Particular traits, such as patience, persistence, and self-mastery, whether the product of relatively innate temperaments or parenting practices and other features of early social learning, can have similar cumulative consequences, as Walter Mischel documented in reporting the surprisingly high correlation between children's nursery school performance in his famous delay of gratification task and subsequent measures of study habits and academic success (Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990).