The personality Paradox

Part1: interaction between person and situation

Traits, situations and the personality paradox:

· Hard for researches to show that individuals display high consistent types of behavior across a variety of different situations (cross situational consistency)

· Mischel, personality paradox: data from extensive research indicated low situational consistency of behavior. in person-situation debate, psychologist has 2 choices 1. Situationism: belief that personality is less important than situation. And view that people make the fundamental attribution error in which people neglect the role of the situation and invoke personality dispositions (incorrect ones) to explain social behaviors. 2. Viewing situation as noise that obscures the true consistent personality. (big 5 approach, factor analytic approach) x. thing that is to be removed/noise, either situation or person, is called the error variance.

Incorporating situations into traits:

· (Mischel) If… then…situation-behavior signiatures when situation changes, so do behaviors, but the relationship between the situations and behaviors may be stable and informative. -if their personality signatures are stable, it can provide a key to personality (eg. Introverted amy may be annoyed with a situation in which she must interact with people but calm when in situations that she is left alone.)

· two types of personality consistency (that must work together to show the character of an individual): 1. Average overall levels of behavior tendencies: trait level aggregation, overall average of different kinds of behaviors like aggressiveness and sociability. x. Measures of traits alone cannot predict a pooled combination of behaviors across different situations 2. If..then (situation-behavior) signatures: stable links between types of situations and types of characteristic behavior. x. Knowing what a person does in specific types of situations help us understand more about the person’s underlying personality system.

as similarity between situations decreases so does cross situational consistency of person behavior.

Interactionism in personality:

· It is the idea that individual’s behaviors are the product of dynamic interactions between personality and psychological environment. Cannot be understood as separate. (Magnusson, mischel)

· Person-situation interaction involves individual difference dimensions coming from research on uncertainty orientation: situation that suits one person may distress another. -- > Principle of interactionism

Triple typology : this type of person will do these type of behaviors in these types of situations.

3 categories are categorized: types of people, types of behaviors an types of situations

interaction as a rule in science:

Edelman

-the plasticity and modifiability of neural systems, and ways in which cultural and biological factors interact in human evolution. He focuses on the interplay of genetic endowment and environmental experiences, in which is a given

Resolving the personality paradox: (Bem and Allen)

a. it requires that when testing the people, researchers must select those who perceive themselves as consistent in the given disposition.

b. self perception of consistency seems to be predictable in the situation-behavior signatures.

c. Indicates that intuition of personality consistency is not an illusion.

Personality Assessment:

1. consistent with social cognitive theories, tend to be specific on specific cognitions, feeling and behavior in relation to particular situations. - can use if..then personality signatures, using questionnaires that ask about participants encodings, expectances and weather they let their anger out. -also linking typologies to measure social cognitive variables.

2. Identify the implications for constructive personality change or treatment. (eg. Enhancing efficacy expectations) - measuring self efficacy expectancies: asking the person to indiace the degree of confidence that the person thinks they can do at a task.

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

(greenwald and farnham)

-Requires participants to make judgments about words that are presented to them in brief and one at a time.

-the words come from 4 distinct categories (self, not self, good, bad) and participants task is to indicate the category of the word presented.

-2 concepts share a key (only 2 key available) , self=bad condition and not self=good

-results: those high ins elf esteem didn’t care about failure while those who were low took the failure to heart.

-IAT can also measure (not only self esteem) implicit attitudes, beliefs and values.

Identifying psychological situations

nominal situations: can be settings like dining room, arts and cradts, cabin time or waterfront phenomenological and social cognitive levels show the impact of such nominal situations depend on their meaning for the person (which is unique)

-the situation encoded and constructed by the individual (Psychological situation) activates their distinctive reaction

-when people talk about people they knew well they use conditional hedges to qualify their behavior (such as this person is aggressive when kids tease him) they show the condition in which the person acts a certain way