One of Mischel’s favorite metaphors for this model of personality, known as interactionism, concerns a car making a screeching noise. How does a mechanic solve the problem? He begins by trying to identify the specific conditions that trigger the noise. Is there a screech when the car is accelerating, or when it’s shifting gears, or turning at slow speeds? Unless the mechanic can give the screech a context, he’ll never find the broken part. Mischel wanted psychologists to think like mechanics, and look at people’s responses under particular conditions.

Also among those factors, Bryant and Fisher observed, was that the team’s collective mindset evolved. Before, the Lakers approached their championship run by worrying about defending the 2009 title. Now, Fisher and Bryant say, the Lakers simply are aiming to win another one.

One of the concerns of existentialist literature — especially Dostoyevsky — was how both Communist and Capitalist cultures left their citizens too fatigued for the work of personal enrichment, i.e. enlightenment. The psychologist Erich Fromm saw an even more profound problem: he believed a culture of work was crippling our capacity for love. He believed the magnum opus of all individuals was to reorganize his and her values and re-energize themselves to pursue ”the art of loving.

It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.