Controversy #2: Causes of the Person-Situation Debate

The person-situation debate was an extended disagreement, originally between social psychologists and personality psychologists, on whether the “situation” or personality traits are more predictive of people’s behavior. As the story goes, the debate was initiated by the publication of Walter Mischel’s 1968 book Personality and Assessment, which made two empirical claims about the trait approach to personality. Mischel argued that (1) a review of the literature shows that personality traits only have a correlation of about 0.30 with how people behave in any given situation, and (2) the cross-situational consistency of behavior is also only around 0.20 to 0.30. Thus, he concluded that personality traits are not good predictors of behavior, and that situations are much more important in how people behave. Furthermore, he maintained, personality traits do not really exist: the personality descriptors used by lay people are illusory because behavior is not really consistent from one situation to the next.¹

Obviously, these arguments generated a lot of response from personality psychologists who had already been using trait questionnaires to measure personality for several decades. In fact, the refrain that personality traits do not exist or describe anything meaningful had been made by critics as early as the first personality inventories were introduced by Gordon Allport in the 1930’s and 40’s. In that time, behaviorism dominated psychology, and the situation (environment) was the only acceptable form of explanation for behavior, since psychology was to be the science of observables, and not intangible intermediates like thoughts, feelings, or personality traits. To some extent, the “situationist” side of the person-situation debate was a continuation of that environmentalist tradition, except that by the 1970’s most psychologists had accepted that other internal states such as cognitions do affect behavior.

Almost all commentators now agree that the debate is resolved, and even the most die-hard situationist will probably grudgingly admit that the victory went mainly to the person side. The vast majority of psychologists now agree that personality traits exist and are predictive of behavior. How did this happen? Both of Mischel’s main empirical claims were roughly accurate, although the correlation estimates of 0.30 between traits and behavior, and behavior across situations, were later conceded by other situationists to be closer to 0.40.² The problem was their interpretation. Is 0.30 or 0.40 a small correlation? How does it compare to the correlation between situations and behavior? These and other questions were not anticipated by Mischel and his supporters. David Funder and Dan Ozer, two trait psychologists, answered the two just mentioned by looking at the performance of several classic experiments in social psychology, to see how the situation affects behavior.³ In three well respected studies, including the renowned (and today, unethical) study by Stanley Milgram on obedience that used fake electric shocks to study how people react to causing harm to others, Funder and Ozer calculated that the correlation between situations and behavioral outcomes ranged from 0.36-0.42: almost identical to the predictive power of personality traits. In fact, this may be somewhat of a practical upper limit for prediction of single behaviors in psychological research. Another large blow for Mischel’s arguments was Seymour Epstein’s findings that if one aggregates behaviors across a reasonable period of time, instead of looking at single instances, the cross-situational consistency of behavior can routinely be as high as 0.80 to 0.90.⁴

As described previously though, the end of the debate was not completely one-sided. The psychologists William Fleeson and Erik Noftle have recently argued that what really occurred was a kind of synthesis. They propose that any scientific debate can end in one of three ways. Either there is a victory for one side, where the other side concedes, a compromise, where the solution is somewhere “in between” the positions of both sides, or a synthesis, when a new idea emerges that incorporates both former positions. Trait psychologists, Fleeson and Noftle argue, could still not explain why behavior has low consistency over short periods, remaining at the 0.30 range, while situationists could no longer make the case that traits are not as important as situations, or are simply figments of people’s imagination, especially in light of further evidence showing that they predict important life outcomes. This state of affairs forged a resolution that changed psychologists’ conceptions of both traits and situations. For traits, psychologists learned that they do not create robust cross-situational consistency for individual behaviors, but that they do create consistency for wide distributions of behaviors over time. For situations, psychologists they learned that they are not the only thing that matters, and that by following the lead of trait psychologists in categorizing situations, social psychologists may be able to explain which salient characteristics of situations lead to different behaviors.⁵

Some commentators however, haven’t taken as magnanimous of the debate as Fleeson and Noftle. Already this year, several articles have come out in a special edition of the Journal of Research in Personality that criticized the fact that the debate has lasted as long as it has, or, indeed, that it ever happened at all. Those on the person side are apt to deny that much knowledge has been gained at all—Robert Hogan titled his paper summarizing the person-situation debate after the Shakespeare play: Much Ado About Nothing. These critics make two charges. First, that psychologists gave undue credit to the attack on personality traits because situationism is to somewhat of a foundational dogma for social psychology. To give just one example, one article quotes from a popular social psychology textbook released in 2005 which stated: “…this is a fundamental principle of social psychology: Often the social situation is more important than personality in accounting for a person’s behavior”⁶. Second, those same authors argue that much of the person-situation debate was based on the “inferred sociopolitical implications of personality research”.⁷ That is, individual difference research is often implicitly associated with conservative ideology, as opposed to situationist views, which are seen as more compatible with liberal politics. For instance, Phil Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect, once stated that:

“My bias is admittedly more toward situational analyses of behavior and comes from my training as an experimental social psychologist as well as from having grown up in poverty, in a New York city ghetto of the South Bronx. I believe that dispositional orientations are more likely to correlate with affluence: The rich want to take full credit for their success, whereas the situationists hail from the lower classes who want to explain the obvious dysfunctional lifestyles of those around them in terms of external circumstances rather than internal failures” (p. 25).⁸

Social psychologists have been accused in turn of left-wing bias in their research goals, and committing of the moralistic fallacy against personality research, particularly in the 1970’s when the debate was most heated. Similar issues to these were raised in the book mentioned in the first controversy: The Blank Slate. No doubt, we will have an opportunity to revisit these underlying political issues in future controversies.

References:

1: Funder, D. C. (2004). The personality puzzle (3rd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

2: Nisbett, R. E. (1980). The trait construct in lay and professional psychology. In L. Festinger (Ed.), Retrospections on social psychology (pp.109-130). New York: Oxford University Press.

3: Funder, D. C., & Ozer, D. J. (1983). Behavior as a function of the situation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 107–112.

4: Epstein, S. (1979). The stability of behavior: I. On predicting most of the people much of the time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1097–1126.

5: Fleeson, W., & Noftle, E. E. (2009). The end of the person-situation debate: an emerging synthesis in the answer to the consistency question. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2 (4), 1667-1684.

6: p.268, Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Akert, R. M. (2005). Social psychology (5th ed.). Uppers Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, cited in Lucus, R. E., & Donnellan, B. M. (2009).  If the person–situation debate is really over, why does it still generate so much negative affect? J Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 146-149.

7: p. 148, Lucus, R. E., & Donnellan, B. M. (2009). If the person–situation debate is really over, why does it still generate so much negative affect? Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 146-149.

See also Hogan, R. (2009). Much ado about nothing: The person–situation debate. Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 247.

8: Zimbardo, P. G. (2004). A situationist perspective on the psychology of evil: Understanding how good people are transformed into perpetrators. In A. Miller (Ed.), The social psychology of good and evil: Understanding our capacity for kindness and cruelty (pp. 21–50). New York: Guilford.