Personality and Social Psychology: Towards a Synthesis
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Universität Potsdam Barbara Krahe´ Personality and social psychology: towards a synthesis first published in: Personality and social psychology : towards a synthesis / Barbara Krahe.´ - London [u.a.] : Sage, 1992. - VIII, 278 S., ISBN 0-8039-8724-2 Postprint published at the Institutional Repository of the Potsdam University: In: Postprints der Universitat¨ Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe ; 121 http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2009/3830/ http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-38306 Postprints der Universitat¨ Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe ; 121 Personality and Social Psychology Personality and Social Psychology Towards a Synthesis Barbara Krahe SAGE Publications London • Newbury Park • New Delhi © Barbara Krahe 1992 First published 1992 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Newbury Park, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32, M-Block Market Greater Kailash - I New Delhi 110 048 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data Krahe, Barbara Personality and Social Psychology: Towards a Synthesis I. Title 302 ISBN 0 8039 8724 2 ISBN 0 8039 8725 0 pbk Library of Congress catalog card number 92-53776 Typeset by Photoprint, Torquay, Devon Printed in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford, Surrey For my children Charlotte and Justin Contents Acknowledgements ix 1 Persons and Situations: Cornerstones of Modern Personality Psychology 1 Scope of the book 5 Preview of the chapters 6 2 The Issue of Consistency in Personality: Sixty Years of Controversy 10 Meanings of consistency 11 The beginnings of the controversy 16 The traditional trait position 19 The situationist challenge 28 Proposed solutions 32 Summary 38 3 In Defence of Traits: New (and Revived) Perspectives 41 Basic trait dimensions: the Big Five 42 The biological basis of traits 49 Traits as social constructions 56 Summary 66 4 Modern Interactionism: An Alternative Framework for Personality Research 69 The fundamentals of modern interactionism 70 The role of situation variables 79 Personality development from an interactionist perspective 85 Summary 97 5 Implementing the Interactionist Programme: Three Exemplary Areas of Research 99 Anxiety: a multidimensional approach 101 Emotions and person-situation congruence 110 viii Personality and social psychology Prosocial behaviour 115 Has interactionism come of age: critical voices 123 Summary 126 6 Improving Personality Measurement: The Nomothetic Road to the Study of Consistency 128 The moderator variable strategy: beyond omnibus predictions 132 Aggregation and act trends: beyond single-act criteria 139 The peer-rating strategy: beyond self-reports 150 Summary 154 7 Personality Psychology is about Individuals: Rediscovering the Idiographic Legacy 157 Strategies for capturing individual uniqueness 159 The idiothetic approach to consistency 169 Integrating idiographic and nomothetic measures of personality 174 Understanding personal life plans 184 Summary 191 8 The Role of the Situation in Personality Research 194 Situations as objective entities 199 Situations as subjective realities 205 Situations as chosen by the individual 218 Summary 230 9 Personality Psychology in the Nineties: An Outlook 233 References 242 Index 274 Acknowledgements As is probably true for most enterprises of this kind, the way to finishing this book was paved with both rewarding and disappoint• ing personal experiences. At the end of the day, memories of the rewarding aspects prevail, and I gratefully acknowledge the support I received from institutions, colleagues and friends. In particular, I am grateful for two personal grants which greatly helped me in writing this book. My thanks are due to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the Feodor Lynen Fellowship which facilitated the planning and beginning of the volume, and to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for the Heisenberg Fellowship in the final stage of the book. I would like to thank Barbara Lloyd and Peter Smith at the University of Sussex and Hubert Feger at the Freie Universitat Berlin for the hospitality with which they wel• comed me in their departments during these periods. I owe special thanks to Bernd Six whose feedback on the manuscript as it was taking shape was of great help to me in clarifying the structure and contents of the book. I am also grateful to Sue Jones at Sage who accompanied the changing fate and appearance of the book with patience and understanding. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my husband Peter for his unfailing support and continuous encouragement, in this project as in all previous ones. Persons and Situations: Cornerstones of Modern Personality Psychology Almost 250 years ago, the English statesman and author, Lord Chesterfield, wrote in one of his famous Letters to His Son: Few men are of one plain, decided colour; most are mixed, shaded, and blended; and vary as much from different situations, as changeable silks do from different lights. (30 April 1752) This view of human nature and its malleability poignantly anti• cipates the challenge that has faced the academic discipline of personality psychology from its inception to the present day. Personality psychologists and laypersons alike are aware of the fact that nobody feels, thinks, or acts in the same way across the multitude of situations encountered in the course of everyday life. People respond with flexibility to the different features of the social and physical world in which they live, and it would appear a hopeless task to try and predict exactly what each of a number of individuals will do in a particular situation. On the other hand, an individual's behaviour in general is not entirely unpredictable, nor is it ruled exclusively by the forces present in a given situation. Our experience with other people - as well as with ourselves - tells us that there is a certain regularity, consistency and uniqueness in the behaviours, thoughts and feelings of a person which define his or her 'personality'. Coming to terms with this intricate relationship between stability and change in individual behaviour is the central task of personality psychology. Personality psychologists are committed to the creed that indi• viduals can be characterized by enduring qualities that distinguish them from others and provide vital clues for understanding their behaviour in a wide range of situations. When we know a person well, we come to develop expectations about how the person will act in particular types of situations. These expectations are indispens• able in guiding our interactions with the person, and they are typically expressed in the form of dispositional labels. Someone is said to be a 'friendly' or a 'conscientious' person, which means that he or she is expected to show friendly or conscientious behaviour with some degree of consistency and predictability. Yet, predict• ability of behaviour on the basis of personal dispositions clearly has its limits, set by the varying features of the situations in which personality is expressed. A habitually friendly person may respond with a rude remark to an unprovoked verbal insult, just as a habitually conscientious individual may forget to keep an appoint• ment after an emotionally upsetting experience with a friend. In certain situations, as in many ceremonial events, cues or demands for a particular kind of behaviour may even be so strong that personal dispositions become negligible and behavioural conformity is shown by all the persons involved. Thus, the task of studying personality takes place within the confines of a social world that poses its own constraints on the manifestation of unique and enduring personal characteristics. It is not surprising, therefore, that the issue of the relative importance of personal dispositions and situational forces in explaining behaviour has brought personality psychology into conflict with those psycho• logical disciplines which regard behaviour primarily as a response to the characteristic features of the setting in which it takes place. With the growing prominence of learning theories stressing the depend• ency of behaviour on reinforcement and imitation processes, per• sonality psychologists came under increasing pressure to produce large-scale evidence of the stability and consistency of personal dispositions and their reflections in behaviour. As a result, the field of personality psychology was thrown into a profound crisis of confidence some twenty years ago, fuelled by powerful attacks on the trait concept and its role in capturing consistency in individual behaviour across time and situations (for historical reviews see Epstein and O'Brien, 1985; Tomkins, 1981). The crisis found its reflection in questions like 'Where is the person in personality research?' (Carlson, 1971), in the regular stock• takings appearing in the Annual Review of Psychology (for exam• ple, Phares and Lamiell, 1977; Sechrest, 1976) and other critical analyses of leading figures of the field (for example, Fiske, 1978a,b). From all these different sources, a gloomy picture emerged as to the current state and future prospects of personality psychology. In the search for a new and more convincing identity that followed this period of crisis, defining relations and claiming