week 6 person and situation debate Flashcards
Kurt Lewin’s(1936) ‘field theory’
B = f(P,E)
•Behaviour is a function of:
1. The person (e.g., needs, belief, values, abilities, i.e., personality), and
2. The environment, especially the social environment (or the ‘psychological field’) — no behaviour happens in a vacuum
effect of ww2 on P and E studies
a growing appreciation of the powerful situational drivers of behaviour due to nazi germany people
studies of Social Influence:
•Asch’s (1951) conformity studies…® People will conform with a majority view even at the expense of a response they know to be correct
•Milgram’s (1963) obedience studies…People are willing to deviate from what they’d normally do (in this case, giving electric shocks) when put in a situation with a strong authority figure
Stanford prison experiment:
•Can bad situations bring out the worst sides of people?
•24 college students randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners for a 2-week study of ‘prison life’
Hyper-realistic role play:
•‘Guards’ given uniforms
•‘Prisoners’ ‘arrested’ at home and ‘charged’ with armed robbery
•Jail set up in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department
Result of Stanford prison experiment
•Chaos…
•Prisoners revolted, guards became sadisHc …
•Study was aborted on day 6….
Demonstrated ‘the power of a bad situation to overwhelm the personalities and good upbringings of even the best and brightest among us’ (Zimbardo et al., 2017)
“Personality and Assessment”
by Walter Mischel (1968)
Two key claims:
1. Personality is a weak predictor of behaviour (r ~ .30).
2. Behaviour varies considerably over situations.
Conclusion: Behaviour is largely driven by situations, and the whole concept of a stable personality trait is “untenable”
The Fundamental Attribution Error” (Ross, 1977)
•People mistakenly explain behaviour in terms of dispositional factors rather than to situational factors
•e.g., impressions of the Milgram obedience study…
•Participants “assumed that the particular subject’s obedience reflected his distinguishing personal dispositions rather than the potency of situational pressures and constraints” (Ross, 1977)
However, Malle (2006) disconfirmed this theory
Shweder (1975): “The Conceptual Similarity CriDque”
•“How people classify” is mistaken as “how to classify people”
•Coherence of personality traits (discovered by factor analysis [week 2]) simply reflect judgements of conceptual similarity
So ratings of talkative, outgoing, and sociable correlate not because they similarly describe a target but because they similarly describe a concept
However, Romer & Revelle (1984) failed to confirm this theory.
The Impact of Situationism on personality psyc in the 1970s
•“Many personality psychologists began to doubt the credibility of the entire enterprise of studying persons” (McAdams, 1997)
•Mischel’s “great contribution to psychology” was to show that there is “no such thing as a stable personality trait” (Thayler, 2008)
-Many “sought to settle the debate on primarily empirical grounds, much in the spirit of Mischel’s original critique”.
Situationism evaluated: Claim #1:
“Personality is a weak predictor of behaviour (r ~ .30).”
® Personality is a weak predictor of behaviour (r~.30). However, situations are no better predictors of behaviour than traits. the guidline only appear in 1988
® Richard et al. (2003) found the average correlation in both personality & social psychology to be r = .20
Situationism evaluated: Claim #2:
“Behaviour varies considerably over situations.”
Well, of course it does!
•There is no requirement/assumption in personality psychology for behavior to be inflexible across situations
Allport (1937, 1961): “…traits do not apply to all sorts of situations…”
-By assessing single instances of behaviour in different situations, Mischel’s measures of cross-situational consistency may have been unreliable (test-retest reliability)
Solution to Claim #2: “Behaviour varies considerably over situations.”
•Aggregation across multiple measurement occasions to increase reliability,
•Epstein (1979): re-estimated cross-situational consistency of behavior as a function of aggregation
For pairs of behaviours, low consistency…
-But when multiple occasions are aggregated consistency increase
Daily other-ratings of discrete behaviours also follow similar trend
Consistency of behaviour Borkenau et al. (2004)
•“Thin slices”paradigm –glimpses of behaviouracross various controlled situations:
•N = 600
•Self-and peer-reports of B5 personality traits
•15 x videotaped behaviour in different (controlled) situations
•120 judges rated behaviour based on the video footage
Results of Consistency of behaviour Borkenau et al. (2004)
•Stability of cross-situational behaviour increased as a function of aggregation
•Relations that self and other-rated personality have with and behaviour increased as a function of aggregation
Experience sampling methods (ESM)
•Techniques for assessing behaviours/experiences multiple times per day for several days or weeks
Fleeson (2001):
•46 students given a mobile device
•Sent survey ‘alerts’ 5x per day for 13 days
•Described their personality state expressions (e.g.,extraverted behavour) over the last hour
•4 items per big five trait (e.g., during the past hour I was talkative)
