Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (47 page)

Obviously, the point of the Grant Study’s seventy-five years is not that it gratified the narcissism of a ten-year-old who wanted the most powerful telescope in the world, nor that it helped to resolve the grief of a boy whose father died too young. I am a real part of this Study, but a small one. It is very much worth noting that so many provocative findings have come out of it—findings that could have been discovered
by no other means—that it has taken
ninety-five different authors
to elucidate them.

It is certainly appropriate to assess the cost-to-benefit ratio of a follow-up study that endured for more than seven decades at a cost of twenty million dollars. And in some ways that is easy to do. The bean-counter in me points out that granting agencies have paid only $10,000 in award, on average, per peer-reviewed—and sometimes highly cited—book or journal article. That’s not an exorbitant cost as these things go. But the Study’s three greatest contributions, which justify its cost and give meaning to the extraordinary generosity, patience, and candor of the men who exposed their entire lives in the interests of science, are less easily subject to financial valuation.

The first contribution is the absoluteness of the Study’s demonstration that adult development continues long after adolescence, that character is not set in plaster, and that people do change. Even a hopeless midlife can blossom into a joyous old age. Such dramatic transformations are invisible to pencil-and-paper explorations or even ten-year studies of adult development.
1

Second, in all the world literature there is no other study of lifetime alcohol abuse as long and as thorough as this one.

Third, the Study’s identification and charting of involuntary coping mechanisms has given us at once a useful clinical tool, a route to empathy for initially unlikable people, and a powerful predictor of the future. Without this long Study of real lives, the importance of the maturation of defenses would still be out of fashion, dismissed as a relic of failed psychoanalytic metaphysics. In this final chapter I will briefly review each of these three contributions.

DEVELOPMENT IS LIFELONG

Adult development is a lifelong process. To investigate it properly means lifelong study—for which even seventy years is not really quite
long
enough. Many students of adult development, most brilliantly Warner Schaie in the Seattle Longitudinal Study, have tried to speed up the process by studying several groups of varying ages concurrently over ten or even twenty years.
2
This method worked in Schaie’s study of the rise and fall of intelligence, which can be studied in populations. But it cannot work for the study of personality, which is unique to individuals. The study of old age in particular requires patience and empathy, not the restless intolerance of frightened fifty-year-olds such as I was in 1986. Without persistence, endurance, and restraint, we learn little about the delicate processes of growth that endure even as life is fading.

Piaget’s and Spock’s delineations of child development changed parenting forever. Erikson’s appreciation of adult development as dynamic growth rather than decay was likewise a major paradigm shift.
3
But without empirical evidence to back it up, it gave rise to more theory and speculation than knowledge. The Grant Study has changed that. Four major empirical works have come out of the Study under my name—
Adaptation to Life
(1977),
Wisdom of the Ego
(1993),
Aging Well
(2002), and this final summary volume—which clarify the second half of life a decade at a time. As the men went on maturing, as hypotheses were tested and retested over time, the books have become progressively less theoretical and more evidence-based. Future studies and wiser authors will take us further still. But the optimum (to borrow a concept from Arlie Bock) study of lifetimes will always require a hundred years of toil, generations of dedicated investigators, and stories of real lives supported by statistical verification. As I keep reminding myself, what people say doesn’t mean much. It’s what they
do
that predicts the future. It was the facts of people’s long-term love relationships, not their belief systems, that showed us what we needed to know first about their capacity to love, and then about their mental health.

The realities of adult development cannot be discerned through
speculation,
through biography (by definition retrospective), or even through diaries (by definition biased). Yet theorists of adult development have had to depend upon just such sorts of materials, so scarce have alternatives been. The very distinguished Terman and Berkeley longitudinal studies rarely published case studies. Before the Grant Study, accurate individual records of adult development were rare.

Sadly, the bellwether publication in the field, the
Journal of Adult Development,
while rich in theory and informative about given stages of adult development, pays almost no attention to real lives or to maturational changes, which are full of paradox. This can be seen in the quixotic truth that at the same time as the Grant Study was demonstrating incontrovertibly that adult development continues throughout the lifespan, it was offering support for the contradictory view of William James and other nay-sayers of whose work I once made light. Lifetime studies hoist us investigators with the very petards that we delight to deploy against our challengers.

Let me illustrate that apparent contradiction, which lies in the vulnerability of all belief systems. In sitting down to write this book, I believed that it was only the tracking of behavior over time that could predict the future, not inventories or questionnaires or any of psychology’s other myriad “instruments.” Paul Costa and Robert McCrae believed that because a person’s NEO has not changed over thirty years, his character has not changed either.
4

I had no problem with the first half of that contention; indeed, we found that among the College men the NEO did not change very much over
forty-five
years (see
Chapter 4
).
5
I even found, in running the numbers, that the NEO traits of
Neuroticism
(negatively) and
Ex-traversion
(positively) were significantly predictive of some Decathlon outcomes. But I did have trouble with the second half—that the lack of change in the NEO meant a lack of change in personality. The NEO traits—uncomfortably like the elegant and empirically derived
anthropologic
measurements with which this book began—are static. They do not address processes of growth, any more than a masculine body build, which may well endure over a lifetime, predicts the kind of officer its owner will grow to become. The NEO deals with personality as reflected in multiple choice questions, and although I tried, I could not correlate any of its traits with the five mature defenses (altruism, sublimation, humor, suppression, and anticipation) that do change over time, and in their changing exert such an important influence on the outcomes of real lives.

But having hoisted Costa on
his
own petard—for failing to recognize the difference between static measurements and dynamic processes—I proceeded to hoist myself on mine. It occurred to me that if
Extraversion
(positively) and
Neuroticism
(negatively) could predict the Decathlon to a limited degree, it might be interesting to create a theoretical composite value:
Extraversion
minus
Neuroticism.
That is, what would happen if I removed from consideration the thwarting effects that
Neuroticism
had on Decathlon success? What happened was that the
Extraversion
minus
Neuroticism
values correlated at least significantly with every Decathlon event for which data was available, rivaling adaptive style and childhood in predictive power. As illustrated in
Table 11.1
,
Extraversion
minus
Neuroticism
estimated at age twenty-one could predict the Decathlon measured with data gathered forty to sixty years afterward, and it could predict it as well as adaptive style assessed twenty years later! My ship of fine theories had crashed upon the rocks, but truth was well served.

The moral of this story is that they were right and I was right. My rightness did not preclude theirs; theirs did not preclude mine. My rightness was not complete, and theirs wasn’t either, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There’s more than one path to the top of a mountain, and there are prizes enough for everyone: Woods, Soldz, Bowlby/Vaillant, Costa/McCrae. But note that it was only in
the
context of lifelong study that the question of changing adaptive style could even be tested. Context is everything, and lifetime studies provide it most generously.

Table
11.1
Statistical Strength of Association of Alternative Predictors of Flourishing
*

*
168 men were included in this table. Only the classes of 1942–1944 were rated for defenses, and some men have been lost to death.

Very Significant = p<.001; Significant = p<. 01; NS = Not Significant.

The Grant and Glueck Studies make clear another important dynamic reality that personality inventories, or even retrospective and cross-sectional studies, cannot: childhood trauma becomes less important with time (even though recovery may take decades), while the good things that happen in childhood endure. A related finding was that environmental conditions that appear very important to outcome in ten-year studies—such as parental social class, loss of a parent, or membership in a multiproblem family—appear much less important over the entire course of a life. Some environmental circumstances, of course, were not tested in the Grant Study and are likely to remain important, such as racism and other forms of societal discrimination. In our admittedly small Inner City sample, however, confined as it was to 456 white urban males, a warm childhood environment appeared to be a far better predictor of future social class and of adult employment (or unemployment) than was either childhood intelligence, parental dependence upon welfare, or the presence of multiple problems within the family.
6
For the Inner City men, the percent of life employed (a behavioral item) was one of the best objective predictors of mental health that the Study possessed, and employment was uncorrelated with social disadvantage. Children of great privilege with personality disorders have greater difficulty with stable employment than the mentally stable uneducated poor.

Another point of interest: it is through lifetime studies that we discover the tools we need for future investigation. The best tool we have for predicting longevity was discovered only through the study of entire lifetimes. Summarizing findings from the Berkeley and Oakland Growth Studies, arguably the greatest study of human development in the world, the distinguished sociologist John Clausen observed
that when his subjects were sixty-five to eighty-five years old, the childhood trait of
Planful competence and dependability
was the most important predictor of future mental and physical well-being.
7
Howard Friedman arrived at the same conclusion in summarizing the longevity of the Terman men; I confirmed his finding seeking predictors of estimated longevity among the Grant Study men with the traits
Well integrated
and
Self-driving.
8
But until the Terman, Berkeley, and Grant Studies reached maturity, the longevity literature had never even considered the importance of what Howard Friedman called
Conscientiousness.

As I’ve described at some length in
Chapter 6
, the Study has made some important discoveries about marriage: that 57 percent of the Grant Study divorces were associated with alcoholism; that divorce led to future marriages happier than those enjoyed by the couples in the lowest third of sustained marriages; that marriages become happier after seventy. These issues have gone largely unaddressed in the literature on marriage. Time will take care of that. The point I want to make here is that these findings were not perceived
even in the Grant Study itself
until sixty or seventy years had passed. To understand lives takes a lifetime.

ALCOHOLISM

Much of what we infer retrospectively about our lives is not true. Nowhere is this more evident than in lifetime studies of alcoholism, where the Study of Adult Development has made perhaps its greatest contribution. In 1980 the Study was already the longest study of alcoholism in history, and had been awarded the international Jellinek Prize, a biennial award for alcohol research.
9
If it had stopped there, though, two other important discoveries that were published many years later would never have been made.
10

To
disprove the illusion that securely diagnosed alcoholics can return to successful social drinking required that we follow Inner City alcoholics for thirteen more years after they had been rated as returned-to-social-drinkers in 1983. Disaster was only a matter of time, like driving a car without a spare tire. And proofs that are a matter of time take time.