Personality Psychology- Chapter 4

- which is more important for determining what people do, the person or the situation- Mischel (1968): behaviour is too inconsistent across situations for individual differences to be characterized by traits

1) does personality transcend the immediate situation & provide a consistent guide to his actions, or is what a person does utterly dependent on the situation at the time? (2) Are common, ordinary intuitions about people fundamentally flawed or basically correct? (3) Why do psychologists continue to argue about the consistency of personality when basic empirical questions were settled long ago

- there is an upper limit to how well we can predict behaviour based on personality & the limit is small- situations are more important than traits in determining behaviour- personality assessment is a waste of time & everyday intuitions are fundamentally flawed.

- unfair, selective literature review by Mischel (poor studies where reviewed- we can do better studies i.e. outside of labs, - a correlation of .40 which Mischel criticized is not small- r=.40 is 70% accuracy

View that persons and situations are constantly interacting with each other to produce behaviour

- people are free to do whatever they want- everybody is equal, & differences are a function of the situation

People can develop consistent identities and styles that allow them to be themselves across situations