PERSON-SITUATION INTERACTIONIST ASPECTS

I. Few people are totally honest or dishonest; then what is personality? How does it affect behavior?

A. Lewin's equation: B = f (P, E) [behavior is a function of personality and environment]

B. Allport believed we have consistent patterns in predispositions, but behavior is manifest uniquely in each situation

C. Murray posited internal "needs" and external "press" which worked in concert

II. Henry Stack Sullivan

A. Importance of "chums" and adolescent psychosocial threats of loneliness, isolation, rejection

1. Psychological health determined to large degree by reactions of others

B. We experience similar social situations over and over

1. Drew on G. H. Mead's ideas of the "social self' and Sapir's views of the importance of culture

C. We become different "people" in different situations; the situation elicits the
personality (note the "illusion of individuality" which describes belief in just one ‘personality")

Ill. Motivation and goals: Henry Murray

A. Murray is considered a primary founder of the interactionist approach to personality

B. Combined ideas of unconscious motivations with those of environmental pressures and traits

C. Because he focused on the richness of life and saw ‘personality" as a dynamic process, he called his theory a "personological system"

1. internal needs and motivations

2. Environmental press

D. Typical combinations of needs and presses termed "thema"

1. Measured with the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

E. The work of McAdams provides a modern example of Murray's influence

1. Studies the "whole person" through biographies

IV. Other

A. Lewin's contemporaneous causation (behavior is caused at that moment as a function of a variety of influences

B. Ideas of behaviorists, such as Skinner, were adapted by Murray as he incorporated situational influences into his theory

C. Humanistic notions of internal motivations toward creativity and self-fulfillment

V. Modern interactionist approaches: Walter Mischel

A. Mischel's 1968 argument that behavior varies so much by situation that the concept of personality traits makes little sense

1. Correlations of behavior with personality or of behavior across situations &re generally .30 or less

a. assumes a simple model of the personality-behavior relationship

b. assumes that a correlation of .30 is "small"

B. More recently, Mischel has looked at individual differences in meanings people give tc stimuli and reinforcements (called "strategies")

1. Competencies: abilities and knowledge

2. Encoding strategies: schemas and mechanisms used to

3. Expectancies: what we expect to happen in response to efforts/behaviors

4. Plans

VI. Other modern developments from interactionist perspective

A. Implicit personality theory

1. Observers tend to make attributions to personality; actors are more likely to make situational attributions

2. Stereotypes help simplify the world

3. People tend to overestimate the consistency of their own behaviors

B. The power of situations: sometimes they are so powerful that they override personality effects (e.g. reactions to a fire in a crowded theater)

C. Trait Relevance

1. All traits may not be equally relevant to all people

D. Consistency within situations: problem of how to classify situations-- where would we expect behavioral consistency?

E. Consistency averaged across situations

1. Reliability issues (is one sample behavior a reliable indicator of personality?)

2. Appropriateness of situation for being associated with particular trait

3. Averaging cross-situational behaviors helps to deal with both of these issues

F. Personal vs. social situations; personal vs. social selves

1. Field independence: characteristic which enables one to judge an object, disregarding background influences (in social situations,

such person may act more independently)

2. Field dependence: characteristic which forces one to rely on background influences to make judgments (in social situations, such

person may conform to situational demands)

3. Low self-monitoring (less sensitive to reactions and expectations of others, so may show more consistent behavior across situations) vs.

High self-monitoring (more sensitive to social influence that varies across situations, thus more difficult to see personality)

4. Social identity vs. personal identity

G. Seeking and creating situations

1. We seek situations that reinforce self-conceptions, making for more "personality consistency"

2. Consistency also results in part from our conscious efforts

3. Some situations are "stronger" and exert greater influence than "weak" situations"

H. Time: Longitudinal data necessary to understand how personality develops over time

1. Block and Block's longitudinal study at Berkeley

2. Caspi's study of the "life course" and the individual's creation of the life course through choosing environments in which to live and

through interpreting situations

3. Recent research suggests good (but not perfect) personality stability across adulthood

4. Terman's Life-Cycle Study

I. Readiness

1. Each experience has its effects in the context of previous experience

2. We are more affected by certain environments at certain times of our lives

3. Both of these concepts come into play in Lorenz's ideas of "critical periods" and "imprinting"

a. Lorenz's ideas focused on critical developmental periods, but we may also imagine more transient "critical periods" or times of

"readiness' (based on circadian rhythms, etc.)