Situationism and Interactionism

1
Situationism and Interactionism

• Dr. Christine Simmonds-Moore

2
Overview

• To what extent does an internal organising
  structure exist in personality
• How have traits/psychodynamic theories been
  criticised?
• Does this persist across time?
• Does this persist across situations?
• Introducing interactionism personality as a
  recipe

3
Mischels criticism of traits

• In 1968, Mischel published a criticism of
  traditional personality theory
• Psychoanalytic theory and trait theory
• Traits fail to predict behaviour in real life
• Situations may be more powerful than internal
  traits
• The person-situation controversy
• The .30 barrier
• Inherent problems in measurement that construct
  correlations between different traits

4
Limitations to Mischels analysis

• Personality is complex e.g., Adlerian
  inferiority complex
• .30 is not meaningless
• .30 correlations are also found for social
  explanations of personality

5
To what extent is personality continuous/consisten
t across time?

• Consistency over time/longitudinal consistency
  stability
• Assessed by computing correlation coefficients
• Good evidence of longitudinal stability (Block
  Conley Fleeson)
• Short term reliability, longer term variability
• Personality changes little after age 30 (e.g.,
  Costa and MCrae, 1990)
• Methodological considerations
• E.g., spouse ratings versus alterations in self
  concept (C M, 1980), peer ratings versus self
  ratings (Haan, 1981)
• Some people change a lot, others do not change at
  all
• Patterns from childhood can often predict later
  behaviour
• What about the influence of the ageing process?

6
To what extent is personality continuous/consisten
t across situations 1?

• Consistency over situations consistency
• The power of the situation is sometimes so
  strong that it overrides our inclinations
• E.g., reactions to traumatic events, e.g, the
  sinking of the titanic
• Culturally accepted and encouraged behaviour
• Nazi Germany
• But, see Blass (1991)

• Assessed by computing correlation coefficients
• Inconsistencies across situations
• Hartshorne and Mays (1928) study on honesty
• Dudycha (1936) punctuality is inconsistent
• Bouchard et al assertiveness is inconsistent
• Coie curiosity is inconsistent
• Paulus and Martin - Flexibility is inconsistent
• Currand et al Social anxiety is inconsistent

7
Dudycha, 1936
8
A wider conceptualisation of traits

• Trait theorists defend themselves
• Agreement that there may be inconsistency of
  overt behaviour
• Traits might account for such inconsistencies
• The notion of aggregation
• a trait does not refer to a specific behaviour in
  a specific situation but rather to a class of
  behaviours averaged over a range of situations
• Epsteins (1983) findings with wider ranges of
  behaviour and situations
• Variability and situational specificity
• Funder and Colvin, 1991 - People express the same
  trait differently in various situations

9
Interactionism 1

• Interactionism is the synthesis of personologism
  and situationism
• Neither the person OR the situation per se is
  emphasised, but rather the reciprocal interaction
  of these two factors
• Ideas of interactionist thought can be traced
  back to Aristotle and other philosophers
• Influenced by early psychologists, e.g., Koffka,
  Kantor and Lewin (see Ekehammar, 1974 for a
  historical perspective)
• E.g., no biological fact may be considered as
  anything but the mutual interaction of the
  organism and the environment (Kantor, 1924)

10
Interactionism 2

• Person x situations
• E.g., Moos (1969) personality, time and place
• Moderator variables
• E.g., gender
• Traits as genotypes
• Individual structure of a trait (Bem and Allen,
  1974)
• Person x mode
• Trait relevance
• Metatraits
• Which types of situation minimise or maximise the
  expression of traits?
• Selection of situations
• Measuring the personality of situations

11
Research on interactionism

• Empirical evidence has attempted to show that the
  person x situation variance is more than the
  relative magnitude of person or situation
  variance
• E.g., Application to affect regulation and social
  cognition I when

12
States and traits

• Zanes et al. (1998) have suggested that
  schizotypy may actually be better considered as a
  state as they found differences among high
  scorers on a schizotypy variable
• Consistency ? associations with pathology
• Inconsistency ? fluctuations in states of
  schizotypy

13
Is personality a state

• Mulitple personality disorder
• Dissociation, other personalities, other
  potentials
• Recent research with dissociation
• Traumatic experience ? spirituality
• Sleep quality is a predictor of dissociation
• Sleep quality is related to aggression in prison
  setting
• Sleep length and hallucinatory experiences

14
My research in parapsychology
15
Summary of interactionist perspectives

• Simplistic to say personality is soley due to
  internal structure or the environment
• Personality is a complex interaction of the
  person and the situation
• Situations bring out different elements of traits
  and internal structures
• We often choose the situations we
  enter/experience
• Interactions are moderated by factors such as
  gender
• Evidence for traits persisting over time
• Traits predict behaviours in similar but not all
  situations
• Difficult to study complexities of these
  interactions

16
Seminar activity 1

• In pairs or small groups, think about how you
  scored on the extraversion trait and whether you
  consider yourself to be introvert/ambivert/extrave
  rt.
• When have you expressed the opposite trait?
• Why have you expressed the opposite trait?

17
Seminar activity 2

• In pairs, think of a famous persons life, rate
  the extent to which the person displays a trait
  across his or her lifetime/different situations
• e.g., smoking cannabis and political behaviour
  I did not inhale
• Why did the person take drugs?
• What situation drove this behaviour?
• Do you think this was part of his personality
  structure?
• Can similar traits predict different behaviours?

• From BBC online
• Should a politician's previous life be open to
  public scrutiny? Tory leadership candidate David
  Cameron MP has refused to answer repeated
  questions over whether he has ever used drugs.
• On the BBC's Question Time he said "We are all
  human and we err and stray.
• "I didn't spend the early years of my life
  thinking 'I better not do anything because one
  day I might be a politician'."
• Should politicians have private lives? Do
  politicians have a responsibility as role models?
  Should we care what a politician did when they
  were younger?

18
References and further reading

• Chapter 10 in Friedman Schustack
• Person Situation interactionism in
  self-encoding (Iam . . .when . . .) Implications
  for affect regulation and social information
  processing. Mendoza-Denton, Rodolfo Ayduk,
  Ozlem Mischel, Walter Journal of Personality
  and Social Psychology, Vol 80(4), Apr 2001. pp.
  533-544.Cited References (82) HTML Full Text
  PDF Full Text via psycharticles
• Interactionism in personality from a historical
  perspective. Ekehammar, Bo Psychological
  Bulletin, Vol 81(12), Dec 1974. pp.
  1026-1048.Cited References (137)   Times Cited
  in this Database(31) PDF Full Text (2212K) via
  Psycharticles
• Understanding behavior in the Milgram obedience
  experiment The role of personality, situations,
  and their interactions. Blass, Thomas Journal of
  Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 60(3), Mar
  1991. pp. 398-413.Cited References (180)   Times
  Cited in this Database(4) HTML Full Text PDF
  Full Text (2150K) via psycharticles
• And see document for trait and interactionism
  reading on the website.