Tributes

Walter Mischel

A mark of great teachers is that they practice their craft everywhere and all the time. They ask in a way nobody else has: Look! What is this? Where did it come from? How does the same X behave so differently here than it does over there? Can both be true?

Walter Mischel was so intensely curious about the world, he had such an infinity of views about it, that hanging out with him, the teacher, was like being in a garden full of frolicking butterflies. He would chase one and then another and yet another. If you were ready to join him, you would rejoice in the chase even as you fell, exhausted and dizzy from the adventure.

Walter Mischel was not, in any formal sense, my teacher; we never collaborated on research, nor did we spend time at the same institution. And yet, he has been a part of me, my education, and my Weltanshauung. That we considered each other friends and admirers in spite of differences in age, culture, and personal histories is because the pursuit of a life of the mind is a unique avocation; nothing except the joint act of learning and discovery is what binds us to each other.

If you were willing, you could have the greatest intellectual ride of your life with Walter. Sometimes though, literally, a ride. He once rented a red convertible at the Society of Experimental Social Psychology meeting in Santa Barbara and took a couple of us on a high-spirited ride through that laid-back town. When a police officer pulled us over and approached with a raised eyebrow, what was Walter’s explanation? “I’m from New York!” he said, relying on this city not just to explain his lapse in driving, but for so much of his identity. [It would be fair to say that Walter was truly immodest about two things: psychology and NYC.]

There was nothing bland about Walter Mischel. In life and in science, he was fast, he was trenchant, and always witty. If you had any perceptiveness, you knew immediately that you were in the presence of an unusual and great mind; somebody both humble about the larger enterprise of doing science, and intensely confident about the role that psychology had to play.

Walter had an eternal quality about him that defied the passing of time. So when I learned that he had chosen to retire I was surprised. But he told me that when he first started teaching in the 1960s, he would say “As you know, I was born when Abraham Lincoln was president” to great laughs from the students. More recently, he said it again, but this time the students dutifully wrote it down: “He was born when Abe Lincoln was president”. That’s when, he said, he threw the mental chalk into the air, and decided that it was time to call it quits.

When I interviewed Walter in Vienna not so long ago, I was struck by many observations he offered about why he came to be interested in the problems he studied, but none more than his observation of the change in his parents’ personality. In Vienna, before the family had to flee, his father was the strong one, his mother he said could easily have been granted admission to Freud’s inner circle of patients in that very city. But after arrival in New York, his father’s personality shrank while his mother became the family backbone. To the young Mischel, this oddity needed explanation: How does the same X behave so differently here than it did over there? Are both true? And if so, what is personality?

For his pursuit of truth – orthodoxy be damned – for his support of this tribe of us, mind scientists, and for all the butterflies he made me chase, even in Vienna, he will remain forever in my heart and in my mind – uniquely in each situation in which I will remember him, of course.