0.15 Social cognition, personality, and emotion  (Page 17/18)

The central assumption of trait theories of personality, cross-situational consistency, came under fire fairly early on, but without much impact on personality theorists until later. In a widely ignored article published in the American Journal of Sociology, Reinhardt Reinhardt, J. M. (1937). Personality traits and the situation. American Journal of Sociology , 2, 492-500. (1937) was one of the first to point out the shortcomings of this model: "The reliability of predictions as to future behavior...when based solely upon a personality classification derived from individual reaction in a clearly defined type of situation depends not upon the constancy of individual purpose alone...but also upon the continuance or recurrence of the same type of situation". More important from the point of the current person v. situation controversy was the gradual accumulation of evidence suggesting that the personal consistency model underlying trait theories is only valid in certain circumscribed situations. Thus self-ratings of traits on paper-and-pencil instruments, the very stuff of personality tests, are fairly consistent over time. Similarly, other behaviors may also be consistent as long as the situation is more or less exactly replicated. Finally personality traits with a strong intellectual component were shown to have a reasonably high cross-situational consistency, which may be interpreted as the reflection of the well-known "g" factor in different tasks requiring intellectual problem solving. What the studies have not shown, however, is that pure personality traits can predict behavior across different situations. Although the evaluation of this emerging empirical evidence began a while ago, the person v. situation issue has only developed into a full-blown controversy in the early seventies.

So if someone is "nice", does this mean that they are nice in every situation? People probably have consistent intellectual abilities in different situations, as your intellect stays the same, but do people change other aspects of their personality from situation to situation? Maybe all people really have multiple personality types, they just aren't aware of it. If you are nice to some people but mean to others, would you call yourself a nice person or a mean one? Everyone is mean in some way - when you label someone as "nice", are you taking into account the other way you could easily perceive them - as being extremely mean?

The controversy was strongly stimulated by Mischels Mischel, W. (1968). "Personality and Assessment." Wiley, New York. arguments. He reviewed a broad spectrum of empirical studies and concluded that both trait and state theories are based on the assumption of intrapsychic consistency in behavior, an assumption which is clearly not supported by the evidence. As a replacement, he offers social behavior theory, which "seeks the determinants of behavior in the conditions that covary with the occurrence, maintenance, and change of behavior..social behavior theory seeks order and regularity in the form of general rules which relate environmental changes to behavior changes". This formulation implicitly emphasizes the importance of physical, external, environmental forces on shaping behavior, and has a strong flavor of the old S-R formulations. This approach, which has, perhaps unjustly, been labelled "situationism", was no doubt strongly influenced by the then Zeitgeist in psychology with its strong reliance on positivistic methodology, and the patent success of pragmatic behavior therapies in clinical psychology, formerly a client-branch of personality theory.