The other day I received a query, politely worded for a change.
I was asked, you keep saying that the narcissist and the psychopath cannot delay gratification.
That is true, by the way. I keep saying this, but I also say that it applies to the borderline as well.
Anyhow, you keep saying this, and yet many psychopaths and narcissists and even borderlinescomplete academic studies, develop long-term careers. Isn't this delayed gratification? Is this a postponement of rewards? Doesn't this contradict what you're saying?
Sorry. No, it doesn't.
And it doesn't because my name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited and a professor of clinical psychology.
Now, dear Oscar, you are right that many, many people, scholars included, confuse three concepts in psychology, stamina, perseverance, and delayed gratification.
Ostensibly, from the outside, they appear to be the same. They also generate identical behaviors, but they are not the same. Not at all.
And the purpose of today's short video is to help you make the difference between them.
Start with stamina. Stamina is about overcoming. Overcoming hurdles, obstacles, impediments, unforeseen circumstances, contingencies, changes in the environment or in oneself, or in one's nearest and dearest, overcoming, succeeding against all odds and despite all hindrances.
It's the energy.
As Wikicheneary define stamina, it's the energy and strength for continuing to do something over a long period of time, the power of sustained exertion or resistance to hardship, illness, etc.
Indeed. Of course, stamina involves persistence, but it is not the same as perseverance.
And it's definitely not the same as delayed gratification.
What is perseverance?
Exactly like stamina. It has a component of persistence.
But perseverance is any situation of going on and proceeding in a single task or a single assignment or a single direction despite all information or input to the contrary.
So perseverance involves a modicum, a slight ingredient of self-delusion.
For example, we have the perseverance effect. It's a phenomenon in which people's beliefs about themselves and others persist despite a lack of supporting evidence or even a contradiction of supporting evidence.
Anyhow, we're going to discuss perseverance at length later in the video.
Right now I want to focus on delay gratification.
So you remember, stamina is about overcoming. We shall overcome. That's a stamina, song.
Perseverance is about persistence.
Delayed gratification is about pleasure, impulse control, and optimism or pessimism.
Okay, let's break it down.
Gratification is the state of satisfaction following the fulfillment of a desire or a craving or the meeting of a need.
Now you should distinguish this from the execution of a plan or a successful project.
There is satisfaction in this, but gratification has more to do with immediacy, where there is a direct, visible, discernible connection between action and reward. So it's about the pleasure principle.
Now you could either delay gratification or insist on immediate gratification.
A delay of gratification is when you forego, you give up on an immediate reward in order to obtain a larger, more desired or more pleasurable reward in the future.
There's a famous marshmallow experiment where children were cruelly given one marshmallow and told to not eat it. And the reward was if the children who did not eat the marshmallow got another one. And the children who ate the single marshmallow had to suffice with this. They didn't get another one.
So the marshmallow experiment is an example of an experiment in gratification and the delay of gratification.
Some children were capable to delay gratification, to not eat the marshmallow immediately, to postpone the eating, the pleasure in the eating of the marshmallow, knowing that they will receive another marshmallow as a reward for their ability to delay gratification.
Other children were lunched for the marshmallow, consumed it, preyed upon it, left nothing, not even crumbs. And of course these children ended up with a single marshmallow.
Delayed gratification, immediate gratification, is the experience of satisfaction or receipt of a reward as soon as a response is made.
In other words, there's a trigger mechanism, there's a stimulus, there's a response, or an action by you, and there is an expectation that this trigger or response or action would yield an immediate outcome, an immediate favorable, immediate result, immediate reward.
Now, if you are able to think ahead, if you are able to trust that your delayed gratification would yield even better outcomes or larger outcomes in the future, then you are able to postpone gratification.
And if you are not, you're focused on immediate gratification.
I keep mentioning the word pleasure.
The pleasure principle is the view that human beings are governed by the desire for gratification or for pleasure. They need to discharge tension that builds up as pain or unpleasant or unpleasure or discomfort when gratification is lacking.
There's a knowing sense ill it is, it's upsetting, and it generates anxiety, which is intolerable and burdensome and unbearable. And to reduce the anxiety, to ameliorate and mitigate it as an anxiolytic self-soothing act, there is a pursuit of immediate gratification.
In the classical psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, the pleasure principle is a psychic force. It's a force that motivates people to seek immediate gratification of instincts, instinctual or libidinal impulses.
You heard of sex, you heard of hunger, you heard of thirst, you heard of number one and number two in the toilet, elimination, all these are instincts and impulses. And the need to gratify them immediately is at the core of the pleasure principle.
Then we have the ego, and the ego prevents us from gratifying instincts immediately, because usually this has very, very unfavorable outcomes socially.
So the id, the part of the model, Freud's three partite model, the id is the seat of the pleasure principle. It operates more strongly the younger you are.
As an infant, you're all id. Later you develop an ego.
Narcissists never develop an ego. Borderlines have a disrupted or diffuse ego, and so on and so forth.
In adulthood, the pleasure principle has to contend with the reality principle of the ego, and so delayed gratification sets in.
Now, why would you not delay gratification?
Because of distrust.
When you don't trust the world, when you don't trust yourself, when you don't believe in justice or just rewards, when you don't think that everything as it should be, when you perceive the universe is basically hostile, a jungle, dog eat dog, etc., you're unlikely to delay gratification, because you cannot place your trust in the future. You don't even know if there's going to be a future.
In short, delayed gratification and immediate gratification have to do with optimism or pessimism.
If you are a pessimist, you would seek immediate gratification.
Calpurnius, since the day, whatever you can get now is for sure better, one bird in the pocket than two on the tree or something like this.
So if you're a pessimist, if you view the world as essentially disordered, chaotic, unstructured, and definitely unjust, you would seek to maximize your rewards rather than optimize your performance. You would seek immediate gratification rather than delayed gratification.
The opposite, of course, if you're an optimist, if you believe that a decision you make now would bear fruit later, you would delay gratification.
Again, let's go back to the marshmallow experiments.
Pessimistic children in the experiment did not trust, did not believe the experimenter who told them that they're going to receive a second marshmallow. They did not believe her. They thought that she was lying, manipulating them, misleading and deceiving them.
So they ate the first marshmallow, pronto, before it vanished mysteriously.
The optimistic children trusted the experimenter. They were willing to wait. They had a basic belief in the goodness of people and in the veracity, the truthfulness of statements and commitments and promises.
Optimism is about hopefulness, the attitude that good things will happen, and that people's wishes and aims will ultimately be fulfilled, and that promises will not be broken, because people are essentially good.
Optimists are people who anticipate positive outcomes, whether serendipitously or through perseverance and effort, people who are confident of attaining desired goals.
Now, most individuals lie somewhere on the spectrum between pure optimism and pure pessimism. But most people also tend to demonstrate sometimes strong, relatively stable or situational tendencies in one direction or another, so we can classify and categorize people as perennial optimists and perennial pessimists.
Pessimism is the exact opposite of optimism. It's the attitude that things will go wrong and that people's wishes or aims are unlikely to be fulfilled and the promises are liable to be broken.
Pessimists are people who expect bad things to happen to them and to others. Pessimists are people who otherwise are doubtful or hesitant about positive outcomes, about the essential goodness of people, about justice.
Most individuals, again, are somewhat pessimistic and somewhat optimistic and so on so forth.
This has to do with what is known as the expectancy value model. The concept that motivation for an outcome depends on the significance of that outcome and the probability of achieving it.
Pessimists and optimists place different values within this model and get different outcomes, dramatically different outcomes.
Pessimists say better to accomplish everything now, better to guarantee things now. The emphasis is on the present. There's no future. No trust in the future. No belief in the future. Anything you can seize now, you should. Everything should, the rewards should be obtained and consumed instantaneously. Immediate gratification.
Optimists, on the other hand, say, we believe other people. We believe the world. We believe in justice.
And so if I'm told to not eat my marshmallow because another one is on its way, I'm going to adhere to that. I'm going to believe, I'm going to trust the promise made, and I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait because I know good things are coming. Pleasure principle, another marshmallow.
And so delayed gratification and immediate gratification have to do essentially with pleasure, the ability to control impulses or impulsivity, which is a factor in personality assessment, and even much more importantly, in my view, the tendency to catastrophize, the tendency to distrust and disbelief other people, the future, the environment, society, contracts, alliances, agreements, promises, total distrust.
Back to perseverance.
Perseverance has nothing to do with the pleasure principle, nothing to do with gratification, nothing to do with rewards. You need stamina to persevere, but not every manifestation of stamina involves perseverance.
Perseverance is the continuance or repetition of a particular behavior, process or activity despite the secession, despite the disappearance of the initiating stimulus.
So there's a stimulus, you decide on a course of action, you embark on it, you take steps, you adopt steps, you have a plan, you pursue it, there's a project, even when the initiating stimulus is long in the rear view mirror is long gone. You're still at it.
It's the quality or state of maintaining a course of action or keeping it a task and finishing the task despite the fact that the beginning of the process or the beginning of the project or the decision made or the of the course of action decided upon or the program and plan are long past they are like a long time ago.
You need stamina in the sense that every long-term pursuit of a course of action every attempt to actualize or realize a plan or a project involve obstacles.
There's always opposition, there's always discouragement, there always changes in the environment, there always changes in you, in other people working with you. So they're always challenges.
And so you need stamina to persevere, and you need stamina to carry forward and to finish with an investment of effort.
But perseverance is not only about stamina.
It's, for example, the ability to have a long-term view, a basic trust in the world, in other people, and in yourself, a commitment in an ideology, an idea, a concept, a belief, the ability to plan and to execute a plan, and so and so forth.
There are many other factors in perseverance.
Delayed gratification or immediate gratification is a one, two, three thing.
There's a stimulus, marshmallow, you want it, you take it. There's a marshmallow, you want it, but you're willing to wait for another marshmallow. So you don't take it.
It's very primitive. Gratification is the most primitive life force, according to Freud and many others. Gratification is at the core of the pleasure principle, which starts its operation in early infancy.
Perseverance and stamina are adult things. They are not infantile. They involve maturation.
They involve, as I said, the ability to conceive of the world, the way it works, its future, its past. Create a model to accommodate all this information and then decide on a course of action in order to modify the model or the world or yourself or others.
This requires maturity and adulthood.
Now, perseverance is actually a dimension in several models of personality, most notably Cloninger's psycho-biological model.
Cloninger's psychobiological model is a seven-factor model. It includes four dimensions of temperament and three dimensions of character.
The temperament dimensions include harm avoidance, sensitivity to and avoidance of punishing stimuli. In other words, not being self-harmitive or not seeking punishment from the environment.
Novelty seeking, a tendency towards exhilaration or excitement in response to cues of potential reward or relief of punishment. Novelty seeking also is intimately linked with curiosity, of course.
Reward dependence, a tendency to respond to positive signals such as social approval and to maintain the rewarded behavior and persistence.
Persistence is the core issue and the core element in perseverance and actually I would say that persistence is a synonym to perseverance.
A tendency to continue a task or activity, regardless of frustration, dissatisfaction, or fatigue in Kloninger's model.
So persistence in Kloninger's model has a very high ingredient of stamina.
The character dimensions in his model include self-directedness, the extent to which individuals are goal-oriented and resourceful, cooperativeness, the extent to which individuals relate to others, and self-transcendence, the extent to which individuals are transpersonal, spiritual, idealistic, able to integrate in a bigger whole, let's say.
And so the model suggests that dimensions of temperament are heritable, and that novelty seeking and harm avoidance are closely related to the behavioral approach system and behavioral inhibition system, first described by Jeffrey Alan Gray, the British psychologist.
The model proposes a link between certain temperaments and specific neurotransmitters, dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and so on so forth.
Major character traits in the model are said to be related to insight learning, and they're shaped by both temperament and environmental factors.
The model is very intricate, very complicated and fascinating, and it's been the inspiration for my IPAM model, intra-psychic activation model.
I encourage you to watch the video in my channel about IPAM and my personality theory, Cloninger has been a major impact, a major inspiration to me.
And the advantage of Cloninger's model is that you can frame research questions in both psychology and psychiatry. It reconciles the two, and it yields empirical evidence and support and all kinds of measures and so on and so forth.
Robert Cloninger, look up his work.
But back to the topic of today's video.
We learned from Cloninger that perseverance or persistence is actually a character trait. Unlike delayed gratification and immediate gratification, your attitude to gratification depends on how you see the world. Are you an optimist? Are you a pessimist? It depends on your ability to control impulses. Are you impulsive? Or are you more cool-headed and thoroughgoing?
So gratification is far more fundamental. Far more fundamental and I would say far more biological. I wouldn't be surprised if it's totally genetically determined. Delayed gratification and immediate gratification as reflective of some deeper underlying personality structures or structures of the self.
Persistence is a character trait and possibly hereditary, but it's much more complex. It's on a higher level, a meta level of psychology.
And stamina is simply a characteristic of perseverance and of persistence. You can't be persistent or persevere without stamina.
As you can see these things have nothing to do with whether you delay a gratification or seek it immediately, whether you believe in the future or not, whether you delay your gratification or seek it immediately, whether you believe in the future or not, whether you control your impulses or not, whether you want rewards to be intimately and immediately and urgently linked to the stimulus, or whether you are able to separate the two.
This is an entirely different ballgame which has to do with how you process pleasure and how you process the rewards and how you process linkage between stimuli and action and so and so forth. Totally different field in psychology.