Studies show that someone’s locus of control can be influenced through training and feedback. One experiment conducted in 1998, for example, presented 128 fifth graders with a series of difficult puzzles. Afterward, each student was told they had scored very well. Half of them were also told, “You must have worked hard at these problems.” Telling fifth graders they have worked hard has been shown to activate their internal locus of control, because hard work is something we decide to do. Complimenting students for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings.
The other half of the students were also informed they had scored well, and then told, “You must be really smart at these problems.” Complimenting students on their intelligence activates an external locus of control. Most fifth graders don’t believe they can choose how smart they are. In general, young kids think that intelligence is an innate capacity, so telling young people they are smart reinforces their belief that success or failure is based on factors outside of their control.
Then all the students were invited to work on three more puzzles of varying difficulty.
The students who had been praised for their intelligence—who had been primed to think in terms of things they could not influence—were much more likely to focus on the easier puzzles during the second round of play, even though they had been complimented for being smart. They were less motivated to push themselves. They later said the experiment wasn’t much fun.
In contrast, students who had been praised for their hard work—who were encouraged to frame the experience in terms of self-determination—went to the hard puzzles. They worked longer and scored better. They later said they had a great time.
“Internal locus of control is a learned skill,” Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who helped conduct that study, told me. “Most of us learn it early in life. But some people’s sense of self-determination gets suppressed by how they grow up, or experiences they’ve had, and they forget how much influence they can have on their own lives.
“That’s when training is helpful, because if you put people in situations where they can practice feeling in control, where that internal locus of control is reawakened, then people can start building habits that make them feel like they’re in charge of their own lives—and the more they feel that way, the more they really are in control of themselves.”
For Krulak, studies like this seemed to hold the key to teaching recruits self-motivation. If he could redesign basic training to force trainees to take control of their own choices, that impulse might become more automatic, he hoped. “Today we call it teaching ‘a bias toward action,’?” Krulak told me. “The idea is that once recruits have taken control of a few situations, they start to learn how good it feels.
“We never tell anyone they’re a natural-born leader. ‘Natural born’ means it’s outside your control,” Krulak said. “Instead, we teach them that leadership is learned, it’s the product of effort. We push recruits to experience that thrill of taking control, of feeling the rush of being in charge. Once we get them addicted to that, they’re hooked.”
For Quintanilla, this tutorial started as soon as he arrived. Initially, there were long days of forced marches, endless sit-ups and push-ups, and tedious rifle drills. Instructors screamed at him constantly. (“We’ve got an image to uphold,” Krulak told me.) But alongside those exercises, Quintanilla also confronted a steady stream of situations that forced him to make decisions and take control.
In his fourth week of training, for instance, Quintanilla’s platoon was told to clean the mess hall. The recruits had no idea how. They didn’t know where the cleaning supplies were located or how the industrial dishwasher worked. Lunch had just ended and they weren’t sure if they were supposed to wrap the leftovers or throw them away. Whenever someone approached a drill instructor for advice, all he received was a scowl. So the platoon began making choices. The potato salad got tossed, the leftover hamburgers went into the fridge, and the dishwasher was loaded with so much detergent that suds soon covered the floor. It took three and a half hours, including the time spent mopping up the bubbles, for the platoon to finish cleaning the mess hall. They mistakenly threw away edible food, accidentally turned off the ice cream freezer, and somehow managed to misplace two dozen forks. When they were done, however, their drill instructor approached the smallest, shyest member of the platoon and said he had noticed how the recruit had asserted himself when a decision was needed on where to put the ketchup. In truth, it was pretty obvious where the ketchup should have gone. There was a huge set of shelves containing nothing but ketchup bottles. But the shy recruit beamed as he was praised.
“I hand out a number of compliments, and all of them are designed to be unexpected,” said Sergeant Dennis Joy, a thoroughly intimidating drill instructor who showed me around the Recruit Depot one day. “You’ll never get rewarded for doing what’s easy for you. If you’re an athlete, I’ll never compliment you on a good run. Only the small guy gets congratulated for running fast. Only the shy guy gets recognized for stepping into a leadership role. We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”
The centerpiece of Krulak’s redesigned basic training was the Crucible, a grueling three-day challenge at the end of boot camp. Quintanilla was terrified of the Crucible. He and his bunkmates whispered about it at night. There were rumors and wild conjectures. Someone said a recruit had lost a limb midway through the course the previous year. Quintanilla’s Crucible began on a Tuesday morning when his platoon was woken at two A.M. and told they should prepare themselves to march, crawl, and climb across fifty miles of obstacle courses. Each person carried thirty pounds of gear. They had only two meals apiece to last fifty-four hours. At most, they could hope for just a few hours of sleep. Injuries were expected. Anyone who stopped moving or lagged too far behind, they were told, would be dropped from the Corps.
Midway through the Crucible, the recruits encountered a task called Sergeant Timmerman’s Tank. “The enemy has chemically contaminated this area,” a drill instructor shouted, pointing to a pit the size of a football field. “You must cross it while wearing full gear and gas masks. If a recruit touches the ground, you have failed and must start over. If you spend longer than sixty minutes in the pit, you have failed and must start over. You must obey your team leader. I repeat: You may not proceed without a direct verbal order from the team leader. You must hear a command before you act, otherwise you have failed and must start over.”
Quintanilla’s team formed a circle and began using a technique they had learned in basic training.
“What’s our objective?” one recruit said.
“To cross the pit,” someone replied.
“How do we use the boards?” another recruit said, pointing to planks with ropes attached.
“We could lay them end to end,” someone answered. The team leader issued a verbal order and the circle broke up to test this idea along the border of the pit. They stood on one board while hauling the other forward. No one could keep their balance. The circle reformed. “How do we use the ropes?” a recruit asked.
“To lift the planks,” another said. He suggested standing on both boards simultaneously and using the ropes to lift each piece in tandem, as if on skis.