Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This makes intuitive sense. Dramatic acting is almost by definition doing what you think you should do, instead of what you want to do. Except for method acting, which instead tries to make it so what you want to do is what you should be doing.
I'd be interested to know if actors have better or worse self-control than non-actors, and if method actors have better or worse self-control than other types of actors.
Kids need adults to show them how to play? Holy crap, what are we coming to?
"How to begin to educate a child. First rule, leave him alone. Second rule, leave him alone. Third rule, leave him alone. That is the whole beginning."
(D.H.Lawrence)
It probably boils down to the problem that when trying to teach "children" as an amorphous mass, "formulaic" and "effective" are simply never going to go together. No matter how smart the formulator or how hard the formula-applier tries.
From the article, it sounds like we're coming to, indeed are in, a first-world industrial and information economy where we've learned that children's natural levels of executive function may not develop sufficiently, in the presence of the gadgetry available, to allow them to compete in the workplace and cope with the demands of a technological society. We're also, apparently, in a place where we think we have some idea how to intervene in what appears to be a caring and benign way to direct children's play in a direction that fosters this key cognitive function.
Far from being unexpected, this seems very natural to me. We wear clothes because we live in inclement places. We cook our food because our brains need more nutrition than raw food allows. And now we direct the play of our offspring to better equip them for their expected environment. This is no more indicative of some untenable circumstance than the fact that we don't live in huts and dig for grubs on the plains of Africa.
Observing an individual's ability to self-regulate works as a good predictor of character in all kinds of situations, interviews being one of the more useful applications. Although justifying your subject judgments to your colleagues could be tricky -> "He answered the concurrency questions better than average but kept slouching down into his chair - I don't think he's going to be able to meet deadlines".
Because assuming people in a certain group have a certain level of skill, it makes sense that people with below average intelligence in that group may be compensating with extra conscientiousness, while people with above average intelligence for that group could have been part of a better group, but their lack of conscientiousness dragged them down.
I.e. being less conscientious doesn't make you more intelligent. Rather, the less conscientious you are, the more likely you are to end up surrounded by people with less intelligence than you (who make up for it with more conscientiousness than you).