Understanding Personality Psychology: Biological, Cognitive, and Behavioral Approaches, Assignments of Personality Psychology

Download Understanding Personality Psychology: Biological, Cognitive, and Behavioral Approaches and more Assignments Personality Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! Li TEST BANK Personality in Social Psychology — GUARANTEED SAFE CHECKOUT — VISA 4 eee OP Personality in Social Psychology 1 Personality in Social Psychology Personality in Social Psychology Introduction Social psychology and personality psychology have the same job: to seek to understand the meaningful, consequential, and for the most part social behaviors of daily life. Cognitive psychology examines component processes such as memory, perception, and cognition. Biological psychology seeks to understand the physical underpinnings of behavior in the anatomy, physiology, functional organization, genetic basis and evolutionary history of the nervous system. Developmental psychology explores the roots of behavior in genetics and early childhood experience, and changes across the life course. All of these fields could be viewed as foundational for the common concern of social and personality psychology, which is to understand what people do every day. In this light, it is unsurprising that courses in social and personality psychology are among Personality in Social Psychology 4 research. Part I defines the field and Part II describes the basic conceptual and theoretical approaches to studying personality. It is proposed that, to the degree that each basic approach to personality represents empirical science, they all depend on the assessment of individual differences through behavior. This dependency puts the trait approach at the center of personality psychology. Part III discusses current research and outlines some of the ways that behavior has been used to assess personality. These include the prominent method of self-report, but also include peers’ judgments and other, wider-ranging and creative techniques for observing and measuring behavior. The last three parts deal with the competition that has characterized the relationship between personality and social psychology for the past 40 years or so. Part IV describes the intersection of personality and social psychology. It focuses on research in person perception and accurate personality judgment, and the contrast between these two traditions. Part V outlines the basis and unfortunate evolution of the estrangement between personality and social psychology, which appears to be slowly ending. Finally, Part VI offers suggestions for re- integrating these fields towards a relationship that can be become more cooperative and less competitive. Part I: Personality Psychology Personality can be defined as an individual’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms – hidden or not – behind those patterns (Funder, 2007). The ultimate goal of personality psychology is to explain every individual from the inside out. The mission includes describing, measuring and explaining how people differ from one another, uncovering the conscious and Personality in Social Psychology 5 unconscious thoughts and feelings that drive behavior, and predicting what people will do in the future, among other goals. But this mission has one problem: it is impossible. The complete study of the individual encompasses too many considerations at once to be feasibly pursued by investigators with human limitations of time and intelligence. One way to make personality research more manageable is to divide it into organized chunks. Rather than trying to look at every possible aspect of personality at the same time, personality research proceeds along different theoretical avenues. Some researchers examine the biological underpinnings of personality, others look at developmental trajectories, others examine how the environment affects personality, and others study how people differ in how they perceive and process information, and still others – and all of them, in some sense – seek to discover and assess the basic psychological dimensions along which individuals differ. All of these areas of research are similar in that they focus on individual differences and patterns of behavior, but are guided by different paradigmatic frameworks that specify which phenomena are the focus of attention (e.g., particular traits and behaviors) and which mechanisms are used for explanation (e.g., genes vs. the environment vs. cognition). The basic approaches to studying personality are biological, psychoanalytic, humanistic, learning-based, cognitive, and trait-based (Funder, 2007). Although the different approaches sometimes compete with one another for the ultimate status of explaining everything there is to know about personality, the reality is that different research questions are better addressed through different paradigmatic perspectives. For example, the principles of behaviorism can be used to explain how gambling behavior is maintained, but say nothing about why those who have gambling Personality in Social Psychology 6 addictions are often unable to admit that they have a problem. In contrast, psychoanalysis has much to say about denial and other defense mechanisms, but offers little toward understanding how the intermittent reinforcement schedule associated with gambling can make this maladaptive behavior so persistent. For this reason, it makes more sense to view each approach as useful for addressing its own key concerns, rather than viewing them as mutually exclusive alternatives. Part II: The Basic Approaches to Studying Personality Biological Approach The biological approach to studying personality searches for the organic roots of individual differences using anatomy, physiology, genetics, and evolutionary theory. Anatomy. Research focusing on anatomy attempts to identify brain structures that play a role in various personality traits. For example, research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has shown that shy people, compared to people described as more “bold,” respond to pictures of unfamiliar people with bilateral activation of the amygdala, and to pictures of familiar people with activation on just the left side of this organ (Beaton, Schmidt, Schulkin, Antony, Swinson & Hall, 2008). Bolder individuals respond to pictures of familiar and unfamiliar people with stronger activation in their nucleus accumbens, compared to shy people. Research by Barrett (2006) also shows that the amygdala plays an important role in positive emotions such as sexual responsiveness. Another intriguing finding is that activity in the left frontal lobe appears to be associated with pleasant emotion and motivation to approach attractive people and objects, while activity in the right frontal lobe seems to be associated with unpleasant emotion and Personality in Social Psychology 9 Although psychophysiology has provided insights about the biological basis of behavior and individual differences in personality traits, researchers must be careful about inferring causal relationships. For example, Bernhardt et al. (1998) found that after watching a World Cup playoff game, fans of the winning soccer team had higher testosterone levels than fans of the losers. And psychotherapy can change measurable aspects of brain activity (Isom & Heller, 1999). Findings like these suggest that biology is not just a cause of individual differences in behavior and psychological experience; it is also an effect. Neuroanatomy, physiology, and patterns of behavior and experience are complicated phenomena in and of themselves, and the relationship between personality and biology is surely even more complex, with causal arrows pointing in both directions. Behavioral Genetics. Behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology both focus on the inheritance of individual differences in behavior. For the good and the bad, we are more similar to people with whom we share more genes (e.g., our parents) than fewer genes (e.g., our cousins). We look like our parents, we are more likely to have high blood pressure if our parents do, and we even have an IQ level similar to our parents. Behavioral genetics extends this knowledge and studies the question: Are those who are more genetically similar (e.g., monozygotic twins) more similar in personality compared to those who are less genetically similar (e.g., dyzygotic twins)? Decades of research has established that most and perhaps all personality traits are heritable to some degree. Indeed, one authoritative researcher seriously suggested that “the first law of behavioral genetics” should be everything is heritable (Turkheimer, 1998, p. 789). Genes matter, to at least some degree, to any psychological outcome and certainly any personality trait. Personality in Social Psychology 10 Having established this fact, current research is directed towards more fine-tuned questions, such as, how do genes affect personality and how do genes and the environment interact to influence personality outcomes. For example, Caspi et al. (2002) found that boys whose genes caused a low level of expression of an enzyme called MAO were more likely to be antisocial if they were maltreated as children. If, however, their genes caused a high level of expression of MAO, they were protected to some degree from such adverse effects. As the field of behavioral genetics continues to develop, the goal will be to generate increasingly fine-grained accounts, such as the one just emerging concerning MAO, of how genes interact with the environment to create brain structures and aspects of physiology that lead to individual differences in behavior. Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary psychology studies behavioral patterns proposed to have been adaptive during the development of the human species. It assumes that behaviors that are common to humans (a) have a genetic basis and (b) increased the likelihood of survival and/or reproduction during evolutionary history. The more a behavior helps an individual to survive and reproduce, the more likely the behavior is to be genetically transmitted, and therefore, appear in subsequent generations. Evolutionary psychology has particularly focused on variation in sexual behavior between males and females. It is commonly hypothesized that gender differences in behavior that are still present today exist because, in the history of evolution, the behaviors that increased the likelihood of reproduction for males were different from the behaviors that increased the likelihood of reproduction for females. Sexual jealousy has been a hot topic in evolutionary research. Buss et al. (1992) observed that females are more distressed by imagining their mate being emotionally Personality in Social Psychology 11 unfaithful than sexually unfaithful, whereas males are more distressed by imagining sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. The explanation for this gender difference is that attending to cues of sexual infidelity (becoming distressed) resulted in greater reproductive fitness for males in evolutionary history because males face paternal uncertainty. It was more costly for a male to mate with a female who might be mating with other males and possibly invest in offspring who were not his own than to mate with a female who might form an emotional attachment with another male. Attending to cues of emotional infidelity, however, resulted in greater reproductive fitness for females because females do not face parental uncertainty. It was more costly for a female to mate with a partner who might form an emotional bond with another female and fail to provide resources for her offspring than to mate with a male who might have other sexual partners. Although the male might have other offspring, his emotional attachment will ensure that he provides resources to the females’ offspring and thus promotes her genetic fitness. Are the conclusions of evolutionary psychology relevant to personality? If one assumes that men and women have different “personalities” – and they certainly are individuals who, as a group, differ from one another – then the answer would seem to be yes. Evolutionary theorizing provides an explanation of one area of behavior where the big two groups of humans appear to be characteristically different. But mostly personality is defined at a level more specific than “typical male” or “typical female” and it is less clear how to apply evolutionary theorizing to explanations of personality traits. Indeed, some researchers have argued that evolutionary theory almost implies that individual differences do not matter, because any traits that were disadvantageous for Personality in Social Psychology 14 with. In a similar vein, our minds make many mistakes of memory and inference but a mind that wasn’t smart enough to make essential decisions relevant to survival and reproduction would not have allowed its body to pass genes to succeeding generations. This line of reasoning suggests that the basic mechanisms of cognitive inference that have survived millennia of harsh environments and reproductive competition are more likely to be adaptive, by and large, than fundamentally flawed (Gigerenzer, Todd & the ABC Research Group, 2000; Haselton & Funder, 2006). In this and other ways, evolutionary considerations offer new ways to look at established theories in social and personality psychology and new grounds on which to evaluate them. Psychoanalytic Approach While biological research seeks to identify the specific physical foundations of behavior and personality, the psychoanalytic approach often operates on a level of almost metaphysical abstraction – one that, nonetheless, leads to unique insights and, on occasion, testable hypotheses. Psychoanalysis seeks to understand personality at the deepest psychological level and takes on the unique challenge of explaining what is going on in the hidden and sometimes dark recesses of the human mind. From a psychoanalytic perspective, personality is shaped by early childhood experiences and behavior is ultimately determined by the outcomes of unconscious processes and conflict. The psychoanalytic approach focuses on constructs such as the unconscious mind, defense mechanisms, attachment, and ego-strength. Psychoanalysis has long been criticized for being unscientific because it was historically based on subjective interpretations of patients by clinical practitioners – most notably Sigmund Freud – using the case study method. However, aspects of Personality in Social Psychology 15 psychoanalytic theory sometimes have received empirical tests, and some of those tests have been successful (for reviews, see Baumeister, Dale & Sommer, 1998; Westen, 1998). Freud died in 1939 but his theory lives on, in several forms. In one form Freud himself is still the issue. A small psychoanalytic community continues to take Freud’s writings literally as infallible sources of truth; a counter-community continues to attack everything from his research methods to his personal life (Crews, 1993; Masson, 1984). Both of these effectively allied groups miss the point because psychoanalytic theory continues to evolve and has become detached from and largely independent of its long- deceased creator. This development was seen in the neo-Freudians (who are themselves no longer “neo” or even, mostly, alive) such as Adler, Jung, Erikson and Horney, and in the growth of psychoanalytically-inspired approaches such as object relations theory (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983) and attachment theory (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007). The most interesting modern manifestation of psychoanalytic theory has arisen among researchers who are currently using rigorous methodologies to test psychoanalytic ideas, with or without acknowledging their Freudian roots. According to Westen (1998, pp. 334-335), five key postulates of psychoanalytic theory are frequently studied and generally supported: 1. Much of mental life is unconscious, which means that people may do or think things that they do not themselves understand. 2. Different mental processes can operate at the same time and this parallel processing can produce conflicting thoughts and behavioral impulses. Personality in Social Psychology 16 3. The roots of adult personality can be found in childhood, and early experience has especially important implications for how individuals form later social relationships. 4. Social interactions are shaped by psychological representations of the self, others, and relationships. 5. Personality development involves learning to regulate sexuality and aggression as an individual moves from immaturity and dependence on others to maturity and independence. Among the research that supports one or more of these tenets are studies that show that a part of the mind (i.e., the unconscious) perceives things that the conscious mind does not (Erdelyi, 1974; Bornstein, 1999; Dijskterhuis, this volume), behavior and consciousness is a result of numerous independently operating mental subsystems (Rumelhart, McClelland, & The PDP Research Group, 1986), the unconscious mind can prevent the conscious mind from perceiving anxiety-provoking stimuli (Erdelyi, 1985), and childhood attachment with one’s parents may translate into styles of adult romantic attachment with important consequences for emotional life (Hazan & Shaver, 1990; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). Overall, psychoanalysis is the most widely and heavily criticized of all the approaches to studying personality; however, it continues to provoke interest and raises questions that the rest of psychology sometimes ignores. Humanistic Approach The humanistic approach was originally based on an even less scientific tradition than psychoanalysis. Early pioneers, such as Carl Rogers (1951) and Abraham Maslow (1987), believed that personality is a special entity that cannot be studied dispassionately Personality in Social Psychology 19 are similar as well as different across cultural contexts (e.g., Matsumoto, 2007; Oishi, Diener, Napa Scollon & Biswas-Diener, 2004). Learning-based Approaches Classic behaviorists ignore concepts like happiness and construals of reality because their approach strictly dictates that they study only that which can be directly observed. Behaviorism is a learning-based approach to studying personality and it places heavy emphasis on overt behavior and the rewards and punishments in the environment that condition individuals to behave in certain ways. From this perspective, personality is simply the behaviors that an individual performs as a result of environmentally imposed reinforcement contingencies. Although some researchers still conduct classic behavioral research (e.g., Applied Behavioral Analysis), most psychologists now recognize that pure behaviorism leaves out important psychological ingredients. For example, one’s beliefs about reinforcements, not just the reinforcements themselves, play an important role in determining behavior. In particular, the evaluative properties of rewards can be as important as the rewards themselves and can, depending on the circumstances, undermine or enhance their effects (Harackiewicz & Sansone, 2000). People also learn how to act from watching the behaviors and consequences of the behaviors of others. Considerations such as these led to the development of the social learning theories. Social learning theories stay true to behaviorism in acknowledging the importance of environmental influences on behavior, but they add unobservable elements that make their theories more attractive, and perhaps more plausible. Julian Rotter’s (1954, 1982) social learning theory discusses the importance of expectations for behavior and proposes that behavioral decisions are based on one’s beliefs about the attractiveness of Personality in Social Psychology 20 reinforcements and the perceived likelihood of attaining reinforcements. Like Rotter, Bandura’s (1971, 1977) social learning theory recognizes the importance of expectations of reinforcements, but his theory also emphasizes expectations about the self. Bandura’s version explains how beliefs about one’s own capabilities (e.g., self-efficacy) influence what one attempts to do and how watching the behavior of others (e.g., observational learning) influences one’s own actions. Walter Mischel’s “cognitive affective personality system” (CAPS) is a social- learning theory specifically intended to explain personality (Mischel & Shoda, 1995; Mischel, 1999). CAPS proposes that personality is a system composed of several person variables that interact with each situation in which a person finds himself or herself. Person variables include mental abilities and behavioral skills, ways of construing reality and efficacy expectations, procedures for controlling behavior, and affects or emotions. According to the CAPS theory, each individual can be characterized by a unique set of “If… then” statements that describe what a person will do in different situations. For example, “if” a conflict arises, one person might “then” become confrontational and escalate the hostilities, whereas “if” in conflict another individual might “then” seek to withdraw from the situation. Thus, the situation is the “if” and the behavior is the “then,” and every individual is characterized by a pattern of characteristic reactions to particular situational stimuli (a description of personality that is, in some ways, reminiscent of the S-R personality theory of John Watson (1930)). Cognitive Approach The cognitive approach, which evolved from and overlaps with the social learning theories, focuses on perceptual processes, thoughts and beliefs, and motivational Personality in Social Psychology 21 processes that form the basis of personality and behavior. One way of conceptualizing personality traits is to think of them as dimensions along which people think and perceive information differently. For example, one person might have the disposition to have positive thoughts more readily accessible, whereas another person might have the disposition to have negative thoughts more accessible. Gordon Allport pointed out this possibility many years ago, when he wrote: For some the world is a hostile place where men are evil and dangerous; for others it is a stage for fun and frolic. It may appear as a place to do one’s duty grimly; or a pasture for cultivating friendship and love. (Allport, 1961, p. 266). Individuals who perceive the world differently might be expected to behave accordingly, and research has confirmed this expectation. Downey and Feldman (1996) proposed that individuals who are higher in the trait of rejection sensitivity, for whom thoughts of rejection are readily available, are more likely to interpret any ambiguous signal as confirmation that their partner is about to abandon them. The slightest expression of irritation from a partner invokes panic, and because the person has a negative reaction toward his or her partner every time a threat is perceived, the person indeed becomes more likely to be rejected. Such individual differences in “chronic accessibility” may also be involved in aggression. Dodge and Frame (1982) found that aggressive boys were quick to perceive hostility in the characters of a short story, whereas nonaggressive boys generally reached a more benign interpretation. Trait Approach The trait approach to studying personality places individual difference constructs (i.e., personality traits) front and center. According to Allport (1931), traits are Personality in Social Psychology 24 regress one or more steps deeper, but they all depend on this first step, of identifying and measuring consistent individual differences in behavior. All but one of the basic approaches to personality are committed to a particular way of explaining these differences: the biological approach in anatomy, physiology, genetics and evolution, the psychoanalytic approach in unconscious processes and early experience, the humanistic approach in individual construals of reality, the learning approaches in responses to reward and punishment, and the cognitive approach in processes of perception and thought. The exception is the trait approach, which is primarily methodological (as seen in its emphasis on psychometric technology) and stands apart from a commitment to any particular explanation of the individual differences it identifies and measures. This atheoretical stance might be viewed as a weakness, but it puts the trait approach at the center of personality psychology because it provides an outlook and technology that is critical to all the approaches, and indeed to any researcher who would seek to understand how individuals are psychologically different from one another. For example, a positive psychologist who studies happiness must create a valid method of measuring it and observe how individual differences in happiness are associated with differences in behavior. Similarly, a behavioral geneticist who is interested in the inheritance of psychopathology must find an appropriate way to measure individual differences in various aspects of maladjustment. In short, if one is interested in psychological dimensions along which people differ, then there is no escaping the basic issues of psychometrics, whether one chooses the label one’s construct as a “trait,” a “person variable,” or some other near-synonym. Personality in Social Psychology 25 Moreover, descriptions of person variables or other individual difference constructs labeled with terms other than “trait” often amount to restatements. For example, the cognitive measures such as self-descriptive reaction time associated with “self-schemas” in the research by Markus (1977) are similarly associated with scores from conventional self-report scales such as the California Psychological Inventory (Fuhrman & Funder, 1995). One can also observe that the “if… then” statements that characterize the CAPS theory largely amount to operational definitions of personality traits. Whereas in trait terms one might say that a person who is more extraverted is more likely to be talkative in social situations, the CAPS theory would more specifically claim that “if” a particular person perceives a situation as social, “then” he or she will talk. There is not much difference between these statements, and one might even suggest that the trait description is more economical. For this reason, the remainder of the present chapter will be oriented towards trait psychology. It focuses on the conceptualization and measurement of individual differences, which is a core issue in personality research regardless of one’s deeper theoretical preference. Part III: Behavioral Assessment of Personality The foundation of empirical personality psychology is the observation of behavior – the only way to examine a personality construct is to propose a behavioral manifestation and then observe it. This is true regardless of the nature of the construct, which, as we have seen, might be anything from stimulus generalization, to rejection- sensitivity, to self-esteem, to conscientiousness, to gender identity. The scientific study of personality rests on the following simple formula: P → B. A researcher might Personality in Social Psychology 26 theoretically view P as causing B, or view P as a summary of B, but the method of study remains the same. A wide range of techniques can be used to examine the behaviors associated with personality, but in practice the most common method is self-report. Self-report has at least three advantages for personality assessment (along with some important disadvantages that will be considered later). First, a person lives his or her life in many different situations and is the only one who has had a chance to observe his or her own behavior in all of them. The self is also the only observer with direct access to his or her inner mental life, which is largely invisible from the outside. In short, the self has more information than anyone else, and has unique access to some. Second, self-views tend to have a causal force. Research on self-verification (Swann, Chang-Schneider & Angulo, 2007) suggests that people actively seek to behave in ways that confirm what they believe to be true about themselves, and studies of self-efficacy (e.g., Bandura, 1977) show how what people attempt to do depends upon they believe about their capabilities. Finally, and perhaps most importantly in practice, self-reports are the simplest and easiest type of data to obtain. Gathering observational behavioral data, assessing life outcomes, or recruiting friends or family to provide personality judgments of target individuals is expensive and time-consuming. Self-report allows researchers to quickly collect information about many people at relatively little cost. Self-reports yield behavioral data, in two senses. First, many questions on self report inventories are questions about behavior, ranging from whether the person goes to many parties to how often he or she gets angry. To the extent that the answers to these questions are accurate, self-report offers an efficient method to gather wide-ranging Personality in Social Psychology 29 socially. It tends to be lower when one has disappointed his or her social group and the negative feeling that accompanies low self-esteem should motivate a person to restore his or her reputation. For this reason, a person with unrealistically high self-esteem might fail to detect when others are unhappy with him or her and fail to respond in an appropriate manner. Overall, it seems that adaptive self-esteem is based on legitimate accomplishment, rather than having an extremely high or low level independent of reality. Self-monitoring is another personality trait that has been widely studied, its prominence pushed along by a highly productive original investigator (Mark Snyder) and a variety of creative studies by him and others. The self-monitoring scale measures individual differences in the degree to which a person is concerned with the impression he or she makes on others and adjusts his or her behavior to each social situation to bring about the desired impression (Snyder, 1974). According to theory, high self-monitors are sensitive to situational cues and monitor their behavior to behave in socially desirable ways. In contrast, low self-monitors are less concerned with the social climate and act more consistently, regardless of the situation. Not surprisingly, high self-monitors are more likely to be described as popular, expressive, and socially poised, whereas low self- monitors are more likely to be described as introspective and independent (Funder & Harris, 1986). Individuals higher in self-monitoring also perform better in job interviews (Osborn, Feild, & Veres, 1998), use more strategies to influence their co-workers (Caldwell & Burger, 1997), and are more willing to lie to get a date (Rowatt, Cunningham, & Druen, 1998). Finally, research suggests that high self-monitors are more Personality in Social Psychology 30 likely to look to the social environment to gauge how they are feeling, whereas low self- monitors are more likely to look within (Graziano & Bryant, 1998). Attributional complexity is an individual difference construct that may have arisen to exceptional prominence because of the innovative way it attempts to bridge traditional concerns of personality and social psychology. The Attributional Complexity Scale (ACS: Fletcher et al., 1986) was developed to reconcile two opposing views concerning how lay social perceivers determine whether the causes of another person’s behavior are internal, external, or a combination of the two. One view proposes that people are cognitive misers who rely on simple heuristics when attributing the causes of other’s behavior (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), while the other view holds that the attributional process is complex (Ross & Fletcher, 1985). Rather than viewing all social perceivers as either simple or complex, the ACS measures individual differences in the motivation and preference for complex attributions. Those higher in attributional complexity are more likely to consider both dispositional and situational factors when trying to understand others’ behavior, while those lower in attributional complexity are less likely to think about the causes of behavior or to consider multiple causes. Research has shown that, compared to those lower in attributional complexity, individuals higher in this trait are relatively less likely to fall prey to various errors of social judgment (Schaller et al., 1995; Follett & Hess, 2002) and, under some circumstances, are better at “mind reading” the thoughts of others in social interaction (Thomas & Fletcher, 2000). Research also suggests that individuals who are higher in attributional complexity are more likely to be described as thoughtful, empathic, open to experience, and generally likeable (Fast, Reimer, & Funder, 2008). Personality in Social Psychology 31 Multiple Traits Other widely-used personality tests measure a large number of traits at once. The “many-trait” inventories are typically used to examine the many possible psychological characteristics that are related to an important behavior or life outcome. For example, the California Adult Q-set 1 (CAQ: Block, 1978, 2007; Bem & Funder, 1978) consists of one hundred descriptions of specific psychological attributes (e.g., Is critical, skeptical, not easily impressed; Is a genuinely dependable and responsible person). Raters use the CAQ by sorting the items into nine categories that range from “highly characteristic” (category 9), “neither characteristic nor uncharacteristic” (category 5), to “highly uncharacteristic” (category 1). The resulting set of ratings is quasi-normally distributed because the technique prescribes that a pre-determined number of items be placed in each category. The largest number of items must be placed in category 5 and only a few items can be placed in the extreme categories (1 and 9). The advantage of the Q-sort rating method is that it forces raters to make fine-grained distinctions about the person being rated and reduces social desirability and various response sets (Block, 1978, 2007). Raters completing the CAQ may include acquaintances of the individual, therapists, researchers, or the individuals themselves. The CAQ has been used to study the psychological correlates of many behaviors. Funder, Block, and Block (1983) used the CAQ to examine sex differences in delay of gratification. They found that boys and girls described by teachers and researchers as reflective and planful are more likely to delay gratification; however, girls who delay are also more intelligent, competent, and resourceful, whereas boys who delay are more shy, compliant, and anxious. The 1 Terminological note: A set of items that are sorted into a predetermined, forced distribution is called a “Q- set”; the act of rating them in this format is “Q-sorting,” and a completed set of ratings is a “Q-sort.” Personality in Social Psychology 34 one reason why they live longer, and they perform better and have more success in the workplace.  Agreeableness refers to the degree to which an individual is cooperative, warm, and gets along well with others. Not surprisingly, those who describe themselves as higher in this trait enjoy better peer acceptance. They also are more satisfied with their dating partners, more likely to volunteer and less likely to suffer heart disease.  Finally, openness to experience is the most controversial trait of the Big Five in that researchers have disagreed about which characteristics should be subsumed by this factor and what it should be called (e.g., openness vs. intellect vs. culture). However, in general, this trait involves the degree to which an individual is creative, open-minded, and aesthetic. Those who describe themselves higher in openness are more likely to pursue investigative and/or artistic careers and are more likely to have left-wing, liberal values (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006). Beyond Self-report Although self-report questionnaires have traditionally dominated the literature and probably deserve credit for having contributed most of what has been learned about personality, they entail two major disadvantages. First, people may sometimes be unwilling to reveal undesirable aspects of their personalities. Second, people are not always aware of every aspect of themselves. Several studies suggest that people rate themselves higher on socially desirable characteristics (e.g., trustworthiness) and rate themselves lower on undesirable characteristics (e.g., laziness). For example, Funder and Dobroth (1987) found that people’s self-ratings of extraversion (a relatively neutral trait) Personality in Social Psychology 35 tended to agree better with their friends’ ratings of their extraversion than self-ratings of neuroticism and friends’ ratings of neuroticism (a relatively undesirable trait). Perhaps more telling, people’s reports of their own behavior do not always agree with direct observations (Gosling et al., 1998; Vazier & Mehl, in press). For these reasons, personality psychology increasingly emphasizes two methods that go beyond self-report: acquaintances’ judgments of personality, and direct behavioral observation. The people who share one’s social space are in a position to observe many behaviors under realistic, meaningful, and consequential circumstances. In various studies, these observers have included friends, acquaintances, teachers, interviewers, and therapists. As a result of their observations, considerable evidence shows, their judgments of personality tend to be accurate. Peers’ judgments of personality largely agree with self-judgments, with some exceptions (Funder & Colvin, 1997), and are predictive of directly observed behavior in the lab (e.g., Funder & Colvin, 1991) and in daily life (e.g., Vazire & Mehl, in press). Teachers’ ratings of children’s personality can predict personality, behavior and important life outcomes such as physical health and even longevity, years later (e.g., Friedman et al., 1995; Hampson, Goldberg, Vogt & Dubanoski, 2006). Turning to direct behavioral observation, a study by Borkenau et al. (2004) suggests that personality information can be revealed in seemingly trivial scenarios that observers view only briefly. Participants were videotaped performing 15 different tasks that varied from 1 minute to 12 minutes in length. Tasks included telling a joke to a confederate, introducing a stranger to the experimenter, inventing a definition for a neologism, reading newspaper headlines, and singing a song. These videotapes were later Personality in Social Psychology 36 viewed by judges who had never met the participants. Each judge viewed only one videotaped task of each participant. Judges then rated the participants along the Big Five traits and intelligence. Results indicated that judges’ personality ratings were positively correlated with participant’s self-ratings as well as ratings provided by the participants’ close acquaintances. The authors also examined the possibility that some of the 15 tasks might be especially diagnostic of personality traits. Results indicated that judges’ ratings of extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness agreed with self and acquaintance ratings equally well across all tasks. However, judges’ ratings of openness agreed most strongly with self and acquaintance ratings when judges viewed the task in which participants described multiple uses of a brick using pantomime. Also, judges’ ratings of intelligence were more strongly correlated with participant’s objective intelligence scores in the tasks where participants read newspaper headlines and invented a definition for a neologism. This suggests that social aspects of personality generally leak out regardless of what one is doing, but that judging an individual’s intelligence and openness requires specific observations of ability-demanding behavior. Gosling et al. (2002) examined the possibility that the environments that people construct for themselves contain information about their personalities. They argued that people craft their environments to be consistent with and reinforce their self-views and to display their identity to others. Judges viewed the offices or bedrooms of participants and then rated the participants along the Big Five traits. Judges’ personality ratings were found to positively correlate with participant’s own personality ratings as well as ratings provided by close acquaintances. Judges’ ratings of openness were most strongly Personality in Social Psychology 39 were rated as and directly and independently observed to be generally more smart, thoughtful, and likeable. This study suggests that word choice is a subtle manifestation of personality that relates to how people view themselves, how they are described by their acquaintances, and how they are observed to behave. In summary, several methods can be used to study personality and each type of behavioral information provides a different perspective. Self-report is by far the most common type of data gathered in personality research, however, researchers are increasingly using reports by friends, acquaintances, teachers and other observers, and putting serious effort into the development of direct and subtle behavioral indicators of personality. Part IV: Person Perception and Accuracy The way that an individual is perceived by others is highly consequential. Reputation determines the opportunities that others will make available to the individual and the expectations they will hold. A person with a good reputation will be trusted and find that other people like him or her; a person with a bad reputation probably not get the job that he or she wants, not attract his or her love interest, and be generally disliked. Moreover, a people tend to live up or down to their good or bad reputations because they tend to behave in ways that confirm the expectations of others (Rosenthal & Rubin, 1978; Snyder & Swann, 1978). The study of how people perceive one another is a major research topic in social and personality psychology (Macrae, this volume). It is called “person perception research” within social psychology and “accuracy research” within personality psychology and the difference in labels is more than superficial. The two Personality in Social Psychology 40 research paradigms are based on fundamentally different philosophical perspectives, focus on different aspects of social perception, and are studied using different methodologies. Person Perception Person perception research in social psychology is based on social constructivism, in the sense that it treats the views people have of one another as mental constructions, a property of the social perceiver rather than of the person who is described. Therefore, the focus of person perception research is on the cognitive processes that underlie the construction of impressions. One common methodology used to examine such processes involves creating an artificial social stimulus (such as description of a hypothetical person), proposing an optimal model for how the stimulus ought to be processed, and observing whether or not participants process the stimulus in the proposed optimal manner. To the extent that participants fail to process the stimulus correctly in this sense, they are presumed to be in error and the cognitive processes that led to the error are inferred by the researcher (Krueger & Funder, 2004). In a classic study, Jones and Harris (1967) asked participants to read essays for and against favor of Fidel Castro that, participants were told, were written by individuals who had been instructed in which position to take. The participants then estimated the essay-writers’ actual opinions. They tended to conclude that pro-Castro authors held relatively pro-Castro opinions, compared to anti-Castro authors, despite having been told the authors had no choice in what to write, and therefore were deemed by the experimenters to have committed an attribution error that Gilbert and Jones (1986) later called the “correspondence bias.” In other writings the bias was dubbed the Personality in Social Psychology 41 “fundamental attribution error” (FAE) and the original study was described as establishing “people’s overwillingness to ascribe behavior to enduring dispositions” (Nisbett & Ross, 1980, p. 131). We shall consider the fundamental status of the error later, but for now the methodological point concerns the way this study exemplifies a research design in which hypothetical stimuli are used to test putatively optimal models of information processing, which participants generally fail to follow. This design is typical of much research in person perception. An essential characteristic of this design is that it provides little or no information about the variables that might influence accuracy outside the laboratory. For example, in the study by Jones and Harris participants were clearly wrong to ascribe different attitudes to the pro and anti-Castro essay writers, because in similar experimental contexts near everybody agrees to write the prescribed essay regardless of his or her actual opinion. In real life, however, people perhaps more often say (and write) what they actually believe 4 . Even though a strategy of inferring corresponding beliefs from written statements leads to error in Jones and Harris’s experiment, therefore, the same strategy might produce correct judgments, more often than not, in realistic contexts. An analogous situation is found in demonstrations of visual effects such as the Ponzo or “railroad lines” illusion (Funder, 1987). Looking at Figure 1, a subject who believes the upper line to be longer than the lower line is simply wrong. In real life settings with a similar appearance, however, such as two objects sitting on a set of actual railroad tracks, the upper object really would be larger. 4 Under some circumstances, they also may come to believe what they have said and written (Bem, 1972). Personality in Social Psychology 44 History of Accuracy Research. Accuracy research in this sense has a history that goes back more than 70 years (e.g., Allport, 1937, chapter 18). Early studies focused on agreement between self and others’ judgments of personality, in search of correlates of the “good judge” (Estes, 1938; Taft, 1955). Research activity in this area came to an almost complete halt in the 1950s, however, for at least three reasons (Funder, 1995, p. 653-654). First, few consistent findings concerning the correlates of judgmental ability emerged from a multitude of studies. Second, severe methodological critiques of the methods used by almost all the studies of the time concluded that the numbers used to index self-other agreement – the typical standard for accuracy – were possibly confounded by actual and assumed similarity between judge and target, and response sets such as positivity and acquiescence (Cronbach, 1955; Gage & Cronbach, 1955). While the problems the critiques raised were not in fact insurmountable, the difficulty that appeared to be entailed in overcoming them discouraged many researchers from further studies in the area. The third reason for the falloff in accuracy research was that it began to be supplanted by experimental research in person perception (e.g., Tagiuri & Petrullo, 1958) – an approach that, as Jones noted, solved the problem of accuracy by bypassing it. Accuracy research began to revive in the early 1980s, however, as investigators turned their attention to the issues Cronbach raised and developed new methods for addressing accuracy issues. Kenny (e.g., 1994) developed statistical tools (and associated computer programs) for decomposing interpersonal judgments into their components, along with a theoretical model of how information is combined to yield personality judgments. A robust, general finding of his research has been that people generally judge each other accurately on important traits such as aggressiveness (e.g., Kenny et al., 2007). Personality in Social Psychology 45 Other researchers showed how even brief observations of behavior called “thin slices” can yield surprisingly valid judgments of personality and important interpersonal outcomes (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992, 1993; Rule, Ambady, Adams & Macrae, 2008). Moderators of Accuracy. Research has identified four basic moderators that affect the likelihood of making an accurate personality judgment: (1) properties of the judge, (2) properties of the target individual who is being judged, (3) properties of the trait that is being judged, and (4) properties of the information on which the personality judgment is based. The oldest and perhaps most frequently-studied moderator is properties of the judge. Early studies suggested that judges who are highly intelligent and conscientious render the most accurate judgments of personality; however, this was the research that was harshly criticized for using inadequate methods (e.g. Colvin & Bundick, 2001; Cronbach, 1955). More recent research suggests that judges who are higher in “communion,” invested in developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships, are more accurate judges of personality (Vogt & Colvin, 2003). Another study suggests that people who generally describe others in favorable terms (e.g. friendly and helpful) are more likely to be accurate because most people actually are generally friendly and helpful (Letzring & Funder, 2006). Overall, the good judge seems to be someone who is socially engaged and optimistic about people, however, there may be subtle differences in the personality characteristics that are associated with accuracy between male and female judges. Kolar (1996) found that the most accurate male judges of personality have a confident and outgoing interpersonal style, while the most accurate female judges are more likely to be Personality in Social Psychology 46 open to and have a high interest in others. This finding hints that being a good judge has important consequences for the judge him or herself, consistent with a recent report that people who are good at identifying facial expressions associated with fear tend to act in pro-social ways such as donating money or helping someone in need (Marsch, Kozak & Ambady, 2007). Another moderator of accuracy concerns the “target,” or the person who is judged. Some people seem like an open book, while other people are more elusive and difficult to know. Colvin (1993) found that individuals who behave in a more consistent manner, regardless of the situation or the people with whom they are interacting, are easier to accurately judge than people who seem to have a different personality for every situation and person they encounter. Interestingly, Jourard (1971) hypothesized that individuals who put on a psychological façade and for whom there is a large discrepancy between who they are on the inside and what they display on the outside, are more likely to be psychologically maladjusted. This suggests that individuals who behave the same regardless of who they are with or where they are may be better adjusted than individuals who are more difficult to judge. In the end, the “what you see is what you get” factor appears to be an important property of the target individual that affects the likelihood of accurate personality judgment. Personality traits also vary in the degree to which they are easy to judge. For example, imagine someone you know and rate the degree to which that person is talkative on a scale of 1 to 5. It seems easy enough. Now try to rate the degree to which that person is deceptive. At first glance this task might seem easy, but further consideration reveals that it is not straightforward. By definition, deception is a trait that describes people who Personality in Social Psychology 49 acquaintance has not. For example, your parents have known you throughout your entire life, but might not ever have seen you deliver an academic lecture. If your mother was asked to predict how you would act during a lecture and one of your students was asked the same question, Colvin and Funder’s findings suggest that your mom and the student would make approximately equally accurate predictions. However, if asked how you would behave in any other situation, the prediction by your mom would likely be more accurate than the prediction by the student. The quality of the information also affects accuracy. Information that is gathered in relatively weak situations may be better for purposes of personality judgment than information that is gathered in strong situations (Snyder & Ickes, 1985). Strong situations have social norms that restrict how people behave in them so they dilute individual differences and personality relevant information, whereas weak situations are less socially scripted and allow for wider variation in behavior. For example, a person’s behavior during Sunday Mass is largely a function of the rules of the situation and observing his or her behavior would not likely yield much information about his or her personality; however, a person is relatively free to behave as he or she wishes at a party and observing his or her behavior in that situation would likely be more revealing. Letzring, Wells, and Funder (2006) observed that people who met in an unstructured situation, where they could talk about whatever they wanted, made more accurate personality judgments of one another compared to those who met under more structured circumstances, where they were given specific goals and instructions on what to do. Situations that are relevant to the personality trait that is being judged are also more likely to provide better quality information. For example, if you have never observed Personality in Social Psychology 50 someone in a situation that affords the opportunity to demonstrate courage, then it would be difficult to make an accurate judgment of that person’s courageousness. Similarly, to judge a person’s sociability, observations of that person at a party would be more informative than observations while the person is studying alone at the library (e.g., Freeberg, 1969). The Realistic Accuracy Model. The moderators that affect accuracy can be explained in terms of the Realistic Accuracy Model, which proposes that the achievement of accurate personality judgment has four necessary stages: relevance, availability, detection, and utilization (Funder, 1995, 1999). First, the person being judged must do something relevant. That is, the target of judgment must do something that is informative about the trait that is being judged. If we want to judge the degree to which someone is narcissistic, that person must display a behavior that pertains to narcissism (e.g. excessively brag). Second, the relevant information must be available to observe. If the target of judgment excessively brags only in contexts that the judge does not share, then the judge will not have access to this information. Third, the judge of personality must detect the relevant and available information. If the judge is distracted or does not notice the narcissist’s bragging, then the information will not figure into the judgment. Finally, the judge must correctly utilize the relevant and available information that was detected. If the judged noticed the narcissist bragging, but interpreted this behavior as charming confidence, then accurate judgment has failed at the final stage. Personality in Social Psychology 51 Figure 2. The Realistic Accuracy Model. The Realistic Accuracy Model has several implications. The first is that accurate personality judgment is difficult. Four hurdles need to be overcome to achieve accuracy and a failure at any step in the process will lead to an inaccurate judgment. Second, the model provides a way to anticipate and explain the four moderators previously discussed. For example, a good judge of personality is someone who spends enough time around people to detect available and relevant information and is able to utilize this information correctly. A good target is someone who emits genuine cues that are relevant to his or her personality in a range of settings, enhancing the availability of these cues. A good trait is one for which many relevant cues are available for detection and, finally, good information involves exposure to relevant cues. The final implication of the Realistic Accuracy Model is that it suggests four different ways to improve the accuracy of personality judgment. Much of the person perception research in social psychology focuses on cognitive errors and biases which occur at the utilization stage of the Realistic Accuracy Model; however, accurate personality judgment is more than correct thinking and judgment could be improved at the three other stages. One way to be a better judge of personality is simply to pay more attention to people (i.e., detection). If relevant and available cues are flying around but a judge is not relevance availability detection utilization (achievement) Judgment Personality Personality in Social Psychology 54 yield the percentage of variance explained) is more informative than focusing on p-levels. This led to the conclusion that a correlation of .30 among behaviors is small because it means that traits account for less than 10% of the variance. By subtraction, it was implicitly assumed that the remaining 90% of variance in behavior must be accounted for by details of the situation. In Mischel’s (1968) own words, “It is evident that the behaviors which are often construed as stable personality trait indicators actually are highly specific and depend on the details of the evoking situations” (p. 37). This message – sometimes called “situationism” (Bowers, 1973) – was accepted by many readers and created an adverse climate for personality research. Meanwhile, research on person perception was blossoming in social psychology. Although some researchers focused on demonstrating that social perceivers follow logical or rational models when making judgments (Kelley, 1967; McArthur, 1972), others concentrated on demonstrating biases, errors, and imperfections and – Jones’s (1985) comment notwithstanding – their findings were generally interpreted as showing how and when people were wrong. People were observed to erroneously attribute the causes of their failure to external sources and the causes of their success to internal sources (Davis & Davis, 1972), erroneously use self-referent information as an anchor from which to infer information about others (the false consensus effect; Ross, Greene, & House, 1977), and as previously mentioned, erroneously assume a correspondence between an author’s written opinions and his or her private opinions, even when armed with the knowledge that the authors had no choice in the point of view they expressed (Jones & Harris, 1967). Lee Ross (1977) summarized this literature and proposed that many errors in social judgment could be explained by an underlying illusion common to everyday social Personality in Social Psychology 55 perceivers and personality psychologists alike. The fundamental attribution error (FAE), he proposed, is the tendency for people to overestimate the influence of dispositional factors on behavior and to underestimate the influence of situational factors. Ross (1977) cited Mischel’s (1968) critique of trait theory as further evidence of this illusion and proposed that an important direction for social psychology was to continue documenting the ways in which everyday social perceivers and trait theorists fail to appreciate the power of situations. In principle, there is no necessary connection between the situationist critique of personality and the promulgation of the fundamental attribution error within social psychology. A particular trait might have a powerful influence on a particular behavior, and people still might overestimate its effect, by believing it to be even stronger than it is 8 . However, such a connection was established. Prominent writers drew direct analogies between the shortcomings of personality psychology identified by the Mischelian critique, and the shortcomings of “lay personality theory” exemplified by the fundamental attribution error (e.g., Ross & Nisbett, 1991, pp. 120-139). This convergence led to the establishment of the fundamental attribution error as a foundation of the way that social psychology came to view personality psychology. The main message of social psychology became advertised as “the power of the social situation is much greater than most people believe.” One major introductory textbook describes this claim as “perhaps the single most important lesson from social psychology” (both quotes from Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2006, p. 634). A fairly direct implication of this lesson would seem to be that personality matters less than most people believe. 8 I thank the Editors for raising this important point. Personality in Social Psychology 56 A classic example that is often cited as strong evidence of situational power is Milgram’s obedience study. Milgram (1963, 1974/2004) demonstrated that surprisingly many people will administer lethal shocks to an innocent victim if a perceived authority figure commands it. Furthermore, a panel of psychiatrists erroneously predicted that fully 98% of Milgram’s participants would disobey such an order. In textbook after textbook, this study has been described as demonstrating the power of situations to elicit bad behavior and the vulnerability of even expert psychological judges to the fundamental attribution error. Evaluating the Power of Personality After 40 years of research, a wide variety of evidence indicates that personality research was given a bad rap. Starting with Mischel (1968), his critique of traits was based on a limited perspective on trait theory and an incomplete analysis of the implications of effect sizes. The basic critique relies on the assumption that the viability of trait psychology requires that a single trait completely predict a single behavior. For example, Mischel reported a study in which the correlation between positive attention seeking behavior (e.g. seeking praise) and negative attention seeking behavior (e.g. disruption) in pre-school children was r = .23 (Sears, 1963). This correlation was deemed low because both behaviors are thought to be indicators of the broader trait of dependency. To the eyes of a trait theorist, however, .23 is a surprisingly high correlation for the two behaviors because, although they might both be manifestations of dependency, it is easy to imagine other traits that would independently influence each of them. A highly agreeable child who is high in dependency would probably seek positive attention but not negative attention, and a highly aggressive child who is high in Personality in Social Psychology 59 Table 2: The BESD for a drug study with an effect size of r = .30 Alive Dead Treatment 65 35 Control 35 65 It should be apparent from Table 2 that a treatment with an effect size of .30 increases the survival rate from 35% to 65% and that is indeed a notable difference. Would you want the treatment? In terms of personality coefficients, let’s say that a researcher found that ratings of conscientiousness (e.g., high ratings vs. low ratings) correlated with work performance (e.g., high performance vs. low performance) at r = .30. As can be seen in Table 3, this means that a recruiter could greatly increase his or her chances of correctly hiring a high performing employee by selecting applicants that score high on conscientiousness (e.g. 65% of those who are high in conscientiousness will perform well and 65% of those who are low in conscientiousness will perform poorly). The BESD illustrates how an effect size of .30 is large enough to be important under many circumstances. Table 3: BESD for a study of job performance with an effect size r = .30 High Performance Low Performance High Conscientious 65 35 Low Conscientious 35 65 Personality in Social Psychology 60 Finally, Funder and Ozer (1983) examined three prominent studies in social psychology that are universally recognized as impressive demonstrations of the influence of situational factors on behavior. These studies included Festinger and Carlsmith’s (1959) study of attitude report as a function of incentive for counterattitudinal advocacy, Darley and Latané’s (1968) and Darley and Batson’s (1973) studies of bystander intervention as a function of the number of other people who are present and the degree to which one is in a hurry, and Milgram’s (1974/2004) study on obedience to instructions to harm another person as a function of the proximity of the authority figure and proximity of the victim. For each of these studies, analysis of variance procedures or t- tests were originally used to demonstrate situational effects; however, Funder & Ozer (1983) used the available published data to calculate the corresponding effect sizes and found that they ranged from .36 to .42, a magnitude frequently observed in personality research. Of course, these effect sizes were calculated from some of the most prominent studies in the social psychological literature. A more thorough review found that the average effect size of social psychological experiments is equivalent to an r = .21 (sd = .15; Richard, Bond & Stokes-Zoota, 2003). Personality traits and situations cannot be distinguished from each other on the basis of effect size, at least not to the advantage of situations. The Fundamental Attribution Error Reconsidered This conclusion suggests that the everyday social perception that people behave in a relatively consistent manner is much more than mere illusion. Therefore, social perceivers’ tendency to infer dispositional causes as the source of others behavior may not be an error, much less a fundamental one. The present authors will not argue that the Personality in Social Psychology 61 FAE really runs in the opposite direction (that personality is more powerful than is usually acknowledged), but a surprising number of studies as well as everyday observations suggest this might sometimes be the case. Empirical Considerations. For example, an intriguing early study by Strickland (1958) found that supervisors trust employees less, the more they supervise them. In a context where workers actually perform the same whether they are supervised or not, supervisors overattribute the work they directly supervise to the situation – they believe the workers are performing only because they are being watched – instead of (more correctly) to the diligence of the workers themselves. Overattribution to the situation occurs in the domains of emotion and happiness as well as in the world of work. People overestimate the long-term effects of positive and negative events on their emotional well-being; one team of researchers surmised on the basis of their results that even the effects of seemingly strong situations as winning the Nobel Prize or having one’s academic department abolished might have weaker long- term effects than we tend to assume (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg & Wheatley, 1998, p. 617). Their research on “emotional forecasting” shows that people overestimate the affective impact of life events. More generally, research from a number of laboratories has consistently shown that people tend to overestimate the influence of the situation on happiness, and underestimate the influence of dispositional factors (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996; Diener & Lucas, 1999; Lyubomirsky, Sheldon & Schkade, 2005). As one investigator summarized the evidence: …research shows that external life circumstances have a surprisingly small effect on happiness and well-being. In contrast, personality traits and other Personality in Social Psychology 64 about Joey’s homework (i.e., it must be difficult because it requires persistence) that influenced his behavior. Almost any explanation for the cause of a behavior implies something about the person and the situation. Especially smart psychologists (e.g., Ross, 1977; Gilbert, 1998) have long understood that the distinction between personal and situational causation is fuzzier and more complex than it might seem at first. Consider, again, the Milgram obedience study. Looked at broadly, the experimental situation contains at least two situational forces and two dispositional ones. The experimenter’s orders constitute an obvious situational force in the direction of obedience; the victim’s cries are a situational force in the direction of disobedience. As Milgram noted …the principal conflict of the experiment…is between the experimenter’s demands that he continue to administer the electric shock and the learner’s demands, which become increasingly insistent, that the experiment be stopped. (Milgram, 1974/2004, p. 26). Indeed, Milgram found that as each force increased it affected behavior in a predictable manner: the closer the experimenter was to the subject, the more obedience was obtained; the closer the victim was to the subject, the more disobedience was obtained. In addition, the experiment evokes two dispositional forces towards compassion and compliance, which also compete within every subject. As Milgram noted: …there were both obedient and defiant outcomes, frequently accompanied by extreme tension. A conflict develops between the deeply ingrained disposition Personality in Social Psychology 65 not to harm others and the equally compelling tendency to obey others who are in authority. (Milgram, 1974/2004, pp 42-43). The surprising degree of obedience ultimately obtained by Milgram can be explained in one of four ways: 1. The situational forces towards obedience (e.g. the orders of the authority figure) were stronger than the situational forces towards compassion (e.g. the victim’s cries). 2. The subjects’ dispositions towards obedience were stronger than the subjects’ dispositions towards compassion. 3. The situational forces towards obedience were stronger than the dispositional forces towards compassion. 4. The dispositional forces towards obedience were stronger than the situational forces towards compassion. Explanation 3 is the standard one found in many textbooks. Explanation 4 might be considered heretical. However, explanations 3 and 4 are actually equivalent (they mean exactly the same thing) and, worse, they are both incoherent because they rely on a simple internal versus external dichotomy that pits the person against the situation. The reality is that at any given point in time, person variables and situational variables both affect behavior and they both take part in the net result. One of them does not “win” because each is necessary for the other. The situational force towards obedience in the Milgram study would have no effect on someone lacking an inclination to obey, and an inclination to obey produces no harmful effect in the absence of orders. Personality in Social Psychology 66 In contrast, explanations 1 and 2 are coherent and correct, but they are also equivalent to each other. The situational forces towards obedience were stronger than the situational forces towards compassion, and the disposition to obey was generally stronger than the disposition to resist. Notice that these two statements are equivalent because, again, situational forces work in inextricable tandem with the dispositions to respond to them. 9 Is there any way to separate situational from dispositional causation of behavior? Ross (1977) provided an interesting solution to this conundrum. He suggested that situational causes can be distinguished from dispositional causes by examining the degree to which a behavior is unique or uncommon. When all or almost all people behave the same way in a situation, it seems fair to conclude that the behavior was situationally influenced. But when behavior varies within a situation (at the extreme, 50% of people behave in one way and 50% in the other) then behavior would seem more influenced by individual dispositions. This method of distinguishing situational from dispositional causation is illuminating and according to one writer, is “a logical standard [that] does not seem… to have any serious competition” (Gilbert, 1998, p. 135). However, it has some surprising implications. For example, it means that the widely-studied “false consensus bias” (Ross, Greene & House, 1977), in which people see their own behavior as more common than it really is, leads people to overestimate the influence of the situation on themselves rather 9 There is a good chance that Milgram himself would have agreed. He once wrote that the “social psychology of the reactive individual, the recipient of forces and pressures emanating from outside oneself…represents, of course, only one side of the coin of social life” (Milgram, 1977, quoted in Blass, 2004, p. 290). Personality in Social Psychology 69 The conceptualization and measurement of personality traits is well developed and ranges from the assessment of a small number of essential global traits (e.g. The Big Five), to large, comprehensive sets of mid-level characteristics that describe many ways in which individuals differ (e.g. The California Adult Q-set). Moreover, a large number of trait measures come packaged with a theory that explains the behaviors and outcomes to which the trait is purportedly related and an adequate validity literature that addresses psychometric properties and observed external correlates. In contrast, true behavioral measurement (i.e., direct observations of behavior by independent observers who describe a behavior that they have actually seen someone do) is rarer than one might think (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007). Systematic attempts to develop a taxonomy of behavior within a theoretical framework are even rarer. Behavior, when it is actually observed, is almost always chosen to illustrate a particular theoretical prediction and the typical study includes one behavior, which might be something as detached from real-life action as a button press on a computer keyboard or a questionnaire response. Although classic social psychology studies in the 1960’s and 1970’s sometimes directly observed single behaviors that were important and consequential (e.g., bystander intervention and obedience), focusing on a single behavior provides a narrow view of the many different things that people might be doing at the same time. For example, when people obey commands by an authority figure to shock a victim, do they plead with the authority figure that shocking the victim seems wrong? Do they ask the authority figure how dangerous the shocks are? Do they try to communicate with the victim? (Milgram, 1974/2004, informally reported that his subjects did all of Personality in Social Psychology 70 these things, but did not provide any direct measurements.) In short, broader conceptualization and measurement of behavior is sorely needed. The Riverside Behavioral Q-set (RBQ; Funder, Furr & Colvin, 2000; RBQ 3.0) is one possible, partial solution to this problem. The RBQ is a comprehensive set of 67 items that describe a broad range of socially relevant behaviors. RBQ items describe behavior at a mid-level of generality so that the behaviors that are coded are not too microscopic (e.g. eye blinks) or too macroscopic (e.g. socially successful). The items were originally derived from the items of the California Adult Q-Set (CAQ: Block, 1961; Bem & Funder, 1978) and were re-worded to emphasize behavioral display rather than trait inference. For example, an item in the CAQ reads “is critical, skeptical, not easily impressed” and the associated RBQ item reads “expresses criticism.” The RBQ is a valuable tool for a researcher who is interested in measuring a variety of behaviors that are relevant to a wide range of personality constructs and social situations. It has been used to illustrate the independence of behavioral change and consistency (Funder & Colvin, 1991), the behavioral correlates of various personality traits (e.g. Fast, Reimer, & Funder, 2007), and for many other purposes. 12 Numerous researchers have complained about the lack of methods for describing features of situations (e.g., Funder, 2000; Hogan & Roberts, 2000; Reis, 2008; Swann & Seyle, 2005). In social psychological experiments, a situational manipulation is typically chosen to test a specific theoretical prediction, not because it is necessarily viewed as an important dimension of situations in general. Social psychology could be said to contain a huge amount of information about how narrowly defined situations affect behavior, but 12 For the current version of the RBQ and other Q-sets, and a free computer program that simplifies the process of Q-sorting. Personality in Social Psychology 71 this knowledge is fragmented because there exists no method for organizing findings into a coherent summary. What is needed is a way to conceptualize and measure the active ingredients of situations. This goal requires identifying attributes that can be used to describe all situations, a daunting task. Gilbert and Malone (1995) observed that “when one tries to point to a situation, one often stabs empty air. Indeed, the constructs to which the word situation refers often have little or no physical manifestation” (p. 25). Thus far, researchers have suggested that situations can be described along three conceptual levels (Block & Block, 1981; Saucier, Bel-Bahar & Fernandez, 2007). Level 1, the broadest level, involves objective aspects of situations that are relatively resistant to differences in perception. According to Saucier et al. (2007), this includes factors such as temperature and the number of people present. Level 2 involves describing situations in terms of an over-arching characterization that most people in the situation would agree upon, such as a research seminar, a funeral, a party, and so on. Level 3 is comparatively subjective and involves properties of situations that are psychologically provoking and for each individual the specific provoking properties may be different. The problem with Level 1 description is that it is unlikely to capture the psychologically active features of situations. Gilbert and Malone (1995) suggest that more subtle aspects, such as another person smiling or making eye contact with a person, are likely to provoke psychological reactions. The problem with Level 3 is that it is too solipsistic and renders the study of persons in situations impossible (Reis, 2008). 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