The person–situation debate in

personality psychology Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include: * construction of a c ...

refers to the controversy concerning whether the person or the situation is more influential in determining a person's

behavior Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as wel ...

Personality trait In psychology, trait theory (also called dispositional theory) is an approach to the study of human personality. Trait theorists are primarily interested in the measurement of ''traits'', which can be defined as habitual patterns of behaviour, tho ...

psychologists believe that a person's personality is relatively consistent across situations.

Situationists The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution ...

, opponents of the trait approach, argue that people are not consistent enough from situation to situation to be characterized by broad personality traits. The debate is also an important discussion when studying social psychology, as both topics address the various ways a person could react to a given situation.

Background

Interest in determining whether there were any generalities in behavior began in the 1920s and 30s.Epstein, S. & O'Brien, E.J. (1985). The Person-Situation Debate in Historical and Current Perspective. ''Psychological Bulletin, 98'' (3), 513–537.

Gordon Allport Gordon Willard Allport (November 11, 1897 – October 9, 1967) was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personal ...

and

Henry Murray Henry Alexander Murray (May 13, 1893 – June 23, 1988) was an American psychologist at Harvard University, where from 1959 to 1962 he conducted a series of psychologically damaging and purposefully abusive experiments on minors and under ...

both supported the idea of a consistent personality with occasional situational influences.Hogan, R. (2009). Much ado about nothing: The person-situation debate. ''Journal of Research in personality, 43'' 249. Allport noted that "traits become predictable to the extent that identities in stimulus situations are predictable."Allport, G. W. (1927). Concepts of trait and personality. ''Psychological Bulletin, 24''(5), 284–293. doi:10.1037/h0073629 Others like

Edward Thorndike Edward Lee Thorndike (August 31, 1874 – August 9, 1949) was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to the theory o ...

viewed behavior as a composition of responses an individual has to situations. In 1968,

Walter Mischel Walter Mischel (; February 22, 1930 – September 12, 2018) was an Austrian-born American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. He was the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in the Department ...

published a book called ''Personality and Assessment'' claiming that behavior is too cross-situationally inconsistent to be classified with personality traits. He stated: "...with the possible exception of intelligence, highly generalised behavioral consistencies have not been demonstrated, and the concept of personality traits as broad dispositions is thus untenable"Mischel, Walter. (1968). ''Personality and Assessment'', London, Wiley. His book was a non-systematic meta-analysis of some of the research on the relationship between behavioral and personality traits (assessed by either self-report or peer-report). The book also assessed studies regarding measurements of behavior from one situation to another. This book generated a formidable dispute between

social psychologists Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not. Etymology The word "social" derives from ...

and trait theorists because trait questionnaires had been used to measure personality for many decades. Behaviorism had dominated the field of psychology up until this time, making Mischel's claim devastating to the mainstream consensus amongst personality psychologists and causing many psychologists to question and doubt whether personality exists. According to David C. Funder, Mischel's book posed three main questions: *Is personality consistent and does it overcome situational influences? *Are people's intuitions about each other's personalities generally flawed or generally correct? *If personality is really that consistent, why are psychologists continuing to argue about this issue? More recently, Mischel has retracted some of his original claims, protesting that some psychologists misinterpreted his argument to mean he believes personality does not exist.Mischel, W. & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. ''Psychological Review, 102,'' 246–268. One of the largest critiques of the person-situation debate is that it does not follow "modern science", as it studies specific people in specific situations and is difficult to replicate and generalize results.

Situationist argument

Situationists had a number of arguments, but they can be generally summarized into four:Funder, D.C. (2010). The Personality Puzzle. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.Roberts, B.W. (2009). Back to the future: ''Personality and Assessment'' and personality development, ''Journal of Research in Personality 43''. 137–145. # Low correlations between measures of behavior and personality: In psychological research, whether relationships between variables exist are compared by the

correlation coefficient A correlation coefficient is a numerical measure of some type of correlation, meaning a statistical relationship between two variables. The variables may be two columns of a given data set of observations, often called a sample, or two components ...

. Mischel argued that in his literature review of personality research, the

correlation In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics ...

between personality and behavior, or behavior across situations, rarely exceeded .30-.40. Because the correlations are close to zero, Mischel concluded that personality traits have little to no relationship to shaping behavior. This claim was especially detrimental to personality psychology and continues to haunt many fields of psychology research today. # The validity of self-report measures and clinical assessment procedures: Most of the studies that Mischel reviewed had taken place in laboratory settings. Rarely was behavior analyzed in natural settings. The claim was that trait psychologists did not adequately combat issues of method variance, social desirability and response sets, and construct validity when they constructed their measures of traits. The practical utility of trait measurements in predicting behavior was also questioned. Even when observation studies were conducted, there was observer bias (that is, traits are in the eye of the beholder). # The type of behavioral assessment and treatment procedures that were becoming popular at the time: These treatments and behavioral assessment methods focused on the situational influences on behavior, rather than personality traits. # Stability: behavior is not cross-situationally consistent, and any stability can be attributed to the consistency of the situation, not the person. Situationists questioned whether personality traits exist when behaviors are not consistent across situations; after all, why spend time studying a construct that has no validity? Because of the aforementioned points, situationists argued that the predictive ability of personality traits is severely lacking. Opponents of the trait approach claimed that the idea of personality traits is fundamentally flawed and that behavior would be better understood through conditioning and learning processes.

Responses

Over time, personality psychologists have formed rebuttals to Mischel's criticisms. According to Funder, Mischel's analysis was quite short (only 16 pages), and therefore was not comprehensive of the personality literature available at the time. With a fair review of the literature, the predictability of behavior from traits may be larger than what researchers previously assumed. Improved research methods can increase the predictability. The situationist argument was formed based on research studies that were conducted in laboratory situations, and therefore did not reflect behavior in real life. When studying behaviors in a more natural setting, personality is likely to influence behavior. According to Allport, personality will be more likely to exhibit greater apparent effects in real situations that are important and influential to the individual being observed. Predictability can also be influenced depending on what is being measured, and some behaviors may be more consistent than others. For example, the amount a person gestures or the volume of a person's voice are more likely to be consistent across situations than goal-directed behaviors, such as when a person is trying to impress another person. It may also be that on average, individuals act consistently, and therefore personality research may be more telling as general behavioral trends than specific instances. This is evident in when people are interested in personalities of others, they are more interested in how others will generally act, not one specific behavior at a specific time. A correlation of .40 is not that small of a correlation and can explain more variance than most people think. Correlation coefficients of the effects found in studies of personality variables cannot be comparable with effects found in studies of situational variables because the two styles of research do not employ a common metric. After converting the statistics that social psychologists use in analyzing situation variables and behavior into correlations used by personality psychologists in analyzing trait variables and behavior, Funder and Daniel J. Ozer found that the correlations between situations and behaviors are also around the .30–.40 range. After conversion, it was found that even well-respected studies, like the one conducted by

Stanley Milgram Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.Blass, T. (2004). ''The Man Who Shocke ...

on obedience that used fake electric shocks to study how people react to being asked to cause harm to others (

Milgram Experiment The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range ...

), found correlations of situations and behaviors to be around .40. Moreover, survey studies that compare the effects of situational variables on behavior show that the correlation between situation and behavior are also around the .30–.40 range. Seymour Epstein found that if the behaviors were aggregated over time, the cross situational consistency of behaviors is much higher. Even in highly controlled studies, cross-situational consistency is around the .40 range. Personality traits are important because personality traits exist. The field of personality psychology gained attention when Allport had his assistant, Henry Odbert, counted how many different words in the English dictionary could be used to describe differences in personality. Odbert reported 17, 953. With such a large number of words that are related to personality trait differences, Allport and Odbert proposed the

Lexical hypothesis The lexical hypothesis (also known as the fundamental lexical hypothesis, lexical approach, or sedimentation hypothesis) is a thesis, current primarily in early personality psychology, and subsequently subsumed by many later efforts in that subfie ...

, or the theory that traits are obviously an important part of how people think and talk about each other, or else it would not be a part of the language. Words that make people more sensitive to individual differences are continuing to be created and formed today.

Current directions

Mischel's book raised important questions about trait concepts and measures in psychological research. Researchers like

Douglas Kenrick Douglas T. Kenrick (born 1948) is professor of psychology at Arizona State University. His research and writing integrate three scientific syntheses of the last few decades: evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and dynamical systems theory. ...

and Funder note that controversy is beneficial to scientific research because it helps narrow down competing hypotheses. Most personality researchers have now concluded that both the person and the situation contribute to behavior. Specifically, situational variables are more conclusive when it comes to predicting behavior in specific situations, while traits are more descriptive of patterns of behavior that influence behavior across situations. Some researchers have suggested the possibility of situational factors (like social roles) eliciting situation-specific goals which then influence the development of personality traits. On the other hand, recent research has found that person-specific traits (like achievement emotions), which are developed by personality traits, may contribute to how someone perceives and then acts in a situation. Some believe that the person-situation debate came to a resolution in the 1970s, though it is still widely discussed as if the debate as not ended. One possible reason the debate is still discussed is because it criticizes foundational personality psychology ideas from

Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical ...

and

John B. Watson John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878 – September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist who popularized the scientific theory of behaviorism, establishing it as a psychological school.Cohn, Aaron S. 2014.Watson, John B." Pp. 1429–1430 in ''T ...

that date back to the early 20th century.

Interactionism

The

interactionism In micro-sociology, interactionism is a theoretical perspective that sees social behavior as an interactive product of the individual and the situation. In other words, it derives social processes (such as conflict, cooperation, identity forma ...

perspective recognizes that the effect of personality depends on the situation and that situations are affected by the personalities of the people who are present. Interactionism also recognizes that people often choose situations that reflect their personalities. One of the many interactionism researchers,

David M. Buss David Michael Buss (born April 14, 1953) is an American evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, researching human sex differences in mate selection. He is considered one of the founders of evolutionary psychology. Biog ...

, introduced the idea that persons and situations interact in three different ways: *The effect of personality on behavior depends on the situation and vice versa *Certain people typically find themselves in certain situations, depending on their personality *People change situations by how they act and what they do in these situations. A commonly used example of person-situation interaction is the Stanford prison experiment, where college students participated in a study that simulated a prison setting with some students acting as guards and others as prisoners. The study was terminated when the guards became even more abusive than anticipated. While

Philip Zimbardo Philip George Zimbardo (; born March 23, 1933) is an American psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He became known for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment, which was later severely criticized for both ethical and scient ...

concluded that the study shows evidence of the effect of the situation transcending personality traits, more recent studies show that these students were drawn to participate in a study of "prison life" because of their personality characteristics.

Synthesis

Personality psychologists

William Fleeson William Fleeson is an American personality psychologist. He is the Hultquist Family Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan after completing a Bachelor of Arts in philoso ...

and Erik Noftle have suggested that the person-situation debate ended in a

synthesis Synthesis or synthesize may refer to: Science Chemistry and biochemistry *Chemical synthesis, the execution of chemical reactions to form a more complex molecule from chemical precursors ** Organic synthesis, the chemical synthesis of organ ...

. According to them, there is more than one type of behavior consistency. Traits are not robustly predictive of cross-situational consistency, but rather, predictive of consistency for a wide distribution of behaviors over time. Personality is not by itself a strong predictor of behavior but a better predictor can be ascertained from an average of behavior in environments. This will lead to a better model called density distributions. These models track how strongly a participant reacts in given situations. Fleeson posited that an individual has an anchor mean level of a trait, but the individual's behavior can vary around this mean depending on situations. Therefore, this distribution could account for the low cross-situational consistency of single acts of behavior while also explaining the high consistency of behaviors over time.

References

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