ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPHOST2019P5)

In the following text there are gaps which indicate that something has been left out. Look at the four alternatives that correspond to each gap and decide which one best fits the gap. Then mark your choice on your answer sheet.

Marrying Women

Jane Austen’s 19th-century characters took it for granted that men with money made more eligible mates. A new study from the Pew Research Center, a think-tank, finds that little has changed. Fully 78% of American women who have never been married say it is “very important” that their future spouse has a “steady job”.

Wrenching changes in the labour market, combined with these    31    preferences, have shaken up the marriage market. Women are much more likely to have jobs than half a century ago; men, somewhat less so. Women today find it much easier to cope without a male breadwinner. At the same time, many find the pool of potential husbands less appealing.

In 1960, young, never-married women were spoilt for choice. For every hundred of them aged 25–34, there were 139 young, never-married men vying for their    32    . In 2012 there were just 91. For some groups, the gap is much bigger. Young never-married black women outnumber young never-married black men with jobs by a startling two-to-one. This helps explain why, although African-Americans are more likely than other races to say they    33    marriage, only 26% of black women are actually married, compared with 51% of whites.

The raw ratio of bachelors to bachelorettes varies with age. There are 118 unmarried 25-year-old men for every 100 single women,    34    women are more likely to marry older partners. Around the age of 40, the ratio is roughly even. From then on, the surplus of men turns into a deficit: by the age of 64, there are only 62 unmarried men, with or without jobs, for every 100 unmarried women.

Pew predicts that, by 2030, 28% of American men – and 23% of women – will never have tied the knot. For men without much education, the picture is particularly grim. Among young American adults with a high school certificate or    35    , there are 174 never-married men for every 100 never-married women. The difference largely reflects the difficulty poorly-educated men have finding work.

The Economist

The Marshmallow Test

The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy was a man of ferocious complexity and contradiction, of a scope that Walter Mischel could appreciate. Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, is a towering figure in personality research, whose first popular book, The Marshmallow Test, summarizes his decades of work on self-control. It is also thanks to Mischel that we consider the degree to which situation dictates behavior, and the fact that willpower – and much more – is only as predictable as the context in which it operates.

His so-called “marshmallow test,” first conducted at Stanford University in the late 1960s, monitors the ability of a child to resist a treat when left alone with it. Mischel’s subjects understood that they could eat the treat immediately if they rang a bell to summon the researcher, but they’d receive two treats if they could await the researcher’s return. Four-year-old paragons of executive function waited up to 15 minutes; school-age kids with “high delay skills” waited so long that Mischel himself could no longer stand to watch their heroic juvenile abnegation.

The test is noteworthy because long-term follow-up studies show that a child’s ability to delay reward correlates with academic success and adult income, as well as with affective powers such as the ability to tolerate stress and rejection. The “cooling” mental transformations that help a kid wait agonizing minutes to consume a marshmallow – imagining the candy is a cloud, putting a frame around it to make it abstract, etc. – are the bedrock processes that allow that same person to stay future-focused enough to earn a college degree or to reliably invest in a long-term pension plan. Those with the ability to delay have a well-oiled prefrontal cortex that successfully regulates their abstract thinking as well as impulse control. Mainstream interest in Mischel’s work reflects our culture’s obsession with executive function or its lack (ADHD). We’re in the midst of a cognitive gold rush on self-control and grit, perhaps the two most valorized skills of our young century. Ironically, Mischel’s studies of personality, which are legendary among psychologists but largely unknown to the public, suggest that there are natural checks on self-regulation. Self-control, like most behaviors, is radically contingent. Character and willpower bend depending on the environment and the individual’s level of motivation.

Leo Tolstoy was a maelstrom of lapses in his personal life. He fought incessantly with his wife. He was critical and demanding of his family even as he preached a love of humanity. This may surprise some people, but it would not surprise Mischel. He argues that the key to exercising self-control and to understanding why people appear to behave erratically resides in the slimmest of phrases: if–then.

For example, the degree of conscientiousness we bring to a task at our job does not predict how conscientious we’ll be about bill paying or interacting with loved ones when we arrive home. However, it is predictive of how conscientious we’ll continue to be in work-related endeavors.

Mischel proposes that personality inscribes itself in if–then behavioral patterns, which “characterize most people when their behavior is closely examined.” Further, “the behavioral signature of personality specifies what the individual does predictably if particular situational triggers occur. These behavioral triggers have been found with adults as well as children and for everything from conscientiousness and sociability to anxiety and stress.”

Perhaps an omniscient biographer could map the intricate if–then patterns in Tolstoy’s life, as scattered as constellations in the night sky but ultimately just as predictable. We are, each of us, that complicated.

Mischel has said that he is most interested in the subjects who “failed” the marshmallow test but went on to succeed in life. There’s no way to know whether Tolstoy would fit the bill, but if so, Mischel would have an idea why.

Kaja Perina, Psychology Today