either, and in general I give people the benefit of the doubt in the absence of strong evidence.

Re:If that were true...

[tehcyder]

Worse, he'd criticized others for doing the same thing, the hypocritical scotch cunt.

No, no, that.s Scottish. Scotch is what you drink with your porridge for breakfast.

Re:If that were true...

[Anonymous Coward]

O RLY?

TED - Marshmallow Experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html

Re:TED - Marshmallow Experiment

[c0lo]

Please mod +Informative the AC parent - well worth it.

Re:TED - Marshmallow Experiment

[badkarmadayaccount]

For the lazy.

Candy test

[lulalala]

I've heard a similar small test before. I remember it goes like this: give the kids a candy each, then tell them if they can keep it for another hour, they get to get a second one. I am sure I would keep it, since I don't like candies.

Looks familiar

[clarkn0va]

http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/08/13/1644229/Joachim-De-Posada-Talks-About-Delayed-Gratification

Re:Looks familiar

[wrencherd]

I was unaware of the previous link, but was thinking the same thing:

The Tiger Mom and this study seem to be measuring/preaching whether children are taught to value and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment from long-term goals ("delayed gratification") rather than being taught self-control or self-discipline.

Re:Looks familiar

[Qzukk]

What is interesting to me is the contortions the kids go through while they resist. I wonder if it's possible to try that with kids strapped into an fMRI and see what exactly is going on in there that makes "wait 15 minutes" require so much physical activity.

MOD PARENT UP!

[religious freak]

Aha - beat me to it. This vid is cute as shit and pretty interesting - further supporting the theory in OP

Don't Eat the Marshmallow... Yet! (related)

[eepok]

http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html/

In this short talk from TED U, Joachim de Posada shares a landmark experiment on delayed gratification -- and how it can predict future success. With priceless video of kids trying their hardest not to eat the marshmallow.

Character

[fwarren]

Or maybe character matters?

Metabolism also linked to success

[turing_m]

I take it that a "good" metabolism is a fast metabolism, according to this study? A fast metabolism is not good to have in a famine. It's only "good" to have in our current environment of plentiful food. It would make sense that if you don't have enough self control to stockpile some food reserves (or something that can be traded for food) in preparation for such a time, your body had better do it for you by making you a lazy fatass.

Re:Metabolism also linked to success

[corbettw]

I call bullshit. Someone with a fast metabolism is going to have a lot easier time chasing down prey (and running from predators) than someone who takes two days to digest a single Twinkie.

Re:Metabolism also linked to success

[orphiuchus]

I call bullshit. Someone with a fast metabolism is going to have a lot easier time chasing down prey (and running from predators) than someone who takes two days to digest a single Twinkie.

Then why are there so many of us with famine-ready metabolisms walking around?

By the way, I just love eating 1700 calories a day and doing an hour of p90x just to keep from gaining 5 pounds a week. Thanks famine-survival-specialist ancestors!

Re:Metabolism also linked to success

[epine]

In an expanding population, low birth age is an advantage. More generations: more tau growth multiples. In a declining population, delayed birth age is an advantage: fewer tau shrinkage multiples. Not for a long time has the western world experienced a consistently declining population due to high mortality (rather than family planning). We forget the other sweep of the pendulum.

A sunny day metabolism is not necessarily optimal for a rainy day. Clearly starvation has been a problem in the history of the human species, because it's awfully easy to tip into porker mode.

It could even be that our genetic program interprets indolence combined with high food intake as "pending baby explosion" and plans accordingly. In old school population dynamics, the best predictor of bust was boom. The same group of people lauded in this study for self-control under different conditions could be the group who starved to death waiting for social chaos to play itself out.

Unfortunately, mother nature didn't comment the code, so it can difficult to distinguish a bug from a feature.

// MoNa 332BC - coefficient of porkerhood boosted 10%
// MoNa 145BC - coefficient of porkerhood boosted another 10%

Besides, those dates make no sense. We all know that MoNa would have written that date somewhere in the six thousand millennium block, though some dim bulbs have construed the four digit date stamp in years.

Re:Metabolism also linked to success

[ikkonoishi]

You don't need a fast metabolism to tend sheep or raise crops. You want to burn as little energy as possible while waiting for them to be ready to eat.

Re:Metabolism also linked to success

[Anonymous Coward]

So says the fellow thinking cavemen had freezers to store all this food, not until the ice age there did such happen.

Re:Metabolism also linked to success

[Ol Olsoc]

You are wrong. Under food shortage conditions, the person with the fast metabolism is going to starve to death, or be generally weak because they cannot get enough food intake to support themselves. The person with the more efficient metabolism is going to be in much better shape, because they extract more of the energy form their food. Your sarcastic twinkie snipe aside, at that point, skinny people aren't going to be superior beings any more.

Surprise, children are people too

[h00manist]

The same is true for adults, or, if you may, human beings. Big surprise, I don't know why people insist on treating children as retards or something.

Re:Surprise, children are people too

[Anonymous Coward]

Cynical response: it lets the adult feel pride over their lack of parental involvement when the child's natural development causes the parent to feel like a retard.

1037 children

[Coppit]

The international team of researchers looked at 1,037 children in New Zealand born in the early 1970s, observing their levels of self-control at ages 3 and 5.

The researchers had a very strong temptation to find another 300 children to study, but being successful scientists were able to exhibit self-control.

Re:1037 children

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh crud. I just read an article that Jamaicans and Singaporeans are number 2 and number 3 as far as coolest nationalities go. I thought, "Hell, I'm both. I must be pretty cool." Then I read your post and got the joke. I'm obviously a dork. *sigh*

Re:1037 children

[Anonymous Coward]

This poster tried to resist making an 1337 joke but lacked self-control.

Re:1037 children

[tehcyder]

You've lost me, what do Jamaicans and Singaporeans have to do with being 1337?

Stupid correlation studies

[7-Vodka]

My my, that's a lot of apparent correlations there without a single causation.

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[FrootLoops]

Amina Khan, the linked article's author, seems to have lifted those correlation numbers from the study. Suggesting the study didn't deal with causation is itself fallacious unless you've read the study and found the same problem. It's really unsurprising that a journalist reports statistics poorly, but saying the study itself is bad because of that is just cynically wrong.

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[artor3]

I don't get why so many people on Slashdot like to harp on this. How exactly do you expect them to prove causation in a sociological study? Correlation is all they can show, and correlation can be interesting. And since they used the word "predicts" instead of "leads to", they can't even be accused of conflating the two.

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't find the original article so I can't be sure, but I don't think you can conclude that a correlational study can't tell you anything about causation. Ok - self control, earnings etc could co-vary with something else that wasn't studied, but being convicted of a criminal offense (for example) couldn't reasonably cause you to have low self-control.

What I'm surprised at is that 43% of the "bottom 5th" and 13% of the "top fifth" were convicted criminals - doesn't that seem a bit high?

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[Anonymous Coward]

Kill yourself, aspie.

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[nomadic]

It's a lot easier to chant "correlation doesn't mean causation" than actually think critically.

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[eugene ts wong]

They harp on it, because it helps them to believe that they are superior. Other fun phrases are "liberty", "liberal", "personal freedom", "freedom of speech", and "libertarian". There are obviously more.

They don't know how to interpret data.

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[eugene ts wong]

That 43% seems a bit low to me. How do the other people without self-control manage to avoid doing wrong things? How do they manage to avoid the law?

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[Hognoxious]

It's a lot easier to chant "correlation doesn't mean causation" than actually think critically.

There's a strong correlation between saying it and getting modded up.

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[tehcyder]

That 43% seems a bit low to me. How do the other people without self-control manage to avoid doing wrong things? How do they manage to avoid the law?

Not every action resulting from a lack of self control is criminal. Most people are not psychopathic killers, their urges only held in by tight self control.

People with a lack of self control are most likely to do things like take excess sick days off work for no good (business) reason, regularly get drunker than they should or call their boss a cunt, not engage in acts of armed robbery.

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[Anonymous Coward]

Pot, I'd like you to meet kettle.

Re:Stupid correlation studies

[eugene ts wong]

How is it the pot calling the kettle black? I wasn't singling anybody out. I was pointing out that many phrases are overused.

Baffling -- where did my story submission go?

[Alaska Jack]

Could someone take a sec and explain to me how this system works? I submitted this earlier today:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1455260/EPA-Broken-CFL-Bulb-Better-read-this#comments

Now it's nowhere to be seen on the "recent" page. It just seems to have evaporated.

To make matters worse, I can't see anywhere in the FAQ where this is explained.

    - aj

Re:Baffling -- where did my story submission go?

[Hognoxious]

There's recently been an upgrade of the site. Well, the direction is still open for debate, but in an attempt to make it look more i lots of things have suddenly stopped working and/or looking weird.

Seems like taco and his gang didn't have the self control needed to actually test stuff before releasing it.

Self control == Intelligence

[Okian Warrior]

I can't comment on the study because I couldn't find a link to it in the linked article (wtf?).

One of the definitions of intelligence is the ability to put off an immediate reward for a long term benefit. Children are presented with a jelly bean and told "if you can wait until [the researcher] get back, you'll get 3 jelly beans", and then the researcher leaves.

Kids who can put off temptation the longest tend to score highest in IQ tests.

For example, smokers could give up smoking for 3 months and use the money to pay for a high-def TV. This never happens in practice, because of their inability to put off the immediate pleasure in order to get the long-term reward.

BTW, the links on Slashdot have no underlines? With no decoration, you have to mouse around the text in order to see if a link was included in the article.

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[zes]

There is a colour difference on the links though, but maybe too slim for some monitors.

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[orphiuchus]

Self control is only part of intelligence if you expand the definition to include it. In my opinion we use the word "intelligence" as too much of a blanket term encompassing all the elements of success.

The truth of the matter is that someone who processes and retains information with the bottom 20% of the population but has the self control to do the extra work required for them to get the grades and/or do good work at, whatever their profession is, is very likely to be more successful than their peers.

Most of the 4.0 students(with engineering or noble science majors) I knew in college never left their rooms on weeknights. I realized a few years ago that they weren't necessarily smarter, some of them quite frankly seemed kind of dim, what they had was work ethic and a realistic assessment of how much time they had to put in to make the grades. And that is far more important than an IQ test.

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

http://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/news/children-with-more-self-control-turn-into-healthier-and-wealthier-adults

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[Kjella]

It should be very obvious that if you make the 2x2 matrix of (Lazy, Hard-working) and (Stupid, Smart) then (Lazy, Stupid) comes out on the bottom and (Hard-working, Smart) comes out on top. But does (Hard-working, Stupid) beat (Lazy, Smart)? It would be nice to answer yes, it's obviously the PC answer that you can be whatever you want to be and so on. Answering no is more of a surrender that you're only this smart, so you'll never get further than this in life.

But the hard fact is that I think the answer is for the most part no. I know people that struggled in school and worked much harder than me but couldn't get the same grades. I see the same at work, some work much harder than me but they still don't deliver equal to me. Sometimes I deliver in two hours what they spend two days on. And some of them I think just sacrifice too much to do it. Sure if you study much harder, work much harder you'll do better. But if you turn yourself into a workaholic just to keep up with a position that's several sizes to big for you, then you're going to miss out on a lot of life.

I work 40 hours a week including lunch break and that is plenty. I work to live, not live to work. Could I have reached even further? Probably. But there's more to life than work and I'm already making a six-figure pay. I don't need to work 80 hour weeks and stretch for seven. Maybe I would if I came up with a killer idea and really wanted to run with it, but not just to climb the corporate ladder. For that my time is too valuable to me.

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that quitting smoking for a "long term" reward isn't correlated to intelligence. I actually take issue to characterizing 3 months as long term, but that's largely beside the point.

I smoke. I'm addicted. In my case, quitting has little to do with intelligence (I have a 99th percentile IQ). It's the addiction. I suspect that starting smoking may be loosely correlated to intelligence (especially these days when the dangers are undeniable), quitting is another thing altogether.

In other words, (citation needed).

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[gtall]

Yep, in grad school we could always tell the ones we'd be graduating with. Those that had grit made it, those that didn't...no matter how they flashed their intelligence...did not.

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[Securityemo]

How would you argue that it even factors into intelligence? Intelligence is the ability for abstract/complicated thought. Sure, if you have no self-control you won't be able to use it, and you need enough "cognitive inhibition" to follow a train of thought long enough to reach the level of complexity the rest of the brain is capable of - but it's not intelligence as such. I have ADD, and before beginning to take stimulant medication I always suffered from a feeling that I couldn't think "up to my envelope", and a deep-seated feeling of frustration at not being able to take in information to sate my intellectual curiosity. I couldn't keep a number in memory when doing arithmetic excercises in school, I actually had to double-check every number I wrote down at every step.

I think that it's as simple as with Asperger or Psychopathy - you just have to accept that if a person has a neurobiological difference at the "hardware level", your assumptions for being able to relate to that persons cognitive/emotional state goes out the window completely as far as that difference goes. And this isn't even a neurological difference, just a chemical difference leading to unsustained concentration and "unregulated thoughts", something everyone suffers from to a lesser degree. You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to accept.

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that intelligence for some (like me) is the ability to completely mock the whole system, refuse to really play by their rules constantly blowing off everything, only to be very successful and everyone wondering how.

I dropped out of school on the last day senior year, refused to study, partied my ass off, and without even so much as a diploma have been making 60-70K since a few years out of school. I'm 23 now.

People who try so hard appear dumb to me. I always seem to be able to blow shit off and still be smarter than the idiots and make more money than them. Call it natural insight or whatever, but I can usually just get my hands on something and do my best and people around me think I've practiced or something.

Posting AC because it's not normally accepted to say you're smart :)

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[tehcyder]

There is a colour difference on the links though, but maybe too slim for some monitors.

Yeah, blame the fucking victims. As usual.

Re:Self control == Intelligence

[tehcyder]

Sometimes I deliver in two hours what they spend two days on.

You're in an unusual job where high skill/intelligence is paramount. For most people in normal jobs, putting in the hours and grinding out results is what matters, and so on average stupid/hard-working succeeds better than intelligent/lazy.

As someone who's studied and taugh

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits.

So does "doing" musical instruments.

Any sport, for that matter.

And any activity that requires concentration and diligence.

I've studied martial arts for quite a few years and taught a little too. The benefits are no better than the above and actually playing sports that use a ball will give a kid "ball sense" - the ability to predict where it's going from looking at it.

Studying music will also give the kid the same mental preperation and more dextarity than martial arts. Martial arts will not make one better at other sports than if one didn't do them.

As far as combat skills: I worked with "jocks" who came off the street with no previous martial arts experience and beat black-belts.

The skills from martial arts are overrated and there's nothing like after several years of practice to walk into your orthopedist and finding him shopping for an airplane while you're hobbling over to his desk. And then there's the dentist for your TMJ.

I don't care how good you become (I was .very good, others will land hits on you.

Re:As someone who's studied and taugh

[ShakaUVM]

So does "doing" musical instruments.

Any sport, for that matter.

I've done sports, played instruments (the violin, which isn't especially easy), and done martial arts. While you might incidentally learn concentration and discipline from sports and music, in martial arts it is taught explicitly.

Well, your mileage will vary, of course, but my instructor in TKD would spend a significant amount of time with students cultivating their character and self-control.

>>I don't care how good you become (I was .very good, others will land hits on you.

Learn to dodge. Pain is a great teacher. =)

Re:As someone who's studied and taugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the confusion may be that you're discussing martial arts like there's no difference between the different disciplines, let alone different instructors and facilities.

Things like Kung-Fu and Tai Chi will involve much more focus and concentration than most other martial arts.

Similarly, Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), Muy Thai and Wrestling (and, to a lesser degree, Judo, Aikido and Krav Maga) have shown themselves to be very effective in actual hand-to-hand combat whereas most others haven't shown themselves to be worth much more than a deterrent to those who don't realize how ineffective they are.

So basically, the term martial arts is way too vague for the disagreement you're having. It's like arguing whether sports help you get in shape when one of you is thinking track and field and the other is thinking ping pong.

Re:As someone who's studied and taugh

[tragedy]

Well duh. People who expect otherwise are getting their ideas about martial arts from movies and TV. Might as well believe in detectives who solve a new murder every week and that you can have realistic immersive VR, but you'll die in real life if you die in the VR etc. I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who takes martial arts classes will be a better fighter than they would be without them (barring debilitating injuries). That's pretty much going to be true even if only for the daily exercise. It doesn't make them a better fighter than everyone who hasn't taken the classes just automatically. It's exactly the same as any other skill. Someone can train for years, maybe all their life, and some newbie with talent or some physical attribute that gives them an edge can come along and best them with no training or maybe just a few lessons. It's true for chess, basketball (consider a super-well trained 5' 2'' basketball player vs. someone naturally athletic and 8 feet tall who can just reach up and put the ball into the basket), tennis, racecar driving, gymnastics, all kinds of martial arts, academics,and just about everything else.

All that doesn't mean that the training is somehow worthless, just that some people are naturally better at some things than others. Usually there's a tradeoff where they're better at one thing and worse at others. Realistically though, there are people who are better at absolutely everything than some other people: faster, stronger, better reflexes, better eyesight, better balance, better memory, better learning skills, more intelligent in every way, etc. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to measure that sort of thing objectively of course. Especially if you're going to claim it's hereditary. It could just be nutrition or lack of disease, etc. Plus, despite what insane social Darwinists might think, all the superpeople might die in a plague along with 99% of humanity while a subgroup with some sort of mutation that limits their intelligence and athletic ability, but also confers immunity, survives.

In any case, the "jocks" who come off the streets and defeat black-belts may be good in a fight. Put them in a fight with a parallel version of themselves who trained in martial arts from a young age and the parallel universe version is the one I would put my money on if I gambled.

Re:As someone who's studied and taugh

[russ1337]

That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits.

So does "doing" musical instruments.

Any sport, for that matter.

And any activity that requires concentration and diligence.

I born in New Zealand in the 70's, played saxophone (badly) age 10-12, then delivered newspapers to people at 5:30am age 14-17.. does that count?

Re:As someone who's studied and taugh

[tehcyder]

actually playing sports that use a ball will give a kid "ball sense" - the ability to predict where it's going from looking at it.

i.e. straight into your face

Re:As someone who's studied and taugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Tai Chi. Same benefits and no one kicks you in the face.

Re:As someone who's studied and taugh

[NoseyNick]

So does "doing" musical instruments.

This one time... at Band Camp...

Re:As someone who's studied and taugh

[Biotech9]

try a better martial art? I studied Muay Thai for around three years and found it rewarding and fun, but ultimately body-size is such a huge factor that the skills you learn don't compensate so much. Also injuries were common and painful. Now I study BJJ and find that even with my scant 2 years of experience I can literally play with people double my weight. No amount of strength can compensate for not knowing what to do in a new realm, the realm of grappling. I've had cause to use BJJ in one fight and handily controlled a guy who was throwing punches as fast as he could. As far as combat skills: I worked with "jocks" who came off the street with no previous martial arts experience and beat black-belts. Could I hazard a guess that this is TKD or Karate?

law-abiding?

[godless dave]

How is "law-abiding" a measure of success?

Re:law-abiding?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is "law-abiding" a measure of success?

Judging from our corporate overlords, it is not.

Re:law-abiding?

[corbettw]

It means you're less likely to end up in prison. Hard to be successful (using any meaningful definition of the term) while locked up behind bars.

Domestication?

[zes]

Am I the only one thinking that all they are saying is that the animal Homo Sapien Sapien is easier to domesticarte if you do it early? Surely this is the case with most species?

Re:Sample size

[MyLongNickName]

Huh? Whut? The number of traits is irrelevant when correlating two specific traits. The only argument you can make is that there isn't a causal relationship. 1,000 is MORE than enough to show correlation, especially when the variations between groups is so high.

Old and Bad study

[gurps_npc]

Been dismissed multiple times before by real scientists. The problems with the study was: a. They determined success and defined control in the year 2000, not 1970.

Note the dates, kids from the 1970s, at kids age 3-11 measured success when the kids were 32. I.E. Math says the study ended in 2000.

No, your fate is NOT predestined by the time you are 11.

Re:Old and Bad study

[orphiuchus]

That's not what "Honors" programs in US schools have been telling us...

Re:Old and Bad study

[drb226]

Been dismissed multiple times before by real scientists.

[citation needed]

Re:Old and Bad study

[QuestionsNotAnswers]

You are talking complete bollocks.
 
This particular study is a sub-study of one of the most complete longitudinal studies of its kind and it is still continuing. It is run by real scientists, some of whom have made it their life work.

Re:Old and Bad study

[tehcyder]

No, your fate is NOT predestined by the time you are 11.

There is a huge difference between people's fates being predestined at 11, and their being quite firmly set by the age of 11.

With anything involving actual human beings, you can only ever say there is a strong correlation between the way someone is at point A and a prediction of what they will do at point B in the future.

For example, you're more likely to end up rich if you're born rich, but that doesn't mean that you can't go from rags to riches or vice versa.

Re:Old and Bad study

[tehcyder]

Don't forget that on slashdot anyone working int he fields of psychology, sociology, medicine or anything involving live humans is not considered a scientist by definition.

The article never said otherwise

[artor3]

The "causation is not correlation" refrain doesn't really apply here. The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it. The study seems pretty solid, and it's conclusion is believable. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to determine whether self-control leads to success versus "unknown factor X" leading to both self-control and success. To do that would require you to take a large sample of children, and teach self-control to some who don't have it, while also breaking the self-control of some of those who do. Not the sort of study a parent will sign their kid up for.

The point is that self-control is good, and trying to instill it in a child is likely (but not guaranteed) to help them in life.

Also, I think you're misunderstanding the summary. It's not saying that the kids with poor self-control had low income or single-parent homes growing up, it's saying that kids with poor self-control are likely to grow into adults with low income and broken homes. The fact that lack of self-control can lead to divorce should surprise no one.

Re:The article never said otherwise

[ShakaUVM]

>>It's not saying that the kids with poor self-control had low income or single-parent homes growing up, it's saying that kids with poor self-control are likely to grow into adults with low income and broken homes

Given that these sorts of issues are often hereditary (nature or nurture), I wouldn't be surprised if they came more often from single households or low income families as well.

>>The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it.

Sure, but self-control could be an irrelevant mechanism for what is going on, and simply correlated both with True Cause X (let's say Low Income) and Bad Outcome Y (growing up into a Low Income Household)

Re:The article never said otherwise

[Zalbik]

The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it.

The point is that self-control is good, and trying to instill it in a child is likely (though not guaranteed) to help them in life.

I think your second paragraph needs to have a little discussion with your first paragraph...

Re:The article never said otherwise

[jhol13]

There is no need to have a group where self-control is broken. A study where some "wild" children are taught self control compared to some who are not would be sufficient. Hard to do, though.

Oh, btw, there are no guarantees in life. The life is a gamble no matter what you do.

Re:The article never said otherwise

[Eivind]

You contradict yourself. First, you say that the article does NOT claim that self-control causes success (but merely that it predicts it) - then you go on to say that instilling self-control will likely help them in life (i.e. that self-control likely causes success.)

The theory is plausible, but uncertain. It's entirely possible that self-control is merely a proxy for some underlying mechanism that is the real cause of success, and that increased self-control-training as such has no effect.

Could be tested offcourse. You could -give- self-control training to half of a group of kids, then compare how the two groups do later in life, to ascertain if the training had any effect.

I don't know if that study has been done - but atleast it's not done in the study linked from this story.

Re:The article never said otherwise

[Lemmy Caution]

There is more to the research than this, as well.

Executive function ("self control") is associated with imaginative play: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=76838288 for the pop summary. Imaginative play, in which kids grab relative raw "things" and make things out of them and make stories with those things (i.e., more like turning a stone into a building and a twig into a person than Legos or Playmobil toys) and unsupervised play are deeply on the decline.

The chilling fact: they recently repeated some tests for executive function that had been administered to children over 60 years ago. Contemporary 5 year olds show the same executive function as 3 year olds in the 1940s (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514) Say what platitudes you like about "new" kinds of intelligence and information processing and cognitive multitasking: a decline in the ability to do basic self-control is going to be a massive problem. Perhaps this also has something to do with the fact that college students study 40% less now than they did 40 years ago... and nearly half learn almost nothing in their first 2 years of college (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much)

Re:The article never said otherwise

[m50d]

trying to instill it in a child is likely (but not guaranteed) to help them in life.

A simple correlation doesn't imply that instilling it is going to help. Maybe those children with naturally high self-control are going to succeed, and efforts to instill it make no difference, or are even harmful.

So, an interesting result, but more research needed before we can turn it into parenting advice.

Re:The article never said otherwise

[sarkeizen]

It does but in the same way as any other research. They correlated self-control (based on some scale) with success (and this is old-news in child-development studies AFAIK). The issue is that all we know is that these children *are* self-controlled. We don't know that increasing self-control by method X creates the same effect. However that is the next logical step in research...

Re:The article never said otherwise

[sarkeizen]

The other thing you can conclude is that if you were to pick a child at random - score them on your "self-control" scale you can predict some other features within some standard error.

Re:The article never said otherwise

[Anonymous Coward]

No, his first and second paragraphs are just fine. He said self control "predicts" success, not "determines." A prediction has room for error.

Parents!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please beat your children.

Re:Parents!

[Anonymous Coward]

Darn it, where are my mod points?

Link to original study

[Anonymous Coward]

"A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety": http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108

This just in...

[thenewt]

A new study shows correlation between a few isolated test parameters and a few isolated end results! Well done, behavioral science, for ignoring the fascinatingly complex interpersonal, existential web that is human life!

Re:This just in...

[ColdWetDog]

... the fascinatingly complex interpersonal, existential web that is human life!

You expect any of us here on Slashdot to believe that?

Re:This just in...

[ColdWetDog]

Plain text - Testing
Italics - testing
Bold - testing
Emphasis - testing

Two for four - not bad for basic HTML. Progress as promised!

Thanks for the responses (and fish)

[Okian Warrior]

I can't read *any* of the responses to my post for some reason, but I can see the 1st line and so can get a feel for what's being said.

Intelligence is not well defined, both in common usage and in the fields of psychology and (my field) AI. I agree that there are more aspects which contribute to an overall sense of intelligence.

One of the failings of AI in my mind is the lack of a good definition of intelligence.

As a mathematician, I know what a manifold is, can tell whether something is one, and can construct one to use as an example.

As an AI researcher... nada. There is no consensus in the field as to what intelligence actually *is*. The closest we have is the Turing test, which is not a definition and conflates intelligence with "human intelligence" and "communication".

(So for my own researches I first had to come up with a workable definition, which makes me an outlier in the field.)

Thanks for the PNAS link. I'll read it once more bugs have been squashed in the comment system.

This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Water is wet. News at 11.

Re:Sample size

[Chmcginn]

The only argument you can make is that there isn't a causal relationship.

Or that the sampling wasn't properly randomized.

Link to the Paper

[BlackSupra]

Link to the paper "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety" by Terrie E. Moffitt, Et Al.

The Abstract : http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108

The PDF Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108.full.pdf+html

The Journal Snippit: http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/highlights.shtml#control

Though policy-makers have considered programs to enhance the nation’s health, wealth, and safety through interventions to improve children’s self-control skills, researchers had not previously shown that childhood self-control actually influences adult outcomes in large populations. Terrie Moffitt et al. analyzed assessments of more than 1,000 participants in the Dunedin, New Zealand Longitudinal Study who were followed from birth to age 32. Even after accounting for differences in social status and IQ, the researchers found that children as young as 3 who scored highly on measures of self-control were less likely than lower-scoring children to develop common physical health problems, abuse drugs, experience financial difficulties, raise a child in a single-parent household, or be convicted of a crime as adults. In a second sample of 500 nonidentical British twins, the sibling who scored lowest in measures of self-control at age 5 was more likely than the other twin to begin smoking, perform poorly in school, and engage in antisocial behaviors at age 12, the authors report. Children whose self-control improved during the study fared better as adults in measures of health, wealth, and criminal history than was otherwise predicted by their initial childhood scores. The results suggest that even small improvements in individuals’ self-control could improve the health, wealth, and safety of large populations, according to the authors. — J.M.

Re:Link to the Paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: I Am A Criminologist.

The Dunedin study has been the source of a lot of research on the development of delinquency throughout the life-course (specifically by Terrie Moffitt). One of the arguments which has evolved from the study is that of a developmental taxonomy of delinquents, including the existence of what were termed "Life-Course-Persistent" offenders who are bound, due to a variety of deficiencies (familial, environmental, biological, social) to engage in a nigh unescapable life of delinquency and crime.

I don't have a lot of time to delve into this study, but I can say that the general problem with the self-control argument has always been that it is, in essence, a tautology. AFAIK, there's never been a clear measurement of self-control that separates it from the things that it is supposed to cause. The basic posited causal relationship is that: Low-Self Control --> Deviance/Crime/Aggression. How then is self-control measured? By looking for the presence of Deviance/Crime/Aggression. So, according to the theory, low self-control causes what we measure to see if there's low self control... Make sense? A lot of criminologists find the propositions of low-self control theory to be problematic due to this measurement issue. Just quickly looking at the methods section in the back of the paper, the measures of self-control appear to be collected in this way.

Re:Link to the Paper

[argStyopa]

An interesting point that I don't believe has been called out in comments yet: note that they tested some kids as young as THREE.

Not to say that there aren't some things that parents could do to help with self-control, but testing at that early age would lead me to believe that many of the elements of self-control are innate and not learned.

I know a family of four kids, and two of them are meticulous, careful, self-controlled individuals. Two are impulsive, whimsical, and NOT self-controlled at all. Same home environment, one of each gender in each group. Not sure if there's anything that could have been done to 'make' the impulsive pair more likely to be more self-disciplined.

Re:Link to the Paper

[badkarmadayaccount]

Adderal?

tour de force of scientific ingenuity. Bravo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good kids turned out to be good adults.
Who would have thunked it?

Old news

[Joe Tie.]

The results were startling.

Unless you have even the most basic knowledge of the subject. In which case it's additional verification of previous studies. What's next slashdot, amazed gasps about this new thing called fire. And how it's apparently baffling scientists?

Is real science from Dunedin Longitudinal Study

[QuestionsNotAnswers]

Here is an interview about this in particular (not sure if available outside NZ!): http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Children-with-more-self-control-turn-into-healthier-and-wealthier-adults/tabid/506/articleID/18253/Default.aspx or google http://www.google.com/search?q=Dunedin+Longitudinal+Study for background information.

It is a very rigourous study that has been going for nearly 40 years (now on phase 38), producing 900 papers, and a superb data set because they still have an amazing 96% of the original sample set (now aged about 40) getting regularly tested. They go to extreme lengths to continue keeping the original people coming back - e.g. organising flights for all the people that have elsewhere including a large number that are spread around the world.

Before you read this

[rbmyers]

Before you read this, read http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer MUCH bigger news.

Definitely not causation.

[gstrickler]

Lack of self control certainly does not prevent success:

• Bill Clinton
• Richard Nixon
• John F Kennedy
• Robert Downey Jr
• Charlie Sheen

List could continue for a very long time.

Re:Definitely not causation.

[am 2k]

You, sir, fail at statistics:

You hand-picked a few people out of the whole of the US population, and try to deduct some statistically relevant conclusions based on this. Unless you have some millions more people to add to this list, this proves exactly nothing.

Note that even the highest likelyhood in the summary was below 50%.

Re:Definitely not causation.

[nomadic]

Nixon, Clinton, and Kennedy definitely had tremendous self control; if you look over their lives they were each working on a long-term plan to obtain the presidency. The fact that once they reached the goal they let themselves do what they want doesn't mean they lack self control, but rather once they had achieved their goal, why not enjoy the power it brought.

Re:Definitely not causation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of the phrase "exception to the rule"?

Re:Definitely not causation.

[General_Fei]

First of all, I agree with below poster: these men had plenty of self-control, they just lacked it in one or two certain high-profile areas.
Now, the problem with parent poster's reasoning is that, even if the "lacked self-control" claim were true, it's akin to saying, "My grandfather smoked for years and years and lived to be a healthy 90-something, so did another guy and another there..." Of course there are people who lack self-control who are very successful in their careers: they're just statistical outliers. Just like smoking, the statistical majority of those who lack self-control (I'm taking a hard look at myself here...) are going to run into debilitating repercussions.

Re:Definitely not causation.

[gstrickler]

You should look up the definition of causation. There is correlation, but it's not causation.

Re:Definitely not causation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Now "success" comes in only black and white.

Perhaps the strawman in the parent post wasn't good enough. For every one of those "successful ones" we have others without those people's gray, shameful downfalls. Take the Will Smiths and Ronald Reagans and extend it as you will. Perhaps we must reevaluate "American success" to be more aligned to the lack of a reason to even talk about someone's own "self control"

Re:Definitely not causation.

[5865]

Bill Clinton is not actively trying not to have a blowjob. He wanted it, he had it and he was betting his ass nobody would discover it.

FWIW, he had enough self control to get himself voted into office.

Re:Definitely not causation.

[tehcyder]

Bill Clinton is not actively trying not to have a blowjob

What, as you write?

This is OLD NEWS

[Anonymous Coward]

Some years ago there was a book entitled "Emotional Intelligence" which reached a
conclusion that ability to decide to delay gratification was instrumental to a person's
success in later life.

None of this is new.

But it's a slow news day so Slashdot editors ( who wouldn't last a month in the real world
of publishing ) act like this is newsworthy.

Done by Stanford First

[bi$hop]

A professor at Stanford did a less rigorous version of this study using marshmallows and bells in the 1960s: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer

not getting caught

[HornWumpus]

You can't measure 'law-abiding'. All you can do is measure 'not getting caught' and assume.

I can't even guess at how many years I'd be facing, yet I've never been arrested.

Confusing self-control for intelligence?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

If you believe "The Bell Curve", which I do, IQ selects for all of the positive attributes listed in the article. What's the correlation between IQ and self-control? And why is it ignored?

Re:Confusing self-control for intelligence?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not ignored. They controlled for IQ. Feel free to mod yourself down.

Re:Confusing self-control for intelligence?

[Anonymous Coward]

They controlled for IQ.

Of course, if you had the intelligence or discipline to RTFP...

Re:Confusing self-control for intelligence?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

I asked a reasonable question after reading the entire article. How's that self-control issue of yours working out?

I learned self control

[Anonymous Coward]

I learned self control during my younger days the old fashion way. When I ever got out of control, I got an ass whipping with my father's belt. He was expert in aim, even when I was fleeing around the room. He was nice enough to give me a warning by threateningly unbuckling it first and then pulling it out if I continued misbehaving.

Re:I learned self control

[Anonymous Coward]

While I too got this kind of a lesson, I found it to have one unfortunate side effect. While it teaches you not to misbehave, it also plants an unhealthy fear of authority in you. I came to realize a man should not fear authority, less he spend his life as a pawn. Authority should have a healthy fear of the man.

balls

[Anonymous Coward]

surely when a child is better able to sit still etc, it isn't self control its obedience

Re:balls

[tehcyder]

surely when a child is better able to sit still etc, it isn't self control its obedience

Obedience is a necessary trait for social success, so it amounts to the same thing.

Real Conclusions

[LZLinuz]

Funny thing I just found my VHS tape of the movie Once Were Warriors. Co starring Temuera Derek Morrison.(He has become one of the New Zealands most famous stars for his roles as the abusive Jake "the Muss" Heke in 1994's Once Were Warriors and as bounty hunter Jango Fett and the Clone Troopers in the Star Wars series. He also voiced Boba Fett in the 2004 special edition of Star Wars episodes V and VI.) Whats the relevance? Wonder if the New Zealand families the study referred to included ones like Jake "the Muss" Heke family in 1994's "Once Were Warriors", a drama of terrible domestic violence. Once Were Warriors (film) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Once Were Warriors is a 1994 film based on New Zealand author Alan Duff's bestselling 1990 first novel. The film tells the story of an urban Maori family, the Hekes, and their problems with poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence, mostly brought on by family patriarch Jake. It was directed by Lee Tamahori, and stars Rena Owen and Temuera Morrison. Sounds like a convenient way to blame everything on poor people. They are dumb, criminals and are either a baby's Momma or a baby's Daddy. Arrest those idiots gosh darn it!

Re:Real Conclusions

[tehcyder]

My God that was a depressing film, cheers for reminding me.

self control = criminal mastermind?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do the kids who succumb to the marshmallow earlier become "impulsive criminals" and the ones who are able to hold back plan "masterpieces" of deception?

Re:Sample size

[MyLongNickName]

True.

I would also like to note that finding the reply to your message through the message center is a real pain in the arse. I am glad we got a slightly better looking CSS, but I fail to see how this broke the message center link...

Not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

Nearly the same top 10% of those who fell in to the "low income bracket" also fell in to the top 11% with health issues. Are they the same people? Where is my Venn diagram ?

I don't think this says anything other than

1. Those who are more wealthy have less health problems
2. Those with less self control are more likely to break the law

Re:Not convinced

[blueocean43]

Nearly the same top 10% of those who fell in to the "low income bracket" also fell in to the top 11% with health issues. Are they the same people? Where is my Venn diagram ?

I don't think this says anything other than

1. Those who are more wealthy have less health problems 2. Those with less self control are more likely to break the law

Or possibly from this we should conclude that being ill makes you poor and grumpy?

population

[arbitrarymodulus]

I didn't know there were even 1037 people in New Zealand!

Re:population

[tehcyder]

A million people and ten million sheep, the lucky bastards.

Well I'm...

[definate]

Well I'm fucked then.

How strong an explanatory variable is "self control"?

How is "self control" measured?

I knew it was my fault.

[zippyspringboard]

That my parents divorced. Wish I had used more self control....

Is this news?

[flyingkillerrobots]

I've seen something along these lines at least a year and a half ago. http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html

affluence == Self control == Intelligence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider this scenario: child already has one jelly bean in his pocket and is told he can have another one or, if he waits, he will get more jelly beans. It's easier to decide to wait if you already have a little of it as you don't want it as much.

austerity

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news NZ has imposed austerity measures arguing that if 2/3 of the population cannot control themselves - they will do it for them.

So, intelligent people have self control ?

[ami.one]

More like: Intelligent people/kids have more self control than others. and NOT: People/kids with more self control are more intelligent.

Crime Rate

[lchop]

Those are rather shocking statistics. Amongst the bottom 20%, 43% had been convicted of a crime (8.6% of the group); of the top 20%, 13% had been convicted of a crime (2.6%). So, ignoring the other 60%, that's 11.2% who have committed a crime. I guess prisons must be quite busy in New Zealand!

Prisoners per capita: USA, No. in world, NZ no. 55

[fantomas]

The USA is the country that has the highest percentage of its own population in jail: 715 per 100,000. New Zealand is in 55th place with 160 per 100,000. Find your country here.

ADD/ADHD

[Anonymous Coward]

I know there are those that believe these are not illnesses but rather a matter of self control but I can tell you as an ADDer diagnosed at 35 this is a real illness and only now is my life just beginning!

Re:ADD/ADHD

[Securityemo]

Mod parent up. Intelligence or even self-worth is not to be defined as "That which differentiates me from those assholes in high school", no matter how personally gratifying.

martial arts are badly taught

[Anonymous Coward]

and black belt is meaningless.
See iain abernethy and the british combat foundation for some better teaching methods .

Re:Causation is not Correlia...

[Anonymous Coward]

... but it might be Coruscant.

...At age 32 they retested

[andyjb]

I'm 32, and i query the assumption that at this age i'm a fully functioning adult.

Conclusion

[McTickles]

Be a law abiding citizen and take it up the arse from The Man and you'll live longer

ADHD is an invention of the middle classes

[Anonymous Coward]

ADHD is an invention of the middle classes to excuse their not educating kids from the lower classes. The kids like it because they don't have to work hard. The parents like it because they have an excuse for the kid not doing very well at school. And the rich like it because it provides them with an excuse for them having the money and the poor remaining poor... there's also a fair few middle class people in phoney jobs raking in a whole lot of money off the back of the ADHD industry. White coats, seminars, white papers, conferences galore.

Re:Sample size

[tehcyder]

And so another slashdot reader entirely ignorant of statistics decides to speak.

Re:Sample size

[tehcyder]

Huh? Whut? The number of traits is irrelevant when correlating two specific traits. The only argument you can make is that there isn't a causal relationship. 1,000 is MORE than enough to show correlation, especially when the variations between groups is so high.

You can't prove causation anyway for most real world events, no matter how big the sample size.

If you test a million smokers and 999,999 die of lung cancer that doesn't actually prove that smoking causes lung cancer, it "only" makes the correlation very high.

There will always be examples of people who drink a bottle or two of vodka a day and live to be a hundred, and keen runners and cyclists who drop dead at twenty: nevertheless most people would agree you're probably going to be healthier and live longer by reasonable exercising and not drinking to excess.

Self control and hard work

[Anonymous Coward]

For any skill or educational qualification, you need to put the time in. It strikes me as fairly obvious that anyone with poor self control won't do the necessary work and will therefore fail to get the grades.

Having a higher IQ gives you a leg up, but you still won't achieve much in life without commitment and a strong work ethic, and that applies to education, work and being a good parent.

Am I on slashdot.uk or something?

[Brannon]

elevator is a lift and french fries are chips, right?

Re: Gullibility==Intelligence?

[Effexor]

I'd like to do the same test, only when I come back I'll take the jelly bean away and tell them I lied. Logically the smart kids will be the ones who didn't blindly trust authority, so I assume they will do better on IQ tests.

The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo

[Paul Fernhout]

See the Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJybVxUiy2U
http://www.thetimeparadox.com/

First posters are probably present-hedonistic oriented, as opposed to past-positive, past-negative, present-fatalistic, future or future/transcendent.

Philip Zimbardo talks about a similar study he did with kids and marshmallows they could eat now or get two instead if they waited ten minutes. Kids who were willing to wait did better in general in life in our society. Of course, one may ask, were they happier overall? Zimbardo suggests each culture may have an optimum mix of time perspectives, like perhaps for our culture, guessing, he suggests an exact figure somewhere, about 20% past positive, 30% present hedonistic, and 50% future oriented.

Re:The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo

[PingPongBoy]

Philip Zimbardo talks about a similar study he did with kids and marshmallows they could eat now or get two instead if they waited ten minutes. Kids who were willing to wait did better in general in life in our society. Of course, one may ask, were they happier overall?

Eat, drink and be merry, for in 10 minutes you may be dead.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

In human scaled values and times, now versus later leans a lot towards now.

Re:Prisoners per capita: USA, No. in world, NZ no.

[Coeurderoy]

I'm wondering what constitute a crime in NZ ? the article would hint at something like 30% of adults at age 32 would have done some sort of crime...
Since most crimes are not starte before 15, and people have a tendency to calm down after 51 we could gessimate a total crime rate of something like 60% during the full life .... WTF ????
And NZ puts relativelly few people in jail so it would seem that in the US they would need an higher crime rate to fill up the jails, something like what ? 90%...

Scary ...

Why is this surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't find this surprising at all. For a further study on top of that one they might like to prove the obvious fact that parents who discipline their children consistently, properly and out of love are more likely to end up with kids with self-control.

Crime rate?

[ResidentSourcerer]

13% crime rate for the best group? 56% for the worst?

On the average one in three?

I must lead a sheltered life. Unless they are counting people with speeding tickets.

Self control...

[Schmyz]

heck half the kids in the U.S. cant even keep pants from falling around their butt...how much self control are we talking. I assume as long as the control also relate to focus and attention then this would be true.

Self control genes

[Keith Henson]

I am sorry to say, but I expect that further study of this will find that self control is largely a genetic effect rather than something parents or teachers have a lot of ability to change.

Readers who want to dig into this might read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris

And this paper about where having more self control came from.

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf

Of course the way medical technology is progressing I expect self control to be available in a bottle. :-)

Keith Henson