Mischel 1973 - Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality

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Mischel, W. (1973). Toward a cognitive social learning reconceptualization of personality. Psychological review, 80(4), 252.

Summary

Psychology has investigated personality traits, with the assumption that they are stable and drive behavior. After finding inconsistency with personal traits and behavioral predictions (e.g., using traits to predict behavior in a new situation), psychology turned to situational factors as explanations - a theory referred to as behaviorism. The author points out that the pendulum has swung too far, however. Psychology’s current endorsement of behaviorism, and the viewed inconsistency with personal traits, has caused several to question if stable dispositional traits even exist. The author maintains that both situation and disposition need to be accounted for (especially the understanding of the psychological intent driving the action) in attempts to explain and predict behavior. That being said, situational elements, direct reports, and past behavior seem to have higher predictive power than do personality traits that have been inferred from behavioral observations. Dispositional traits become more predictive of behavior when a situation encountered is ambiguous (the subject is unsure how to categorize it or unclear regarding situational expectations).

Personality traits serve as “summaries for categories of observed behavior.” In this sense, they can serve people cognitively as a heuristic. The data regarding several people’s consistent behavior can be summed up in a single construct, rather than trying to maintain histories of behavior for each individual encountered. The fundamental attribution bias shows that we do tend to make dispositional assumptions regarding others, while we preserve situational complexity in self-conceptions. Dispositional assumptions also lead us to construe others as behaviorally consistent, which we generally do (perhaps this is an example of the representativeness heuristic).

The author proposes a cognitive social learning model that includes a person’s competency in cognitive and behavioral constructions, how the person is encoding and categorizing events, the person’s expectancies regarding outcomes, the subjective values of these outcomes, and the individual’s self-regulatory systems and plans. This model emphasizes the subjective view (caused by past experiences) of the individual and is thereby able to more flexibly interpret a range of seemingly inconsistent behaviors.

Application

In examining behaviors, the situational context is extremely relevant. Personality traits are not always as longitudinally stable as generally assumed. If you want to better see someone’s personality, remove consequences from a situation.