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

Mischel's arguments have been criticized on numerous accounts. The most important of these is that he appears to ignore cognitive mediating factors in the determination of behavior, and he also seems to deny the role of individual differences, in favor of assigning a casual determinant status to situations. Thus Alker (1972) sought to defend the trait model by arguing that cross-situational consistency is not a necessary assumption for trait theories. He argued that personality variables remain a major source of variance in behavior, and criticized the studies showing situations differences on methodological grounds (the samples were too homogeneous, disturbed rather normal people were used, etc). Bem (1972) and later Endler (1973) have taken issue with Alker's propositions, defending Mishel's position in its importance aspects. Bowers Bowers, K. S. (1973). Situationism in psychology: An analysis and a critique. Psychological Review , 80, 307-336. (1973) has also criticized Mischel's alleged "situationism", but his critique was oriented more towards the perceived extremity of Mischel's S-R formulations, and not against the substance of his thesis. Thus, he suggested that "situationsim has gone too far in the direction of rejecting the role of organismic or intrapsychic determinants of behavior...It is my argument that both the trait and the situationist positions are inaccurate and misleading and that a position stressing the interaction of the person and the situation is both conceptually satisfying end empirically warranted".

"S-R" is 'stimulus-response'. It makes sense that, in order to figure out someones personality, you would look at their internal thinking (their beliefs, judgments, etc) and compare this to how they actually interact. That is just a lot more complicated than looking at either one by itself, how they interact or how they think. You could come up with a set of rules as to how the environment changes behavior, analyze the rules taking into account the persons thoughts, and come to conclusions about their personality type.

Much of this controversy has been superseded is Mischel's later, much more moderate and more cognitively oriented conceptualization of the issue. He distances himself from a purely situationist position:

• Evidence for the lack of utility of inferring hypothesized global trait dispositions from behavioral signs should not be misread as an argument for the greater importance of situations than persons.

Instead, he suggests that the individual's previous social learning history may contribute to his idiosyncratic perception and interpretation of given situations, resulting in idiosyncratic behavior in terms of the meaning the situation has for the individual. Thus, it "becomes important to assess the effective stimuli, or 'stimuli as coded', which regulate his responses in particular contexts. These stimuli as coded should not be confused with the totality of objective physical events". Aside from the S-R terminology, this position comes surprisingly close to what phenomenologists have said all along: the perceived, subjective, phenomenological situation, and not the objective situation is the most important determinant of behavior. The "cognitive transformations" an individual employs in interpreting a situation are the foci of interest: "Assessing the acquired meaning of stimuli is the core of social behavior assessment" (Mischel, 1968). Mischel (1973) goes some way towards developing his cognitive social learning model of personality. He proposes that instead of traits, person variables such as cognitive construction competencies, encoding strategies and personal constructs, behavior-outcome and stimulus-outcome expectancies in particular situations, subjective stimulus values and self-regulatory systems and plans should be studied. This may well be feasible and even profitable in one-to-one clinical settings, where the individual learning therapies may be constructed on the bases of an investigation of such cognitive, individual variables. But it is also clear that this method is drastically different from the nomothetically-oriented mainstream of psychological research, and its implications are more far-reaching than the sedate S-R terminology would suggest. For Mischel's (1973) cognitive social learning approach to personality appears to be, in everything but terminology, a recipe for idiographic, subjective and interpretative analysis of unique meanings and construals of unique individuals of the situations they encounter.

So basically analyze everything - subjective perceptions, the different types of stimulus, unique meanings of things and individuals, personal constructs (such as schema), ones expectations and ideas of the value of various stimuli, etc.

Social psychology, like most other branches of psychology for a long time operated on an implicit personal consistency assumption. Individuals were assumed to perceive each other, conform to social pressure, or hold attitudes in a fairly steady, constant and consistent fashion. While that is true to some extent, it is fairly obvious that people are much more dynamic and complex than previously thought.