What predicts behavior? The Person-Situation Debate

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What predicts behavior?The Person-Situation
Debate
INTERNAL FORCES ! (the person)
CONTEXTUAL FORCES ! (the situation)
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SITUATIONIST CRITIQUE OF PERSONALITY (other
names Person-Situation Controversy Consistency
Paradox) A controversial and painful debate that
almost killed the field of personality but at the
end helped to redefine and improve the concept of
trait (the later, thanks to people like Bem,
Funder, Buss, Winter, Cantor, Emmons, among
others). Political roots of this debate?
Long-standing disagreements between clinical
psychologists (Freudian, interested in
intra-psychic structures --the internal!) and
experimental psychologists (Radical behaviorism,
interested in social, cultural forces --what can
be observed!)
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SITUATIONIST CRITIQUE OF PERSONALITY How did
all started? Mischels (1968) did an extensive
review of personality studies (use of
self-reports and projective tests to predict
single behaviors) and found that most
correlations among related measures of
personality traits (e.g., honesty and
conscientiousness scales) and between personality
traits and related behaviors (e.g., honesty scale
and cheating behavior) were only .20-.30 (less
10 variance). MISCHELS CONCLUSION --gt is the
concept of trait important or useful at all?
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• SITUATIONIST CRITIQUE OF PERSONALITY
• therefore .
• Personality traits dont influence behavior much
  (we overestimate peoples behavioral consistency
  --gt personality cognitive illusion).
• At any time, peoples behavior is mainly powered
  by situational forces such as roles, peer
  pressure, cues (priming of certain cognitions
  and motives), media influence, etc ...

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PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGYS RESPONSE TO THIS
DEBATE? 10 years later . Epstein (1979),
Funder and Ozer's (1983) --gt reanalysis of some
of situationism's best known studies -gt
predictive power of situations had about the same
size as criticized "personality coefficients"!
(.20-.30)
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PROPOSED SOLUTIONS TO CONTROVERSY (and lessons
learned from it) 1. INTERACTIONISM Very often,
a big chunck of behavioral variance (y) is
predicted by the interaction between the
situation (S) and personality (P), that is PxS
BEHAVIOR (y) P S PxS
error ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE (ANOVA) MODEL
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Example of a significant interaction effect
between personality and the situation
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BEHAVIOR (y) P S PxS error Y
creative work performance P openness to
experience (scores on this measure were used to
divide people in two groups HIGH and LOW
Openness) S clerical job vs. student newspaper
job
HIGH
HIGH
Creative vs. Uncreative behavior
HIGH
LOW
LOW
(Y)
LOW
News-paper
Clerical
Job type (S)
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BEHAVIOR (y) P S PxS error Y
creative work performance P openness to
experience (scores on this measure were used to
divide people in two groups HIGH and LOW
Openness) S clerical job vs. student newspaper
job
HIGH
HIGH
In this example, only the main effects (P S
separately) are significant (the interaction
between them is not significant)
Creative vs. Uncreative behavior
LOW
HIGH
LOW
(Y)
LOW
News-paper
Clerical
Job type (S)
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PROPOSED SOLUTIONS TO CONTROVERSY (and lessons
learned from it) 2. ROLE OF MODERATOR-VARIABLES
Individual differences in peoples need for
consistency (how much importance you give to show
consistency on your behavior, values, goals, etc)
and self-monitoring (attention to situational
cues) moderate predictive power of personality
and the situation.
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PROPOSED SOLUTIONS TO CONTROVERSY (and lessons
learned from it) 3. AGGREGATION Correlations
between conceptually-related traits or between
traits and their related behaviors increase
dramatically when these measures are aggregated
(ie. averaged) across different situations,
times, types of questionnaires, etc.)