The Importance of Emotional Restraint

When the lives of 95 Harvard university students from the 1940's were followed up into middle age, the men with the highest intelligence test scores in college were found not to have been particularly successful in their careers, Nor did they have the greatest life satisfaction or the most happiness with friendships, family and romantic relationships.

It became clear that IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of people who start out with roughly equal promise, schooling and opportunity, Academic Intelligence offers virtually no preparation for the turmoil - or opportunities - that life's vicissitudes bring. The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of unruly impulses.

Even though there is every indication tat a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige or happiness, schools and culture fixate on academic ability, In doing so, they ignore a more reliable guide: emotional intelligence - a new concept but one which research suggests can be as powerful, and at times more powerful than IQ.

Take the marshmallow test. Imagine you are four years old and an adult makes the following proposal:
you can have one marshmallow now but if out wait until he returns from an errand, you can have two. It is a challenge sure to try the soul of any four-year-old, a microcosm of the eternal battle between impulse and restraint, desire and self-control, gratification and delay. The choice is telling: It offers a quick reading not just of character, but of the path the child will probably take through life.

A study of the marshmallow challenge with four-year-olds demonstrates how fundamental is the ability to restrain emotions. It was begun during the 1960's by Walter Mischel, a psychologist, at a nursery on the Stanford University campus, and tracked the four-year-olds through their school careers.

The children were offered one marshmallow immediately - or two if they waited until Mischel returned from an errand. Some four-year-olds were able to wait what must have seemed an endless 15 minutes for him to return. They covered their eyes to avoid temptation, or rested their heads in their arms, talked to themselves, sang, played games with hands and feet, even tried to go to sleep. Theses plucky pre-preschoolers got the extra-marshmallow reward. But others, more impulsive, grabbed the one marshmallow almost always within seconds of the experimenter leaving the room.

Years later, those who had resisted temptation were as teenagers, more socially competent, personally effective, self-assertive and better able to cope with the frustrations of life. They were less likely to go to pieces under stress or to become rattled when pressurized: they embraced challenges and pursued them instead of giving up even in the face of difficulties. They were self-reliant and confident, trustworthy and dependable: they took the initiative and plunged into projects.And more than a decade later, they were still able to delay gratification in pursuit of goals.

The one in three children who immediately grabbed the marshmallow, tended however, to have fewer of these qualities and their psychological make-up was more troubled. In adolescence thy were more likely to shy away form social contacts, to be stubborn, indecisive and easily upset by frustration, to become immobilized by stress and prone to jealousy and envy; and to over-react to irritations with temper, provoking arguments and fights. They were also still unable to put off gratification.

What shows up in a small way early in life blossoms into a wide range of social and emotional competences later on: from being able to stay on a diet to completing a university degree course.

Some children even at four had mastered the basics: they were able to read the social situation as one where delay was beneficial. They were the ones who turned out to be more academically competent: better able to put ideas into words, to use and respond to reason, to concentrate, to make plans and follow then through and more eager to learn. In short, they were better able students, their performances enhanced by their emotional intelligence.

At the age of four the marshmallow test proves twice as powerful a predictor of later academic prowess than IQ ( which becomes a stronger indicator only after children learn to read).

A key set of characteristics makes up emotional intelligence - such as self-motivation and persistence in the face of frustrations: the ability to control impulse and delay gratification to regulate moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think, to empathize and to hope.

Emotional life is a domain that, as surely as mathematics or reading, can be handled with greater or lesser skill and requires its own set of competencies. And how adept a person is at those, is crucial to understanding why one person thrives in life while another of equal intellect, fails.

There is a joke: " What do you call a nerd 15 years from now?" The answer: " Boss". Even among "nerds" emotional intelligence offers an added edge in the workplace. Much evidence shows that people who are emotionally adept - who know and manage their feelings well and read and deal effectively with other people's feelings - are at an advantage, whether in romance and intimate relationships or in picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics.

On the other hand, people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional lives, fight inner battles that sabotage their ability to focus on work and think clearly.

The Butterfly Effect

Some scientists see their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the ‘Butterfly Effect’, the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz’s suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly’s wings.

Translated into mass culture, the Butterfly Effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

In the 2004 movie The Butterfly Effect, Ashton Kutcher travels back in time, altering his troubled childhood in order to influence the present, though with dismal results. In 1990’s Havana, Robert Redford, a math-wise gambler, tells Lena Olin, ‘A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds.’

Such borrowings of Lorenz’s idea might seem authoritative to unsuspecting viewers, but they share one major problem: They get his insight precisely backwards. The larger meaning of the Butterfly Effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can’t. To claim a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm, after all, is to raise the question: How can we definitively say what caused the any storm, if it could be something as slight as a butterfly? Lorenz’s work gives us a fresh way to think about cause and effect, but does not offer easy answers.

Pop culture references to the Butterfly Effect may be bad physics, but they’re a good barometer of how the public thinks about science. They expose the growing chasm between what the public expects from scientific research – that is, a series of ever more precise answers about the world we live in – and the realms of uncertainty into which modern science is taking us.

The Butterfly Effect is a deceptively simple insight extracted from a complex modern field. As a low-profile assistant professor in MIT’s department of meteorology in 1961, Lorenz created an early computer program to simulate weather. One day he changed one of a dozen numbers representing atmospheric conditions, from .506127 to .506. That tiny alteration utterly transformed his long-term forecast, a point Lorenz amplified in his 1972 paper, ‘Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?’

In the paper, Lorenz claimed the large effects of tiny atmospheric events pose both a practical problem by limiting long-term weather forecasts, and a philosophical one, by preventing us from isolating specific causes of later conditions. The 'innumerable' interconnections of nature, Lorenz noted, mean a butterfly’s flap could cause a tornado – or, for all we know, prevent one. Similarly, should we make even a tiny alteration to nature, ' we shall never know what would have happened if we had not disturbed it', since subsequent changes are too complex and entangled to restore a previous state.

So a principal lesson of the Butterfly Effect is the opposite of Redford's line : It is extremely hard to calculate such things with certainty. There are many butterflies out there. A tornado in Texas could be caused by a butterfly in Brazil, Bali or Budapest. Realistically, we cant know. It's impossible for humans to measure everything infinitely accurately. And if you're off at all, the behavior of the solution could be completely off. When small imprecisions matter greatly, the world is radically unpredictable.

Moreover, Lorenz also discovered stricter limits on our knowledge, proving that even models of physical systems with a few precisely known variables, like a heated gas swirling in a box, can produce endlessly unpredictable and non-repeating effects. This is a founding idea of chaos theory, whose advocates sometimes say Lorenz helped dispel the Newtonian idea of a wholly predictable universe. Instead, Lorenz's work suggested that our ability to analyze and predict the workings of the world is inherently limited.

But in the popular imagination, that one picturesque little butterfly became a metaphor for the surprising way that long chains of events unfold. A market analysis from 2007 cites Lorenz, then suggests that hypothetical problems at Sony could affect a string of shippers, retailers and investors: 'One butterfly, in this case a Japanese butterfly, sets off the entire chain.' Even applied to society, rather than nature, such claims merit skepticism.

That we imagine the Butterfly Effect would explain things in everyday life, however, reveals more than an overeager impulse to validate ideas through science. It speaks to our larger expectation that the world should be comprehensible – that everything happens for a reason, and that we can pinpoint all those reasons, however small they may be. But nature itself defies this expectation. It is probability, not certain cause and effect, that now dictates how scientists understand many systems, from subatomic particles to storms. Thus global warming may make big storms more likely – 'loading the die', so to speak – but we cannot say it definitively caused Hurricane Katrina. Science helps us understand the universe, but as Lorenz showed, it sometimes does so by revealing the limits of our understanding.