Personality and Social Interaction

We begin with a reminder of two fundamental facts of human nature:

For that last reason, psychologists need to understand the relations between psychological processes within the individual and social processes that take place in the world outside. While much of cognitive psychology is concerned with how the individual acquires, represents, and uses knowledge in perception, memory, thought, and language, social psychology is concerned with the role that cognitive (as well as emotional and motivational) processes play in social interactions -- between individuals, and between individuals and groups.

Analyzing Social Interaction

The classic framework for the analysis of social behavior was provided by Kurt Lewin, a refugee from Hitler's Europe who settled in the United States in the 1930s. Lewin sought to apply the principles of Gestalt psychology to the study of social behavior. The Gestalt school is known for its assertion that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Applied to perception, this means that perception encompasses the entire stimulus field. Individual stimulus elements form a coherent, integrated whole, and cannot be isolated from each other. Similarly, Lewin argued that social behavior is responsive to the entire field of social stimuli -- not just the other person immediately present, but also the wider social context in which the interaction occurs. Lewin went even farther to assert that the social situation includes the person him- or herself: the person is part of the stimulus field to which he or she responds.

Employing the language of mathematics, Lewin asserted that:

This bit of pseudo-mathematics represents the idea that personal and environmental determinants combine somehow to cause individuals to do what they do. The comma in the equation indicated that Lewin was open as to precisely how these factors combine. Lewin was heavily influenced by Gestalt psychology, and believed that the person and the environment constituted an organized and integrated field in which behavior takes place.

Defining the Subdisciplines

As subfields within psychology, personality and social psychology have historically emphasized different aspects of Lewin's formula.

Personality Psychology

Traditional personality psychology assumes that behavior is primarily determined by features of the person such as his or her beliefs, attitudes, values, emotions, motives, and traits, and that situational factors are largely irrelevant.

B =f(P).

This viewpoint is exemplified by traditional research on personality traits such as friendliness or aggressiveness.

So, for example individual differences in friendliness, assessed by means of a self-report questionnaire, would be used to predict whether a person would smile in some situation.In this research, which often uses the technique of multiple regression analysis (a variant on the correlation coefficient), the trait measure (e.g., friendliness) serves as the predictor variable, and the behavioral measure (e.g., smiling) serves as the criterion variable.

The canonical method of traditional personality psychology is to construct a "psychological test" to measure some personality trait, and then to use this information to predict individual behavior in some specific situation. The test might take the form of a self-report questionnaire, a rating scale (completed by the subjects themselves or by others who know them well), or even a sample of actual behavior.

Here's an actual research example: as part of an ongoing study at UCB, Ware and John (1995) measured MBA students' level of conscientiousness with a questionnaire known as the NEO Personality Inventory (to be discussed below), and then tracked their arrival times at two appointments, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Collapsing across the two appointments, they found that highly conscientious individuals tended to arrive a little early, while those who scored low on conscientiousness tended to arrive about five minutes late. In this case, conscientiousness significantly predicted a criterion of punctuality. (We'll return to this study later.)

A similar method is used to study the relationship between attitudes and behavior. For historical reasons, having largely to do with an interest in attitude change in response to persuasive communications, attitudes have primarily been studied by social psychologists. But the logic is the same: attitudes, which are internal dispositions to evaluate certain objects or ideas positively or negatively, are held to cause the individuals who hold these attitudes to behave in particular ways. Thus, in the 2000 election, a registered Democrat was (probably) more likely to vote for Al Gore than for George Bush -- though not enough of them did, from Gore's point of view.

Social Psychology

Traditional social psychology, by contrast, assumes that behavior is primarily determined by features of the environment, and especially features of the sociocultural ecology, such as interpersonal, organizational, and cultural factors, and that individual differences in personality are largely irrelevant.

B =f(E).

This viewpoint is exemplified in social psychology by traditional research on social influence, or the effects on behavior of the presence or behavior of other people. It is very congenial to the behaviorism espoused by John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner -- that latter of whom, famously, wrote (in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 1971) that "a person does not act upon the world, the world acts upon him".

So, for example, we might arrange an encounter between a subject and an acquaintance or a stranger, and see if smiling occurs more often in one situation than the other. In this research, which often uses the technique of analysis of variance (a variation on the t-test), the manipulated variable (e.g., presence of acquaintances or strangers) serves as the independent variable, and the observed variable (e.g., smiling) serves as the dependent variable.

The canonical method of traditional social psychology is to manipulate some aspect of the social environment (such as whether behavior is private or public, or whether the subject receives information about other people's attitudes and opinions), and observe the effects of this manipulation on behavior in some specific situation. All subjects might be exposed to all conditions (this is known as a within-subjects design), or different groups of subjects might be randomly assigned to each condition (this is known as a between-groups design).

Returning to the Ware & John (1995) study, recall that punctuality was measured in two different situations -- an appointment in the morning and another in the afternoon. When they examined punctuality as a function of the situation, rather than as a function of the person, they found that the students tended to arrive late for morning appointments, but a little early for appointments in the afternoon. In this case, punctuality depends on a feature of the situation -- the time of day at which the appointment is scheduled.

Just to confuse things, sometimes in regression analyses, the predictors are labeled as independent variables, and the criteria are labeled as dependent variables. This is because, mathematically, multiple regression is formally equivalent to the analysis of variance.

Link to an interview with Elliot Aronson.

Putting the Person and the Environment Together

However, these traditional formulations are largely misleading. Nobody believes that one factor is exclusively responsible for behavior, and the other is wholly irrelevant. Dispositional and situational factors probably combine somehow to cause behavior to occur.

One possibility is that P and E are independent -- that is, that each set of factors exerts its own separate influence on behavior, without affecting the other in any way. In such a situation, behavior is partly predicted by personality traits, and partly affected by situational manipulations. In mathematical terms, personal and environmental factors are additive:

B =f(P + E).

If P and E are independent:

In statistics, these two effects would be characterized as the main effect of personality and the situation, respectively.

Thus, friendly people may smile more than unfriendly people, and people may smile more at acquaintances than at strangers, but the difference between friendly and unfriendly subjects is constant across the two situations (subtract the means), and the difference between acquaintance and stranger targets is constant across levels of friendliness (again, subtract the means). Statistically speaking, there is no interaction between these main effects.

Returning to our study of punctuality, when Ware and John (1995) examined the data as a function of both the person (level of conscientiousness) and the situation (time of day), they found that the effects of the two variables were completely independent of each other -- as indicated by the almost perfectly parallel lines. But another way, punctuality varied as an additive function of conscientiousness and time of day,

For most of the 20th century, personality and social psychology proceeded largely independently of each other, but in the 1960s and 1970s there arose a trait-situation controversy over which factors were more powerful predictors of behavior -- internal traits or external situations. This debate devolved into a contest over whose "effect size" was bigger -- and, like most characteristically masculine competitions, it was essentially a pointless exercise, and generated much more heat than light. It's over now, and in most psychology departments personality and social psychologists work side by side -- though they still keep their hands on their swords.

The Doctrine of Interactionism

The trait-situation controversy faded partly due to exhaustion of the participants, but also because psychologists began to consider a more interesting possibility -- that personal and environmental determinants interacted with each other in a variety of ways.

The Doctrine of Interactionism proposed by K.S. Bowers (1973), holds that people influence the situations that, in turn, influence their behavior. As he put it:

An interactionist... view denies the primacy of either traits or situations in the determination of behavior....

More specifically, interactionism argues that situations are as much a function of the person as the person's behavior is a function of the situation.

From an interactionist perspective, different kinds of people show different patterns of response across different situations. In mathematical terms, personal and situational factors are multiplicative:

B =f(P x E).

If P and E interact:

Thus, for example, friendly people might smile more than unfriendly people, but this difference would be bigger when they encounter a stranger than when they encounter a friend. Or, put another way, friendly people might discriminate less between the two situations that unfriendly people would. Such a situation is known statistically as the person-by-situation interaction.

The person-by-situation interaction takes a number of forms.

There are other forms of interaction, all variants on these.

Here's an actual example of interaction, a study of behavior problems in toddlers. Elisabeth Conradt and her colleagues (2013) studied the children of mothers who were at risk for parenting problems of various sorts.  When the children were infants, just 5 months old, the researchers measured their respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a physiological index of activity in the parasympathetic nervous system.  Children with high levels of RSA tend to be more sensitive to, and engaged with, their environments.  One year later, at 17 months, the researchers assessed the environment in which the child was raised, as "secure" or "disorganized".  At the same time, they assessed the toddlers' levels of social and emotional problems. Children with low levels of RSA showed the same amount of problem behavior, regardless of the environment in which they were being raised.  But children with high levels of RSA were very responsive to their environments: those raised in disorganized environments showed a much higher frequency of behavioral problems than did those with low levels of RSA.  So the high-RSA children really are more responsive to their environments: those exposed to a disorganized environment showed it in relatively high levels of behavioral difficulties; those exposed to a more benign environment responded with relatively few behavior problems.

Reciprocal Determinism

Traditionally, the person-by-situation interaction has been characterized as unidirectional. That is to say, in Bowers' preferred formulation, people somehow affect the situations they are in, and this interaction, along with the main effects of the person and of the situation, causes behavior to occur.

But of course, it may also be that, in addition to the person influencing the situation to which he or she responds, the environment also shapes the internal states and dispositions of the person in it.If people can influence their environments, why should their environments influence them?

Albert Bandura has called this state of affairs reciprocal determinism. In reciprocal determinism, causality is bidirectional:

But if the causal relations between P and E can be bidirectional, why can't the causal relations between P and B, and between E and B, be bidirectional as well?

In addition to personal factors such a traits and attitudes causing behavior to occur, behavior might feed back to change the person who emitted it.

And, to complete the circle, in addition to environmental factors such as social pressure and rewards causing behavior to occur, behavior might feed back to change the environment that elicited it.

In other words, each element in Lewin's formula -- not just P and E but B as well, is both cause and effect. Because the reciprocal causal relations involve three elements, Bandura also has labeled this expanded notion of reciprocal determinism triadic reciprocality.

Reciprocal determinism in general, and triadic reciprocality in particular, entails a very interesting situation in which everything is simultaneously both the cause and the effect of everything else.

Still, when everything in a system affects everything else, things are going to get awfully complicated awfully quickly. For this reason, it is rarely possible to study triadic reciprocality in all of its dynamic glory. Fortunately, the lack of simultaneity works to our advantage, permitting an analytic decomposition in which we break triadic reciprocality down into its bidirectional segments, or dialectics (from the Greek word meaning "dialog").

This yields The Three Dialectics in Social Interaction:

In what follows, we take up each of these dialectics in turn.

Reciprocal Determinism in Marital Relations No, not those marital relations -- well, those too, actually, if you think about it, but here I'm really talking about conversations between married couples, as an example of reciprocal determinism in action.  The analysis comes from John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington who specializes in marriage and family therapy (his laboratory is called "The Love Lab").  Gottman sets out his system in a monograph, The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (2003).  For our purposes, a complex dynamic nonlinear system is a system in which each element influences the state (behavior) of the other elements, just as in Bandura's analysis of reciprocal determinism, the elements P, E, and B are all influencing each other.  Gottman's insight is that married couples behave like this: each partner is influencing the other's beliefs, moods, desires, and actions.  Gottman begins with the simple assumption that spouses engaged in conversation react to the most recent statement made by their partners.  Then, they map out influence functions -- for example, a biting remark by one spouse will induce a negative emotion in the other, and a negative response, leading to a downward spiral in affect.  Also important is each spouse's uninfluenced steady state -- essentially, whether each spouse is disposed to be in a positive or negative mood, independent of what the other person says or does.  Also, they take into account repair functions, in which spouses turn a difficult conversation into a more positive direction, or damping functions, which turn them in a more negative direction.  From this point, Gottman creates bilinear influence functions tracing the course of the conversation, and each partner's effect on each other in turn.  For example, in validating couples tend to move in the direction of their partner's negative behavior, creating a vicious cycle.  In conflict-avoiding couples, one partner behaves more positively when the other is negative.  In hostile-detached couples, one spouse's positive behavior has little or no impact on the other. (Graphic from "Every Unhappy Family Has Its Own Bilinear Influence Function" by David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, 04/25/2003).

The Dialectic Between the Person and Behavior

With respect to the dialectic between the Person and Behavior, analysis of the personal determinants of behavior focuses on internal states and dispositions:

In each case, the idea is that these internal factors dispose a person to behave in particular ways:

Most research on the personal causes of behavior has focused on personality traits, so they receive special attention here.

The Structure of Personality

Personality may be defined as the distinctive patterns of experience, thought, and action that characterize the individual's unique response to his or her life situation.

Traditionally, the scientific study of personality has begun with the ways in which people describe each other. In this culture, such descriptions tend to employ a mixture of terms:

The earliest "scientific" theories of personality were based on type categories. For example, the humour theory of temperament slotted people into one of four personality types:

The typological approach seems satisfying at first glance, because the categories seem to capture the gist or essence of many people we know. But from a scientific point of view it is ultimately unsatisfying, simply because most people don't fit easily into these or any other set of pigeonholes. A major problem with the classic type theories of personality is that they are based on the classic view of categories as proper sets defined by singly necessary and jointly sufficient features, with sharp boundaries between categories, homogeneity within categories, and no unclear cases. But such an approach fails for people for the same reason that if fails for other natural objects: some people can't be classified under the scheme at all, others seem to possess characteristics of more than one type, and some are more representative of a type than others.

In principle, these problems of partial and combined expression could be solved by shifting to a probabilistic, fuzzy-set view of personality types, and in fact just such a move has been made for the diagnostic categories in psychopathology. But in normal personality, the problem was solved by shifting emphasis from types to traits -- continuous dimensions (analogous to height and weight) representing psychological features that everyone possesses, but in varying degrees. Because everyone is considered to possess each trait, all cases can be classified; and a multidimensional system can represent all possible collections of traits, thus permitting partial and combined expression.

Describing personality in terms of traits, however, raises the thorny question of how many dimensions are needed for the job. One count of dictionary terms, by Allport & Odbert (1936), determined that there were 17,943 trait terms in the English language (actually, sad to say, they missed one, and there were really 17,944). More have been added since then.

This is obviously a lot of traits, and it would be convenient to have a more concise summary. In fact, employing a statistical technique called factor analysis (which is based on the correlation coefficient), it has been determined that only five traits are basic to personality description. Put another way, there are five basic dimensions of personality:

These traits have been called "The Big Five", and are commonly considered to represent a universally applicable structure for personality description -- encoded in language, and permitting comprehensive descriptions and comparisons of personality, applicable to people of any age in any culture at any time.  With a different ordering of the traits, the Big Five is also sometimes referred to as the "OCEAN" structure of personality (standing for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism).

I call the Big Five The Five Blind Date Questions: they represent the most important things you'd like to know in advance about someone you're going to spend some time with:

Although most psychologists are fairly satisfied with the Big Five structure of personality, some theorists have suggested that we can reduce these five dimensions still further (remember that we started out with 17,954!), to just two:

The Structure of Attitudes

Similar considerations apply to the domain of attitudes. There is a potentially infinite number of attitudes -- as many attitudes as we have objects to have attitudes about, which is a lot -- war, abortion, nuclear power, global climate change, feminism, racial integration, my next-door neighbor, General Motors, the sweater that my mother gave me for my birthday. And methods similar to those used to reduce the corpus of personality traits to a manageable number have been used to uncover the basic structure of attitudes.

In this case, it appears that the structure of attitudes can be boiled down to a single dimension -- "the Big One?": liberal versus conservative, pretty much as those terms are understood today. In addition, there is some evidence for a second dimension, reflecting individual differences in attitudes concerning traditional morality. Interestingly, the two dimensions appear to be largely independent of each other: one can be politically liberal but very traditional with respect to morality; and one can be a conservative libertine.

If that's too monolithic a structure for you, it can be argued that the structure of attitudes consists of yet another "Big Five": that is, people are either relatively liberal or relatively conservative in political,economic, religious,social, and esthetic domains. You can be a raving liberal Democrat and still not like modern art. You can be an Orthodox Jew but still favor liberal social causes. Maybe, like Spearman's g, a single dimension of liberalism-conservatism is just too abstract, and it's more useful to focus on what might be called "primary attitudinal domains".

The Assessment of Personality

It is clear that we commonly describe each other in terms of traits, but the scientific study of personality wants to go beyond mere description to prediction and explanation. In that effort, a particular conception of personality has evolved that asserts that traits have a physical existence in the nervous system and cause people to behave in characteristic ways in a wide variety of situations. Trait theorists disagree about whether personality traits are inherited or acquired through experience but they agree that traits exist and can be measured quantitatively. It is old doctrine in science that whatever exists, exists in measurable form.

The problem of measuring personality traits is one of psychometrics, or measuring psychological attributes of people. The most convenient instruments for this purpose are adjective ratings scales, where the items are trait adjectives such as those that comprise The Big Five; or personality questionnaires in which subjects describe their actual or likely behavior in a number of different situations that bear on the trait(s) in question. Most personality testing regards these self-reports as substitutes for actual behavioral data collected by trained observers -- that is, it assumes some degree of isomorphism between what people say about themselves on personality questionnaires, and what they actually experience, think, and do.

Personality tests, like all measuring instruments must have certain psychometric properties.

In addition, one psychometric property is highly desirable, even if it is not strictly necessary:

Assessing The Big Five

Over the years, a number of personality inventories have been published, providing assessments of a number of different personality traits. Among these, perhaps the most famous are:

Lately, a questionnaire designed to assess subjects' standing on the "Big Five" personality traits has been developed, called the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI; the "NEO" stands for Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness, the three major traits assessed in early versions of the scale; Agreeableness and Conscientiousness were added later).

The NEO-PI assesses each of the Big Five personality dimensions in terms of six "facets". After analyzing each Big Five dimension into these facets, the authors (Robert McCrae and Paul Costa) then developed eight self-report items bearing on each of these facets, for a total of 240 items. The Big Five dimensions, subordinate facets, and sample inventory items are presented below, to give you a flavor for the scale. In addition, I show the distribution of Big Five scores in a large sample of college undergraduates, as assessed by an abbreviated version of the NEO-PI called the NEO Five-Factor Inventory.

Alternatively, the Big Five can be measured simply by asking subjects to rate themselves on a series of adjectives representing the various facets of the five dimensions. The following list shows selected correlates of each of the Big Five facets, as measured by the NEO-PI, with items of the Adjective Check List (ACL):

Returning to the NEO-PI data, note that the distribution of each Big Five trait approximates a "normal" or "bell-shaped" curve -- and that, happily, the average score on Neuroticism is lower than the average scores on Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness.

Interestingly, the Big Five traits are, to all practical purposes, uncorrelated with each other. The correlations among the traits are much closer to 0.0 than they are to 1.0. This means that, for all practical purposes, we cannot predict a person's standing on one trait from knowledge of his or her standing on another.

However, the correlations are not precisely zero, and so a higher-order resolution of the Big Five structure is possible. An analysis of personality trait adjective ratings by Seymour Rosenberg and Andrea Sedlak has showed that they can all be arranged on two dimensions of evaluation:

Moreover, these dimensions are correlated with each other, such that, on average, people who are perceived to have socially desirable traits are also perceived to have intellectually desirable traits. Even though the Big Five traits are essentially uncorrelated with each other, you should note that, with the exception of Neuroticism, each of the Big Five traits represents a socially desirable quality. Neuroticism is something that can be charming in small amounts, but extremely annoying and maladaptive in large amounts. Accordingly, we can propose a higher-order resolution of the Big Five along the following lines:

The Function of Traits

Once the basic traits have been identified and a technology has been developed to measure them, research can proceed on the nature of traits, their origins, and their influence on experience, thought, and action. With respect to the functions of traits, there are two views:

In the weak view, traits have only nominal existence; in the strong view, traits have actual existence. The strong view is exemplified by the doctrine of traits: traits cause the coherence, stability, consistency, and predictability of the individual's behavior.

Obviously, no one expects to observe perfect levels of coherence, stability, consistency, and predictability. But the stronger these features appear in human experience, thought, and action, the more the doctrine of traits seems valid -- the idea that personality traits exist in people and dispose them to particular modes of experience, thought, and action. For the past 50 years, considerable research has been devoted to these issues.

Coherence

The coherence of personality is expressed in two ways:

The coherence assumption results in a hierarchical structure of individual differences:

For example, we also tend to think that people who have socially desirable traits also have intellectually desirable traits, forming a "super-superordinate" trait of good-bad. In what is known as the halo effect, we tend to perceive socially desirable traits as correlated with each other. Thus, people who are perceived as extraverted will also be perceived as agreeable, and people who are extraverted and agreeable will also be perceived as intelligent and creative.

With respect to the Doctrine of Traits, the strongest evidence is for the coherence of personality -- studies in a wide variety of populations seem to converge on The Big Five as a coherent hierarchical structure of personality, uniting habitual behaviors, primary traits, and higher-order traits.

However, it should be noted that most of this literature has concerned the coherence of habitual behaviors, subsumed by primary traits, and the coherence of primary traits, subsumed by secondary traits such as The Big Five. There has been little research on the coherence of actual behavior.

At the same time, it should be noted that the extent of coherence of habitual behaviors and primary traits may be magnified by people's expectations and beliefs about personality structure. For example, The Big Five traits fall out when people make abstract judgments of the semantic similarity or co-occurrence of traits and actions, as well as when they rate specific other people. More critically, The Big Five falls out when people rate the personalities of total strangers -- people for whom they could not possibly have knowledge of how they actually behave. Apparently, people carry around in their heads an implicit theory of personality -- a set of beliefs, not always well articulated, about how various aspects of personality hang together (like "The Big Five Blind Date Questions") that influences their judgments -- in much the same way that perception of the nonsocial world is influenced by the perceiver's beliefs and expectations.

From Types to Traits and Back Again The psychology of personality began with ideas about different discrete "types" of people, but for reasons discussed earlier (partial and combined expression, etc.), the focus of personality research quickly switched to continuous traits as the basis of personality.  However, type theory remains enormously attractive -- look how easy it is for us to classify people into "types" like jocks and nerds, preppies and princesses, goths and head-bangers.  And so it is with personality psychologists. Recently, Gerlach et al. (Nature Human Behavior, 2018), reported a new personality typology based on the Big Five personality traits.  Using data from four large samples totaling about 1.5 million individuals, they performed a cluster analysis -- a variant on factor analysis which can identify groups of individuals who share a particular profile.  Of course, with 1.5 million subjects, they observed just about every possible combination of the Big Five traits you can imagine.  But four profiles appeared much more frequently that would be expected by chance alone -- so frequently that it seems reasonable to identify them as meaningful personality types. The "Average" type shows moderately high scores on Neuroticism and Extraversion, moderately low scores on Openness, and about average on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The "Self-Centered" type shows high scores on Extraversion, average scores on Neuroticism, and relatively low scores on Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. The "Reserved" type shows low scores on Neuroticism and Openness, and average scores on Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. The "Role Model" type shows low scores on Neuroticism, average scores on Openness, and moderately high scores on Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness.

Stability

Within each level of the hierarchy, the Doctrine of Traits assumes that behaviors and traits are relatively stable across both long and short intervals of time. People who were extraverts at age 10 should still be relatively extraverted at age 50.

The assumption of stability lies behind the psychometric property of test-retest reliability.

There is less evidence in favor of stability: although personality questionnaire scores and adjective trait ratings show significant degrees of test-retest reliability over even very long periods of time, there is at least as much variability as there is stability. Stability is greatest over relatively short intervals of time.

Consistency

Again within each level of the hierarchy, the Doctrine of Traits assumes that behaviors and traits are relatively consistently displayed across a wide variety of different situations. The whole point of a trait, given the strong view, is to generate consistent responses in a variety of situations, and to render various situations "functionally equivalent" in terms of the behavior that occurs within them.

There is even less evidence for consistency: human experience, thought, and action is remarkably flexible and finely tuned to the specific situation in which it occurs. Consistency is greatest across situations that are highly similar.

Predictability

Finally, it should be possible to estimate a person's standing across different levels of the hierarchy:

The assumption of predictability underlies the psychometric property of external validity. Trait measures are considered valid to the extent that they predict what people will actually do. And this returns us to Dialectic Between the Person and Behavior.

Predicting Behavior from Traits and Attitudes

In the context of Lewin's formula,B =f(P,E),the most important implication of the Doctrine of Traits is prediction, because, according to the doctrine, a person's behavior (B) is a function of his or her traits and other internal, personal characteristics (P). So, to what extent can we predict a person's actual behavior in some specific situation from knowledge of his or her generalized personality traits and attitudes?

For example, given that we know that a person is extraverted, and thus tends to be warm, and also to like most people, will he also like Judy when he meets her?

And given that we know that a person is agreeable, and thus tends to be trusting, and also to believe most people are honest, will he also let his co-worker borrow some money?

To be honest, this question has not been studied as much as we would like. A great deal of personality research has focused on identifying the basic structure of personality (the question of coherence), and in addressing questions such as the stability of personality and the consistency of behavior across situations. Relatively few studies have addressed the question of predictability.

Ideology and Voting Behavior

Perhaps the strongest evidence for predictability concerns the relation between political attitudes and voting behavior. Jost (2006) analyzed survey data from the American National Election Studies (ANES)covering all US presidential elections from 1972 (McGovern vs. Nixon) to 2004 (Bush vs. Kerry). In the survey, more than 7,500 respondents rated themselves on a 7-point scale of political liberalism-conservatism (where 1 = extremely liberal and 7 = extremely conservative), and then reported how they had voted in the most recent election. In each election, Jost found that voting behavior was almost perfectly correlated with political ideology, with liberals voting much more often for Democrats, and conservatives voting much more often for Republicans. In the 2004 election, for example, the correlation between political liberalism-conservatism and voting for John Kerry vs. George W. Bush was a whopping r = .97!

The following graphs depict individual results for each presidential election, from 1972 to 2004:

Although this is certainly an impressive level of predictability, in most cases our ability to predict specific behavior from measurements of personality traits is extremely limited.

Racial Prejudice

But attitudes are not nearly so strongly predictive of actual behavior in other instances. In a famous study, LaPiere (1934), traveled around the United States with a Chinese couple. At a time when American prejudice against Chinese was particularly strong, LaPiere was surprised to discover that the couple was rarely refused accommodation at hotels and restaurants. After completing the tour, he wrote to the hotels and restaurants that he had visited, and asked whether they accepted "members of the Chinese race as guests".

LaPiere concluded:

"In the end I was forced to conclude that those factors which most influenced the behavior of others towards the Chinese had nothing at all to do with race."

In other words, racial attitudes were not predictive of actual behavior.

Delay of Gratification

Consider, for example, a study of delay of gratification in young children (Funder, Block, & Block, 1983), conducted at UCB. Delay of gratification has to do with people's ability to tolerate frustration and control their impulses. It's a pretty important aspect of socialization. Max Weber, a pioneering sociologist, thought that delay of gratification was the basis for the "Protestant ethic" of self-restraint and the negation of pleasure (obviously, he didn't know many Protestants!) which he thought lay at the basis of capitalism. But every culture requires some ability for ego-control: to plan ahead and tolerate delays. This ability is generally acquired early in life, as a result of socialization. Of course, even within a culture individuals will differ in their ability to delay gratification: as traditional personality psychologists might put it, some people have it, some people don't.

In the Funder study, nursery-school teachers administered a test of intelligence, and also rated their pupils' personalities on an instrument (known as the California Q Set) that provided measures of two higher-order dimensions of personality:

Why didn't Funder et al. assess the children's personalities in terms of The Big Five? At the time the study was done, consensus had not yet developed around The Big Five as the structure of personality. There were other competing systems, including Hans Eysenck's four-factor proposal (neuroticism, extraversion, psychoticism, and intelligence) and the two-factor system (ego-control and ego-resiliency) proposed by Jack and Jean Block, who after all were Funder's co-investigators. These two competing systems still undergird much research, and in fact Jack Block has on numerous occasions (e.g., 1995, 2001) pronounced himself a "Big Five Contrarian", and offered trenchant critiques of the research supporting The Big Five as a universally applicable structure for personality description.

Around the same time as the assessments were made, Funder et al. engaged the children in an experimental assessment of their ability to delay gratification employing two different situations

All four predictors -- IQ, ego control and ego resiliency, and the specific item "Is unable to delay gratification" correlated in the range of .20 <r < .30 with actual delay behavior (the correlation between delay and the specific item was, of course, negative).

These values are fully representative of the kinds of validity coefficients routinely obtained in these kinds of studies. Personality in general predicts behavior in particular, but the prediction is relatively weak. There's more to predicting behavior than knowing the person's personality traits.

There is a subtle problem in all of these studies, which is that behavior is measured by only a single observation (an episode of the person's behavior, limited to a particular time and place), and single observations are inherently unreliable. Of course, one person's "unreliability" is another person's behavioral flexibility, but even so it may be unfair to ask personality traits to predict specific episodes of behavior with any great power.

Accordingly, some investigators have focused on the prediction of aggregate measures of behavior: instead of predicting a single instance of delay of gratification, for example, they might seek to predict the overall trend in delay behavior, measured across a number of different episodes. Instead of predicting specific instances of behavior, then, these studies seek to predict something closer to habitual behavior.

Predicting Habitual Behavior

For example, in one study, Sampo Paunonen assessed personality with the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI), which yields scores for each of the Big Five personality traits. Scores from the NEO-FFI were then used to predict subjects' behavior on 13 different variables, such as the number of dates per month (not whether the subjects had a date on a particular Saturday night), and mean number of traffic violations in the past year (not whether they ran a particular stop sign on a particular day). The table below shows the correlations between each of the Big Five traits and selected criterion variables:

Note that the correlations in question never exceeded .30.

Note, too, that it's generally hard to explain the correlations that Paunonen actually obtained:

And finally, Paunonen generally failed to confirm these findings in a second study conducted in almost exactly the same manner as the first.

A later study by Paunonen and Ashton (2001) used another version of the NEO Personality Inventory, which yields scores for six "facets" of each of the Big Five personality traits, obtained similar results.The correlations in question rarely if ever exceeded .30.

Note, however, just to reiterate, that the criterion variables used in these studies were actually self-reports of habitual behaviors. So, for example, although scores on Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, and Openness were significantly correlated (some positively, some negatively) with the number of cigarettes smoked per month as reported by the subjects themselves, we do not know how well these scales would predict the number of cigarettes smoked per month as recorded objectively by an independent observer, or whether a person would smoke on any particular day or in any particular situation. It stands to reason that, given the modesty of the predictions obtained in this study, from the level of secondary traits to the level of habitual behavior, the ability of secondary traits to predict behavior in specific situations will be even more limited.

Predicting Rooms

Another perspective on predictability is offered by a study by Samuel Gosling and his associates (2001), which asked whether people's personalities could be inferred from the appearance of their offices and bedrooms. For example, agreeable people might have many pictures of friends, or conscientious people might make their beds. Gosling and his associates obtained both self-ratings and peer-ratings of the Big Five personality traits, and then (with permission, of course) conducted surprise visits to their subjects' offices or bedrooms. For our purposes, we can think of the appearance of these rooms as samples of the subjects' behaviors on the particular day of the visit (my office is generally neat, moderately high level of conscientiousness, but sometimes the desk is quite cluttered; I always make my bed in the morning, too, perhaps for the same reason, but sometimes my nightstand is piled high with books and magazines). Could you use knowledge of my level of conscientiousness to accurately predict what my office or bedroom would look like on any randomly selected day? In my office, I'm often reading a book on some esoteric subject, such as hypnosis or consciousness, while my nightstand usually has artsy or "liberal" magazines on it, such as The New Yorker and The Nation; but sometimes I've got something utterly conventional on my desk, like an introductory psychology textbook, or my nightstand holds a Tom Clancy thriller. Could you use knowledge of my level of openness to experience to predict what would be readily at hand on any randomly selected day?

The answer is yes, to some degree. Still, most of the correlations aren't very high. The relationship between personality and behavior is stronger for bedroom appearance than office appearance -- probably because there are more institutional and societal constraints on what you can keep in your office as opposed to what you can put in your bedroom. The relationship is especially strong between the appearance of people's bedrooms and their level of openness to experience.

Predicting Smiling

Another recent study also illustrates the use of personality traits to predict behavior. LeeAnne Harker and Dacher Keltner (2001) analyzed data from a longitudinal study of women who graduated from Mills College, a private women's college in Oakland, California, in 1958 and 1960. As seniors, these women had completed a battery of personality assessments; they also had their photographs taken for their yearbook. The question is: Can personality predict how the women posed before the camera? The question is not a trivial one. We might expect happy people to smile and sad people to frown, but almost everyone smiles in their yearbook photo -- because that is what you're supposed to do, and the photographer won't snap the picture until you do so. But when a photographer asks you to "smile for the camera", the resulting posed facial expression (sometimes known as a "Duchenne smile"), often differs significantly from the smile spontaneously displayed by genuinely happy people. As it turns out, women who scored high on negative emotionality, a dimension related to neuroticism, were much less likely (r = -.37) to display an intense, genuinely positive facial expression in their yearbook picture. Somewhat puzzlingly, the correlation between smiling and positive emotionality, a trait related to extraversion, was also negative, but it was not statistically significant. But women who were high on affiliation, a trait related to agreeableness, were more likely to show a genuine smile (r = .33).

Predicting Musical Preferences

Another recent study examined the correlation between personality and musical preferences (Nave et al. Psych. Sci., 2018).  Now, preferences aren't exactly behavior -- they're internal mental states.  But in this instance, the measure of musical preference is based on whether more than 44,000 (you read that right) Facebook subscribers, who completed an assessment of the Big Five personality traits, and also indicated whether they liked music representing various genres: classical (baroque to modern), rock, folk, and jazz. 

• Previous research by Rentfrow (who was a co-author of the study we're talking about) had revealed another "Big Five" dimensions in music: mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense, and contemporary (not surprisingly, Rentfrow calls this the "MUSIC" structure of music, paralleling the OCEAN structure of personality).  Quoting Nave et al.,
  
• "The mellow dimension represents music that is romantic, relaxing, and slow, and comprises soft rock, R&B, and adult contemporary musical pieces.
  
• The unpretentious dimension represents music that is uncomplicated, relaxing, and acoustic, and comprises country, folk, and singer/songwriter pieces.
• The sophisticated dimension represents music that is inspiring, complex, and dynamic, and comprises classical, operatic, world, and jazz pieces.
  
• The intense dimension represents music that is distorted, loud, and aggressive, and comprises classic rock, alternative rock, punk, and heavy metal pieces.
  
• The contemporary dimension represents music that is percussive, electric, and not sad, and comprises rap, electronic dance music, Latin, and Europop pieces."
  
• In Study 1, more than 22,000 users of the "MyPersonality" personality website completed a personality assessment according to the Big Five model and rated 25 unfamiliar long musical excerpts, each 15 seconds long, 5 representing each of the 5 dimensions in the MUSIC model.  These preferences, of course, are attitudes, not specific behaviors.
  
• In Study 2, the "Likes" for musical artists were harvested from the Facebook profiles of almost 22,000 MyPersonality users who had completed the Big Five assessment.  Because "Facebook Likes" are public, they come closer to actual behavior -- that is, closer to actual listening to recordings or attending concerts.
  

In both cases, there was a significant correlation between Openness to Experience and preferences for various musical styles, with highly open individuals preferring more "sophisticated" music.  Along the same lines, subjects scoring high on Extraversion preferred "unpretentious" music. 

 

Big Five Predictor	Study 1	Study 2
Openness to Experience	.25	.30
Conscientiousness	.11	.19
Extraversion	.16	.21
Agreeableness	.15	.17
Neuroticism	.12	.18

The Personality Coefficient

There's a pattern emerging here. For the most part, the correlations between general traits and specific behaviors seem to reach a plateau in the .20s and .30. Walter Mischel (1968), reviewing the literature up to that time, suggested that there was a ceiling, or upper limit, on the extent to which an individual's behavior in some specific situation could be predicted from knowledge of his or her generalized personality traits. Mischel called this ceiling, corresponding to a modest correlation of r = .30, the personality coefficient.

A correlation of .30 means that the two variables have about 10% of their variance in common -- actually, .30² = .09 or 9%.That means that only about 10% of the variance in actual behavior can be accounted for by the personality trait in question. The vast bulk of behavioral variation is left unaccounted for by personality traits.

Mischel's claims were controversial, to say the least -- and they were especially challenged by proponents of traditional personality research, based as it was on the Doctrine of Traits. His review was written relatively early in this debate, and drew on a relatively small body of empirical evidence. Still, he seems to have had it right: there is a ceiling, roughly corresponding to a correlation coefficient of r = .30, on our ability to predict specific behaviors on the basis of our knowledge of generalized personality traits.

Interestingly, at about the same time Wicker (1969) came to a similar conclusion about the predictability of behavior from attitudes. Because the attitude construct was considered to be as central to social psychology as the trait construct was to the psychology of personality, Wicker's review precipitated a major crisis in the field, with large number of theorists wondering if it was a waste of time to study attitudes -- or, to put it another way, almost the entire history of experimental social psychology, from the time of Thurstone and Cave, had been a waste of time. And, interestingly, the solutions to the problem of predictability offered by social psychologists largely paralleled what was going on in personality psychology (e.g., Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977; Fazio & Zanna, 1981). Reflecting these trends, a later "meta-analysis" by Kraus (1995) yielded a an average correlation coefficient of r = .38. Call it, pace Mischel, "the attitude coefficient". But, as this later review indicates, these technical fixes didn't alter the situation very much.

General traits don't predict behavior very well, and neither do general attitudes.

So it's not the case that there is no predictability, just as it's not the case that there is no coherence, stability, or consistency. But levels of coherence, stability, consistency, and predictability of traits are rather modest -- perhaps much more modest than the Doctrine of Traits would have us believe -- because, as Lewin's formula indicates, other factors enter into the determination of behavior besides personal qualities such as traits and attitudes.We will discuss these factors when we discuss the other dialectics that comprise the Doctrine of Reciprocal Determinism.

The Reciprocal Effect of Behavior on the Person

So much for the effects of the Person on Behavior. What about the reciprocal effect of Behavior on the Person?

Self-Perception Theory

The B==>P relation is illustrated by Daryl Bem's self-perception theory of attitudes, which reverses the traditional account of attitude-behavior relations. Common sense tells us that attitudes come first, and lead us to behave in attitude-consistent ways. If I'm a registered Democrat, then I'll probably vote for the Democratic candidate in an election. My attitudes cause me to behave in particular ways. But Bem argued that the actual direction of causality is reversed: that behavior causes attitudes to form. Specifically, Bem argued that we infer what our attitudes are from observing our own behavior -- in exactly the same way that we infer what other people's attitudes are from observations of their behavior. Put another way, our perception of our own behavior leads us to form attitudes that are consistent with that behavior. In this sense, the behavior comes first, and the attitude comes later.

Self-perception theory is illustrated by the "foot-in-the-door effect" on compliance. In a classic study, Freedman and Fraser (1966) canvassed neighborhoods in the guise of a California "safe driving" campaign. They asked homeowners in a random half of households in particular neighborhoods to sign a petition in support of safe driving. The canvassers did not request any donations for the campaign -- only signatures. Almost everyone complied with this request. Later, the canvassers returned to all the households in the neighborhood, and asked permission to place a large, unattractive poster in their front yards promoting the campaign. Homeowners who had earlier signed the petition were more likely to agree to the poster than those who had not been asked to sign. The trick in the experiment, of course, is that almost everyone who had been asked to sign the petition actually did so. So there could not have been any difference between the two groups in their support of safe driving. Rather, it was the act of signing the petition that made homeowners more likely to permit the poster.This is the "foot in the door" effect -- that granting a small favor makes it more likely that the person will later grant a large favor. The effect, in turn, is explained by Bem's self-perception theory.

In another study, Cialdini et al. (1976) recruited subjects for an experiment by telephone. Some subjects were informed that the experimental session was scheduled for 7:00 AM before they agreed to participate; others were given this information afterwards. Of course, some subjects in the first condition didn't agree to participate, but we are interested only in those who did. The question is: how many subjects who agreed to participate actually appeared? The result may seem paradoxical: more subjects who agreed after learning the experiment was scheduled for 7:00 AM actually showed up. But if you look at it from the point of view of self-perception theory, the result is not paradoxical at all. Agreeing to participate creates a kind of "foot in the door", and increases the likelihood that the subject will take the more arduous step, and actually show up for the experiment.

A third experiment, by Chaiken and Baldwin (1981), also illustrates self-perception theory at work. In this study, subjects first completed a questionnaire concerned with attitudes toward environmental conservation. Some subjects had strong pro-conservation attitudes, and others were strongly opposed to conservation efforts (these were not necessarily the kind of person who would like to shoot the last elephant hiding behind the last tree in the rain forest, but rather the kind of person who thinks that conservation efforts are fine in their place, but should be tempered by such needs as energy self-sufficiency and economic development), but some subjects had weak, inconsistent pro/con attitudes. The subjects then completed a questionnaire in which they were asked to report on their conservation-relevant behaviors. Some subjects received a version of the questionnaire carefully worded in such a way as to encourage them to reflect on their anti-environment behaviors (e.g., that they did litter on occasion), while others received a version that encouraged them to reflect on their pro-conservation behaviors (e.g., that they frequently did not litter). When these subjects were subsequently retested, their attitudes shifted in the direction of their behavioral self-reports. Those who were encouraged to reflect on their anti-environment behaviors became more strongly opposed to conservation, while those who were encouraged to reflect on their pro-environment behaviors because more strongly favorable. No such shift occurred in those who already had strong attitudes either way. For those who had weak, vague, inconsistent attitudes about environmental conservation before the experiment began, their reflections on their own behavior appear to have created attitudes that did not exist before.

Actually, the Chaiken-Baldwin experiment provides an example of what is known as the person-by-situation interaction. Attitude strength is a feature of the person. Reviewing one's past experiences is a task set by the situation. The task affects attitudes, but only for people who had weak attitudes to begin with. People with initially strong attitudes about the environment, whether pro or con, were unaffected by the situational manipulation.

The James-Lange Theory of Emotion

The reciprocal effect of Behavior on the Person is also illustrated by the James-Lange theory of emotion. Traditionally, we think of our behaviors are caused by our internal emotional states: when we see the bear, in William James's famous formulation (1884), we run because we are afraid. But James and Lange reversed the direction of causality: in their view, emotion results from the perception of our own bodily responses to a stimulus. To continue James' famous formulation, when we see the bear, we are afraid because we run. James, as his formula suggests, emphasized the perception of our motor responses; Carl Lange, a Danish psychologist who came up with the theory independently of James (1885), emphasized the autonomic nervous system. When Walter B. Cannon (1935) famously criticized the James-Lange theory on the ground that there were no differential autonomic correlates of various emotional states, he was really talking about Lange's version of the theory. More recently, however, some evidence favoring James's version has come from studies of the facial expressions of emotion.

For many years, UCSF psychologist Paul Ekman and his colleagues have studied facial expressions of emotion as an aspect of nonverbal communication. Following Darwin, who thought that there was evolutionary continuity of emotional expressions between humans and nonhuman animals (e.g., The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals, 1872), Ekman has argued that there are a small number of innate "basic emotions" which expressed facially in very similar ways in humans across all cultures. Some of these emotions, and examples of their associated facial expressions, are:

There may be other basic emotions, as well: one candidate is contempt. But this list gives the basic idea.

Note that Ekman refers to these as emotional expressions, implying the traditional view that the emotion comes first, and the expressive behavior comes later. Or, in Lewin's terms,P (emotional state) ==>B (facial expression). However, the James-Lange theory asserts that the expressive behavior comes first, and the emotions later:B (facial expression) ==>P (emotional state). Of course, from the point of view of reciprocal determinism, both could be true: there could be a kind of feedback relationship between emotional state and emotional behavior.

The James-Lange theory was formalized by Sylvan Tomkins in the facial feedback hypothesis of emotion, which states that feedback from the face affects the person's emotional state. The facial feedback hypothesis, in turn, comes in two forms:

In any event, is there any evidence for reversing the direction of causality? Yes. Laird et al. (1989) studied this question in a psychophysiological experiment in which they used the electromyogram (EMG) to record the activities of subjects' facial muscles. Under the guise of "calibrating the equipment", Laird induced subjects to move their facial muscles in such a way as to mimic the facial expressions of emotion documented by Ekman. At the same time he collected ratings of the subjects' moods. Lo and behold, when the subjects put on the "fear" face, they actually felt afraid. The same thing happened for anger and sadness. The results were a little more complicated for disgust, but overall it appeared to be the case that putting on the emotional face caused changes in subjects' emotional mood states.

You can get a sense of what happened in Laird's study by mimicking a clever experiment performed by Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988), in which subjects who held a pen in their mouths experienced different emotions depending on whether they held the pen between their teeth, thereby forcing a smile, or between their lips, thereby inhibiting smiling.

There are some interesting twists here. When Botox is employed cosmetically for the treatment of "frown lines", it is injected into precisely those facial muscles, the corrugator muscles, that are involved in producing frowns. One side-effect of these Botox injections appears to be the alleviation of depression. In a study by Lewis et al. (2009), a group of women receiving Botox for treatment of frown lines scored lower on questionnaire measures of anxiety and depression than a control group. The idea is that, by paralyzing the corrugator muscles, Botox prevents feedback from those muscles from depressing the patient's mood. Finzi claims that Botox is safer, and possibly more effective, than any other treatment for depression, psychological or pharmacological. See the Face of Emotion: How Botox Affects Our Mood and Relationships by Eric Finzi (2013), a dermatologist who frequently treats patients with Botox.

By 2021, enough evidence had accumulated that paralyzing the muscles involved in "frown lines" with Botox made people feel better that it was seriously proposed as an alternative drug treatment for depression.  One meta-analysis of five clinical studies found that Botox was more than twice as effective as standard antidepressant drugs(Schulze et al. J. Psychiat. Research, 2021).  However, the research is problematic because it wasn't conducted in a double-blind fashion.  Some patients were given Botox and others were given placebo, as in a standard double-blind clinical trial.  But even though the patients weren't told which group they were in, the effects of Botox are obvious the moment that patients try to activate the muscles in their forehead.  So, the trials aren't really double-blind: The patients explicitly informed that they're getting Botox or placebo, but they can pretty easily figure out who got which.  There's no easy way around this methodological problem, and there are other problems with these clinical studies as well (Coles et al., Emotion Rev., 2019), so Botox may not be quite as effective as it seems to be.  In addition, Botox is a drug, and all drugs have side-effects (for one thing, it can leak into muscles you don't want paralyzed, like those that control eye movements), so don't try this at home!

A similar experiment, reported more recently, examined the effects of posture on power, status, and leadership. In the guise of a marketing test of ergonomic office chairs, Li, Galinsky, and their colleagues (2011) induced subjects to adopt an "expansive" posture (legs spread wide and arms reaching outward) or a "constricted" posture (legs together, hands under thighs, shoulders hunched). Later on, they engaged in a number of simulated activities in which they had the opportunity to exercise leadership. Subjects who had earlier adopted the expansive "power" posture were more likely than those who had adopted the constricted "subordinate" position to choose to speak first in a debate, to leave the site of a plane crash to find help, or to join a movement to free someone who had been wrongly imprisoned. Apparently, behaving like a leader increased the person's level of power motivation and the tendency to exercise leadership.

Self-Efficacy

Our final example of the influence of behavior on personality comes from perceived self-efficacy, a concept developed by Albert Bandura (1977) as part of his cognitive social-learning approach to personality. Bandura agrees with Lewin that personality factors, such as motives, determine how a person is going to behave, but argues that efficacy expectations mediate between the person and his or her behavior. If you're a basketball player facing a difficult three-point shot, and you don't think you can make it, you might not even try -- thus guaranteeing failure. But if you think you'll can do it, then you're likely to try -- and you might actually succeed.

Link to an interview with Albert Bandura.

Self-efficacy is the person's belief, or expectation, that he or she can act effectively to bring about desired results in some situation.

Bandura argues that self-efficacy expectations have a variety of sources:

Thus, performance accomplishments -- actual behavior -- feeds back to revise the person's self-efficacy expectations, and thus his or her motivation to engage in some activity. Expectancies and motives don't just determine behavior -- behavior also determines expectancies and motives.

The Dialectic Between the Environment and Behavior

According to Lewin's formula, environmental factors are also relevant to behavior. These include all the features of the situation that exist "outside" the person. As a social psychologist, of course, Lewin was mostly interested in the social situation: the presence of other people, and what they say and do.

Situational Influences on Behavior

From the point of view of the dialectic between the Environment and Behavior, features of the environment, especially the social environment, elicit behavior regardless of the individual's internal states and dispositions. This direction of causality is entailed in the Doctrine of Situationism, and is exemplified by a large body of social-psychological research illustrating social influences on behavior. In each case, the subject's behavior is influenced by the environmental situation in which that behavior occurs.

Delay of Gratification

Research on delay of gratification in children nicely illustrates the role of situational, as well as personal, determinants of behavior. In a study by Mischel & Ebbesen (1970), children were asked which of two rewards, cookies or pretzels, they preferred. Then the children were told that the experimenter would go away for a while (actually, about 15 minutes). If they waited for the experimenter to return, they would receive their preferred reward. But if they could not wait, they would receive their non-preferred reward. Then the experimenter left. In one condition of the experiment, he took the cookies and pretzels with him. In other conditions, he left one or the other behind. In a fourth condition, he left them both behind. How long did the children wait before signaling the experimenter to return?

In fact, children who waited in the absence of both rewards were able to wait a fairly long time -- some of them even outlasted the experimenter! If either the preferred or the non-preferred reward was left with the child, waiting time decreased. And if the child was left to wait in the presence of both rewards, waiting time dropped almost to zero. Young children cannot delay gratification long in the presence of a reward. But this experiment shows clearly the influence of the situation -- whether rewards are present or not -- on the child's behavior.

Conformity

A classic study of the effects of the social situation example is Asch's research on conformity. In Asch's experiment, subjects were recruited for what was presented as an experiment on perception, in which they were asked to indicate which of three comparison lines matched a standard line in length. This is a straightforward perceptual task, on which subjects make few errors -- although of course the task is more difficult on some trials than on others. In Asch's experiment, subjects were either individually or in groups. If they were run in groups, all the other "subjects" were actually confederates of the experimenter, acting in accordance with a prearranged script -- unbeknownst to the real subject, of course.

In one group experiment, all the "subjects" (including the confederates) announced their judgments publicly, and on critical trials the situation was arranged so that the one "real" subject went last. On some trials, the confederates were instructed to agree on the correct response. On other trials, they were instructed to agree on the incorrect response. When subjects were alone, or run with only one or two confederates, their judgments were largely unaffected by the group. But once the group consisted of three or more individuals (Asch ran groups as large as 15), subjects began to conform to the (erroneous) judgments of the group, in about 1/3 of the trials.

In the previous experiment, the confederates were unanimous. In a follow-up study, the confederates were unanimous on some trials; but on others, one confederate dissented from the majority. When the subjects were run individually, again, they made few mistakes on the matching task. In the group trials, when the confederates were unanimous, subjects conformed to their erroneous judgment on about 32% of trials -- about the rate observed in the previous study. When there was a single dissenter, however, conformity dropped to about 6%. Thus, the individual was conforming to group norms, and the degree of conformity depended on whether the others were unanimous. A feature of the social situation -- what other people said -- affected the subject's behavior.

In a variant on Asch's experiments, Nemeth and her colleagues (working at UCB) assembled groups consisting of six real subjects, plus 1-4 confederates. Thus, in Nemeth's experiments, the confederates comprised a minority, rather than a majority, of the group.

Even though the confederates were in the minority, the subjects still showed a tendency to conform -- so long as the confederates constituted a "critical mass" of 3 or 4.

Especially when the situation is ambiguous, we look to others for cues as to what to think, feel, want, and do.

"Mere Presence" Effects

Another large literature concern social presence effects on behavior -- the effects of the presence of other people on the behavior of the individual.

OK, so social facilitation and social inhibition contradict each other. Which is the true effect of the presence of others? Of course, it depends on the task:

Social facilitation and social inhibition are effects of the mere presence of other people. But what if the individual is working with other people. Latané and his colleagues have documented a social loafing effect. Subjects were brought into the laboratory and asked to cheer, clap, or shout as loudly as they possibly could. They performed best when they were alone. But when they shouted, etc., along with other people, they shouted less loudly -- and the shouting got progressively less loud as more people were engaged in the task.

Aggression

Features of the situation can also affect people's tendencies to behave in an aggressive, hostile manner toward each other.

With respect to the physical environment, Anderson (1989) reviewing crime statistics, found that the rate of violent crimes such as rape and murder was highest during the summer, and lowest during the winter. There seems to be something about high levels of heat and humidity that brings out the worst in us.

The relationship between heat and aggression was shown clearly in a clever field study by Kenrick and MacFarlane (1986).  Kenrick is on the faculty at Arizona State University, near Phoenix, where it gets very hot in the spring and summer.  They arranged for a confederate to stop her car at a green light, and then determine the number of drivers behind her who honked their horns, and for how long. They found a linear relationship between horn-honking and a "discomfort index" based on both temperature and humidity.  the relationship was especially strong when the drivers had their windows rolled down, suggesting that their cars didn't have air conditioning!

One of the most popular situationist theories of aggression has been the frustration-aggression hypothesis originally proposed by John Dollard (Dollard et al., 1939) and Neal Miller (1941), who were colleagues at the Institute for Social Research at Yale. Dollard and Miller argued that aggression is a reflexive response to frustration, where frustration was defined broadly to include any obstacle to goal-attainment. Such obstacles, of course, are typically to be found in the environment.

Research in the ensuing years led Berkowitz (1989, 1993) and others to revise the original frustration-aggression hypothesis somewhat. According to the revised frustration-aggression hypothesis:

Thus, in the revised frustration-aggression hypothesis, the important situational feature is not an obstacle on the way to a goal, but rather the presence of environmental cues for aggressive behavior.

As an illustration of what Berkowitz has in mind, consider an experiment by Berkowitz and LePage (1967) on anger, weapons, and frustration. In this experiment, two subjects (one of whom, of course, was a confederate of the experimenter) were brought into a room to work together on some problems. At the end of the session, they were asked to evaluate each other's performance on the problem solving task by giving each other from one to ten electrical shocks (1 shock for really good performance, 10 shocks for really bad performance). The confederate went first, and according to prior arrangement gave some subjects 1 shock, and others 7 shocks. Of course, this "feedback" was entirely independent of the subjects' actual performance, which was overall quite good (and they knew it).

The intent of this procedure, of course, was to induce anger in the subjects. When it came the subjects' turn to evaluate the confederate, of course, they had an opportunity to retaliate -- to aggress -- against the confederate. And so they did: subjects in the angered condition delivered more shocks than those in the control condition.

The really important variable in this experiment, however, was the presence of cues for aggression. As amazing as it is to think about it, in some conditions the laboratory room was outfitted with a number of actual guns - -a revolver, a shotgun, and the like. In a control condition, the weapons were replaced by badminton equipment -- racquets, shuttlecocks, and the like. There was also a control condition in which there were no objects of any sort in the room. Within the angry condition, retaliatory aggression reached its highest levels by subjects who were run in the presence of the weapons -- even when the experimenter made it clear that the weapons did not belong to the subject. Apparently, the mere presence of weapons in the room -- a situational cue -- was enough to increase the amount of aggression directed by the subject toward the confederate. This is known as the weapon effect.

In subsequent years, the weapons effect has stimulated considerable research on the effects of medial portrayals of violence on aggressive behavior. It is well known, for example, that aggressiveness is significantly correlated with exposure to violence on TV, in the movies, and on video games. Whether the exposure causes the aggression, or whether they are both effects of a third causal variable, remains a point of somewhat heated controversy. But the correlation between media violence and personal aggressiveness may be a real-world instance of the weapons effect.

Altruism

Returning to the social situation, a large body of research on social influence was stimulated by the tragic case of Kitty Genovese, a woman who, according to the familiar story, was brutally assaulted and murdered while a large number of her neighbors looked on without doing anything to help her. The Genovese case was first brought to public attention by A.M. Rosenthal, then a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times (and later its executive editor) in a series of newspaper articles and later a book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (1964). Rosenthal's reporting, in turn, was initially based on information from the New York City police commissioner.

Actually, though, the popular story is something of an urban legend.

• Manning, Levine, and Collins investigated the case, and determined that, contrary to legend, 38 people had not witnessed the stabbing, only a few witnesses thought it was an attack (as opposed to a neighborhood domestic dispute), nobody actually saw the murder itself, and some witnesses actually did try to help (American Psychologist, 2007).
  
• One of these, Sophia Farrar, was a neighbor in the Queens apartment house in which Genovese lived with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko.  She, her husband, and their son heard the attack, about 3 AM, looked out the window, saw nothing, and went back to bed.  Later, another neighbor awakened Farrar to report that Genovese was lying in the building's vestibule in distress.  Not knowing what had happened, never mind that Genovese's attacker might still be on the scene, Farrar rushed to help, and with Zielonko comforted Genovese until help arrived (she died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital).  Farrar's story was told in a documentary film, "The Witness" (2016).  She died in 2020, and received a glowing obituary in the New York Times ("Sophia Farrar Dies at 92; Belied Indifference to Kitty Genovese Attack" by Sam Roberts, 09/04/2020).  
• For further analyses of the case, see also:
• Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America by Kevin Cook (2014).
• Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences by Catherine Pelonero (2014)
  

Still, the overriding question was: what causes people to help? We usually refer to altruism as a personality trait, assuming that some people are more altruistic than others, and that altruistic people are more likely to render assistance in an emergency, even at some cost to themselves. That would be an example of B=f(P). But, of course, features of the social situation may be important too. Surprisingly, it seems that the presence of others can sometimes deter helping behavior.

In classic research on "bystander intervention", Darley and Latané recruited subjects for an experiment in which they were asked to complete some straightforward personality questionnaires. Some subjects completed the questionnaires alone in a small booth. Others completed the questionnaires in small groups (none of the subjects in these experiments were confederates of the experimenter). In one version of the experiment, the subjects were left alone, but midway through the session (nontoxic) smoke began to filter into the room through a ventilation duct. In another version of the experiment, the subjects were informed that the experimenter would be in the next room; midway through the experiment, they heard a crashing sound, followed by the experimenter's cry that she had fallen and broken her foot. The results were striking: when subjects were alone, more than 70% of them made some move to get help or render assistance; but when subjects worked in groups, the rate of helping behavior fell precipitously. In a later version of the experiment, when all the "subjects" but one were actually confederates of the experimenter who assiduously ignored what was going on, helping was reduced still further. In this case, the features of the social situation -- whether there are others present, and if so what they were doing -- affected helping behavior. 

Although the Darley-Latané experiment has been replicated many times, a "meta-analysis" of the bystander-intervention literature published in 2011 qualified its conclusions somewhat.  In simulations of real-life dangers (as opposed to laboratory situations), with naive bystanders (instead of confederates) who could communicate with each other, the presence of others seems to facilitate helping behavior.  In a recent study that made use of widespread electronic surveillance in the Age of Terrorism, Richard Philpot and his colleagues examined CCTV recordings made in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and South Africa of actual altercations, both verbal and physical: they found that bystanders actually tried to help in about 90% of the incidents (American Psychologist 2019).  This does not contradict the basic conclusions of Darley and Latané, however.  Their basic point was that, under conditions of uncertainty, people look to others for cues as to what to think and how to behave.

Social Impact Theory

There are more such experiments in the social-psychological literature than you can shake a stick at. The vast bulk of social-psychological research, especially in the 1950s through the 1970s, concerned social influence in some way.

Many of these experiments are variants on the Asch conformity paradigm, examining the influence of real or imagined social pressure on the individual subject's expression of belief. Asch himself distinguished between two levels of conformity:

Asch thought that the conformity he observed might go to the level of judgment -- he was, after all, heavily influenced by the Gestalt movement in perception -- but he admitted he only had evidence for conformity at the level of behavior.

Other variants on the Asch experiment have explored other areas of social influence:

Social influence is a primary topic in what might be called "the 4 As" of social psychology:

In each case, a large body of research shows the influence of the social situation on people's behavior. There is also a fairly large body of research, much of it also conducted by social psychologists, on the influence of the physical environment -- density of people, noise levels, etc. -- on behavior. Traditional social psychology is, to a very great degree, the study of environmental influence, with an emphasis on the social environment.

In fact, Latané (1981) -- the same researcher who was involved in the bystander intervention studies -- has proposed social impact theory to predict the effects of "the presence and behavior of other people" on a target individual's behavior. First, Latané proposes that:

With respect to N, Latané has further proposed a "psychosocial law",of social impact:

Of course, you will recognize this as a variant on Stevens' Law in psychophysics,S =kIⁿ-- and the resemblance is quite intentional. For Latané, social influence is analogous to sensory experience, and social stimulation is analogous to physical stimulation.

Well, not three as an absolute number.  A minority of three may be enough to wield social influence at the scale of laboratory experiments on group processes, but a minority of three isn't going to mean much in a group of hundreds, or thousands, or millions.  In a set of experiments by Centola and colleagues ("Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention", Science, 06/08/2018) suggest that a minority amounting to about 25% of the population constitutes a "critical mass" or "tipping point" for minority influence.

It should be understood that Latané's social impact theory, and especially the psychosocial law, represents situationism in its strongest form: it's the objective situation, described in terms of the actual number of people in the environment putting pressure on the individual, that determines whether the target will conform.

Social Contagion

For social psychologists, the environment is a social entity, consisting as it does of other people. And there are a lot of people in our social environment.  Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary biologist, has estimated that an individual's social group consists of about 150 people -- a figure sometimes known as "Dunbar's number"..  Based on studies of nonhuman animals, Dunbar figures that this is the maximum number of people that we can keep track of, given the size of our brains.  According to Dunbar, our core group of social relationships consists of about 5 people, with whom we talk once a week, and about 100 acquaintances to whom we speak about once a year.  Of course, given social media like Facebook, any individual may know a lot more people than that, but Dunbar claims that if people who claim more than about 150 people in their social circle probably don't know much about them, and he doubts that they are genuine friends.

All of these subsequent experiments have methodological problems, too -- it's not easy to do this kind of research. But it's pretty clear that we're all petty interconnected -- and every reason to think, thanks to social media, that we're getting more so.

And these social networks have effects on us, as they form the structural basis for social contagion effects, in which some piece of social behavior is transmitted from one individual to another -- a little like a virus.

Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociologist) and James Fowler, a political scientist,have pioneered the study of social contagion effects through large social networks.  One of their early studies involved participants in the Framingham Heart Study, a large-scale longitudinal study which, since 1948, has followed about 15,000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, and their descendants, given them a comprehensive physical examination every four years.  They found that health behaviors related to smoking and obesity were contagious, with friends and neighbors seeming to "infect" each other for better (quitting smoking) or worse (gaining weight).  such "contagion" effects had long been discussed in the sociological literature, but Christakis and Fowler were the first to demonstrate them conclusively. 

• In their first study, C&F (New England Journal of Medicine, 2007) mapped the social connections (family, friends, co-workers) among about 5,000 FHS participants -- more than 50,000 of them.  They then plotted all these connections on a computer, with animated dots representing individual persons, and the size of the dots representing their weight.  They saw, and later confirmed statistically, that weight gain occurred in clusters.  When one subject gained weight, others in his or her social network were also likely to gain weight -- 57% more likely if a friend gained weight, 20% more likely if the friend of a friend gained weight (even if the intermediary did not), and 10% more likely if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.  The contagion effect appeared to wash out after about three degrees of separation:  There is no contagion between you and a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend.
  
• A later study found the same sort of contagion effect with smoking.
• And drinking alcohol.
• And happiness.
• And even loneliness proved to be contagious!
  

In another study, the Christakis-Fowler group observed the social contagion of positive and negative emotion through networks of "friends" on Facebook.  For more than three years (1180 days, to be exact), Coviello and his colleagues (2014), including Christakis and Fowler, collected "status updates" from more than 100 million Facebook users in 100 large US cities, and coded them for positive and negative language.

So, bad weather negatively affected A's mood, which elicited a negative behavior from A which elicited expressions of negative mood by his friend B.  Although the researchers didn't examine this, it seems very likely that social contagion generated a feedback cycle:

All of which began with A's positive or negative posts, which were elicited by the weather. 

In another study, Poncela-Casanovas et al. (2015) studied a group of 5,000+ registrants on weight-loss website.  For those who stuck with the program for six months or more, the best predictors of weight loss ere (1) initial body-mass index (BMI); (2) frequency of weigh-ins (the more the better); and (3) the number of friends who were also in the network.  Clients with no friends on the network averaged about a 4% weight loss; those with two or more friends averaged more than 8% weight loss.  The more friends a client had who were also on the website, the more weight she (they were mostly women) lost -- about 0.7% per friend. 

C&F's research on social contagion is controversial.  For example, some critics have argued that their findings are contaminated by homophily -- the tendency of individuals to associate with others who are like them.  If you're obese, you tend to hang around other obese people.  And other critics think that their findings are a product of shared environment: if friends and acquaintances tend to eat at the same greasy spoon diner, they're all going to put on weight.  But frankly, I think they've got the goods.  The important thing to understand, though is that this influence is bidirectional.  Each person constitutes part of the environment for some other person.  So while our behavior is influencing other people in our social network, their behavior is influencing us.

Much the same methodology has been used to study the propagation of news (and rumors) online, via Twitter.  Soroush Vosoughi and his colleagues, at the MIT Media Lab, tracked approximately 126,000 rumors spread over Twitter by approximately 3 million people -- rumors which had been verified (or not) by independent fact-checking organizations ("The Spread of True and False News Online", Science, 03/09/2018).  Disconcertingly, they found that "fake news" spread "farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly" than truth, and this was so for all categories of rumor they studied.  Of course, this might be true for a number of reasons.  Robots, by contrast, spread true and false news at the same rate.  Vosoughi et al. note that false news was more novel than true news, and evoked more negative emotion.  But the differences in propagation between true and false news may have been exacerbated by a tendency for people to retweet stories even though they know them to be untrue -- as if to say, "Look what these idiots are saying now!".

Automaticity in Social Behavior

Another, almost-pure expression of situationism in social psychology is the argument that most social behavior is executed automatically. In this line of theorizing, automaticity is defined along the lines originally set out in cognitive psychology. In this formulation, automatic behavior is inevitably evoked by the presence of an adequate stimulus in the environment.

In one demonstration of the automaticity of social behavior, Bargh and his colleagues (1996) recruited subjects for an ostensible experiment on language processing, in which their task was to unscramble randomly arranged words so that they formed meaningful sentences.

When the subjects had completed their assigned task, they exited their cubicles to find the experimenter engaged in conversation with someone else (another confederate, of course), and assiduously ignored the subject for a total of 10 minutes. Subjects in the "rude" condition were much more likely to interrupt the experimenter, and subjects in the "polite" condition were much less likely to do so, compared to the subjects in the control condition.

Bargh's interpretation is that reading "rude" or "polite" words automatically activated "rude" or "polite" behavior on the part of the subjects. Actually, it's not clear whether the words automatically elicited the behavior; perhaps the words automatically biased the subjects to perceive the experimenter as rude (or, in the "polite" condition, not to perceive him as rude).

Either way, the argument goes, the subject's behavior was a result of automatic processing of some feature of the stimulus environment. And, in fact, Bargh has argued that pretty much all social behavior is of this sort: executed automatically, without conscious awareness or conscious intent, in response to particular environmental stimuli. It is a pretty pure expression of situationism in social psychology.

The Effect of Behavior on the Situation

Just as the environment influences behavior, so it is that behavior reciprocally influences the environment -- that is, behavior shapes the situation in which it occurs.

Altruism Redux

Interestingly, this point is effectively illustrated by Darley and Latané's research on altruism. They showed clearly that features of the situation influence helping behavior, but the big question is why?

The problem comes when everybody does this. If I am trying to decide whether to help, and everybody else is doing the same thing, then nobody is helping -- and this lack of action effectively defines the situation as either too dangerous (in which I really shouldn't try to help) or not an emergency (in which my help really isn't needed). This state, in which everybody looks elsewhere for cues as to what to believe, is known as pluralistic ignorance. It is a prime example of how the behavior that takes place in a situation -- in this case, doing nothing -- creates a situation in which nothing can or need be done.

Of course, if the (inaction) of others shapes the situation, so does their action. In fact, when people observe others helping, they themselves are more inclined to help. Evidently, the behavior of other people defines the situation as one in which helping is needed, possible, and safe.

The fact that behavior can change the situation is illustrated by studies of the effects of modeling on helping behavior.

In one study by Bryan and Test (1967), a female college student was stationed by a car on the side of a road (actually, I think it was California Highway 1) with an obviously flat tire, trunk open, and the spare leaning against the car. One-quarter mile away they stationed another car with a flat tire, this time an elderly couple. On one condition of the experiment, nobody was helping the couple. In another condition of the experiment, the couple was being helped by another motorist (the couple and the "good Samaritan" were, of course, confederates of the experimenters). More people stopped to help the college student when the couple was being helped, than when they were not.

Another study by the same investigators studied contributions to a Salvation Arm kettle during the Christmas season. On some trials, as a pedestrian approached the kettle, another person (again, a confederate of the experimenter) moved in and deposited some change. The pedestrian was much more likely to make a donation after this modeling episode, than if the modeling had not occurred.

Modeling is just one situation in which behavior changes the situation. The behavior of the model creates situational cues that can influence the behavior of other people. In the Darley and Latané experiment, an unresponsive model leads others not to intervene in an emergency. In the Bryan and Test studies, a helpful model induces others to help.

Learning Redux

If you think about it, instrumental or operant behavior effectively changes the environment in which it occurs. In fact, that's exactly how Skinner defined operant behavior -- as behavior that operates on the environment to change it in some way. The pigeon in a Skinner box can press a key to get food, and by doing so changes the environment from one that didn't have food to one that does. Much of our behavior has this quality -- it changes the environment, whether we intend it to do so or not.

We will say more about the effect of behavior on the environment when we discuss the dialectic between the person and the environment, and in particular the ways that people influence their environments through their behavior.

The Dialectic Between the Person and the Environment

To complete our overview of the reciprocal interactions between the person, his or her behavior, and the environment, we examine the dialectic between the person and the environment -- how environments go beyond eliciting behavior to shape the people in them, and how people reciprocally shape the environments in which their behavior takes place.

The Influence of the Environment on the Person

First we look at the ways in which features of the environment shape the features of the people in them. This is, in fact, a continuation of our discussion of social influence. After all, social influence extends beyond the individual's behavior to his or her thoughts and feelings, beliefs and desires, traits, attitudes, and values -- the internal states and traits that cause the person to behave as he or she does.

"State" of Mind

Data from surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a unit of the US Department of health and Human Services, indicates that people living in the Appalachian and Mississippi Valley regions of the United States experience relatively high levels of mental distress, defined as 2 or more weeks of stress, depression, and poor emotional health.  By (Moriarty et al., "Geographic Patterns of Frequent Mental Distress: Adults, 1993-2001 and 2003-2006", American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2009).

Persuasive Communications

Along with studying situational influences on behavior, traditional social psychologists have devoted a great deal of effort to tracing the effects of the situation on attitudes. Recall that attitudes are internal, dispositional characteristics of the person, and that they are supposed to dispose people to behave in attitude-consistent ways. Attitudes, like traits, are assumed to be stable across time and consistent across situations, but they can change -- Democrats become Republicans and vice-versa. In particular, social psychologists discovered that attitudes can shift, depending on the situation in which they are assessed.

In a classic study of attitudes (I know, I know, all these studies are "classics" -- but they really are!), Janis and his colleagues (1965) asked subjects to read a set of essays on various controversial subjects (i.e., they were controversial in the 1960s!):

The essays were specifically written to be either "pro" or "con" on each issue. Half the subjects were offered a snack while they read the essays. The other half of the subjects were not.

The important finding of the experiment was that subjects who snacked while they read the essays were more likely to agree with the argument in the essays, regardless of the topic -- moonshot or 3-D movies -- and regardless of the position the essay took -- pro or con. Assuming that agreement is a reflection of people's real attitudes, and not just a further example of Aschian conformity, this experiment seems to show that a feature of the situation -- whether food is present -- affects people's internal, attitudinal dispositions.

Interpersonal Attraction

Another example of situational influence on internal mental states comes in the domain of interpersonal attraction? "Liking" someone is a special case of an attitude -- it represents a favorable evaluation of that person. But what leads us to like someone?

Obviously, our attitudes toward other people are determined partly by what are known as target characteristics -- features of the person who is the target of our evaluation. For example, we tend to like other people who are

Personal characteristics matter, to some degree, but situational characteristics -- that is, features of the situation in which we encounter the target person -- are also powerful determinants of attraction, and can lead us to like a person even if he or she is not particularly attractive, competent, or similar to ourselves.

One of these environmental factors is sheer proximity -- we tend to like people who are physically near us. This is true within towns: Sociologists who explored the development of friendships within a suburban tract, in which everyone moved in at approximately the same time, and everyone was of roughly the same socioeconomic status, found that most people who lived near each other were friends, and that few people who lived far apart were friends. The same holds true within a living unit such as a dormitory, or even within a classroom. Despite the occasional horror story, roommates generally get along remarkably well, considering how they came together. And students often strike up friendships with those who just happen to sit next to them in class. "Workplace romances" occur because the parties have frequent contact with each other.

Here's an example, from a study by Segal (1974) on friendship patterns among state police recruits. In classes at the police academy, the recruits were seated in alphabetical order. Thus, all the recruits with names beginning with letters early in the alphabet sat near each other, as did all the recruits with names beginning with late letters. Later, when asked to nominate their friends, there was a high correlation between the last name of the recruit and the last names of his/her friends.

What is really important, it turns out, is not so much sheer physical proximity, but rather functional distance -- how much effort is required to make and maintain contact, and the availability of the other person as a friend. A neighbor with whom you share a yard is more likely to be a friend that one whose yard is separated from yours by a fence. If your dormitory room is near the bathroom, the elevator, or a stairwell, you are likely to have more friends -- just because of the number of people passing by your door, and the frequency with which they do it. Thus, the effects of proximity are partly mediated by familiarity -- we like those who are familiar to us more than we like strangers.

The Mere Exposure Effect

The role of familiarity in evaluation is dramatically illustrated by a series of classic studies performed by Robert Zajonc on what he called the mere exposure effect. In one of these experiments, subjects recruited for an experiment on language learning were taught to pronounce unfamiliar, meaningless material presented to them as either "Turkish words" of "Chinese ideographs" (the words weren't really Turkish, and the ideographs weren't really Chinese, but that's what they looked like). During the experiment, individual items were presented to the subjects from 1 to 25 times in a sort of verbal-learning experiment.

Afterwards, the subjects were (falsely) told that the items were adjectives, and were asked to guess whether each item had a "good" or "bad" meaning on a 0-6 rating scale. Compared to control items that had never been presented at all, items that had been studied previously were more favorably rated -- and the favorable evaluations increased with the number of repetitions. Almost every item employed in the study was rated more favorably if it had been presented many times, as opposed to just a few times (or, in the control condition, not presented at all).

The mere exposure effect occurs when repeated exposure increases judgments of attractiveness, likability, or any other favorable evaluation, even in the absence of any substantive contact with the objects being rated. Because likability is an expression of preference, and preference is an attitude, the mere exposure is a pure situational effect on the person. Apparently, people prefer whatever they encounter frequently in their environment.

A very clever demonstration of the mere exposure effect was performed by Mita and colleagues in an experiment in which subjects were asked to make judgments of faces. Subjects were presented with pairs of near-identical photographs of women, in which one photograph was the mirror-reversal of the other, and asked to indicate which one they preferred. In these photographs of the American actress Marilyn Monroe, Picture A is the actual photo; Picture B has been mirror-reversed.

Some of the subjects were the same women whose faces appeared in the photographs, while other subjects were their friends (in one study) or romantic partners (in another). The idea was that people should prefer the photograph that offers the view with which they are more familiar:

In fact, that was what Mita et al. found: people prefer photographs that represent the view they have encountered most frequently.

As with the effects of the situation on behavior, social psychology is full of studies demonstrating the effects of the situation on the person, and especially of effects on the person's attitudes (traditional social psychology, after all, is virtually defined as the study of social influence. These studies are only samples of this very large body of research.

The Influence of the Person on the Environment

James Baldwin, the African-American author of such classics as go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), the Fire Next Time (1963), and If Beale Street Could Talk"(1974), was once encouraged by a friend to settle down. He replied: "the place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it" (quote by Claudia Roth Pierpont in "another Country", New Yorker, 02/09-16/2009). The idea that we make our own environment is the heart of the Doctrine of Interactionism.

As the foregoing experiments show, people are affected by their environments in a variety of ways. But, according to the doctrine of interactionism, people also affect the environments in which their behavior takes place.

How can this happen?

David Buss (1987) has identified three ways in which people affect their own environments:

In addition to these three modes, a fourth means of affecting one's environment can also be identified (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987):

Now, let us examine each of these four modes in turn.

Interactionism Redux

Because this material is so important, it gets its own section.

Evocation

By evocation, we mean that the person's mere presence in the environment alters that environment, independent of his or her actual behavior, and in fact even in the absence of any behavior at all. Evocation works, chiefly, by eliciting behavior from others which changes the environment for everyone. It can occur completely unintentionally, and even may be completely unconscious on everyone's part. Thus, the person's effect on the environment is not mediated by his or her behavior, at least in the sense of a deliberate voluntary act. Rather, the effect is produced by the person's mere presence -- most likely, by his or her physical appearance.

Gender-Role Socialization

Evocation plays a major role in gender-role socialization (described in more detail in the Lecture Supplement on Psychological Development). Parents and others treat little boys and girls differently, in order to bring up boys who are appropriately masculine, and girls who are appropriately feminine (as these concepts are defined by the larger culture).

According to an analysis provided by John Money and Anke Ehrhardt (1972), the "program" for gender dimorphism (i.e., sex differences) begins with what they call the phyletic imprimatur, or those (largely biological) aspects of gender dimorphism that are shared by all members of the species. To make a long story short, genetic and hormonal processes during fetal development leave the developing fetus, and newborn child with a set of external genitalia, and an internal reproductive system, that are more or less recognizably male or female. (There may also be some gender differentiation of brain structures, possibly forming the biological basis for gender differences in mental and behavioral processes.)

At birth the program for gender dimorphism is passed from the genes and prenatal hormones to the environment. The social imprimatur refers to the differential socialization that boys and girls experience, in line with the concepts of masculinity and femininity that prevail in the culture into which they are born. (The program passes back to the hormones at the time of puberty, returns to the autobiographical history, and returns again, for women at least, at menopause.) As Margaret Mead showed, the details of the social imprimatur vary from one culture to another, but in the present context the important point is that every culture distinguishes between the sexes. The distinctions that the culture makes constitute the social imprimatur.

The word imprimatur is derived from the Latin, meaning "it is permitted". In the past, the Roman Catholic Church published a list of books that had been given the imprimatur, meaning that Catholics were permitted to read them. In Money and Ehrhardt's work, the phyletic imprimatur refers to those aspects of gender dimorphism that are permitted by biology, and the social imprimatur refers to those aspects of gender dimorphism that are permitted by culture.

The point of the social imprimatur is that the child's social and cultural environment is structured around masculinity or femininity, literally at birth, in response to the announcement that the child is a boy or girl. The newborn is wrapped in a pink (for girls) or blue (for boys) receiving blanket (before the 20th century, the gender-dimorphism was reversed, with pink for boys and blue for girls), and from that point on the child's parents and others in the social environment raise the child in accordance with prevailing cultural concepts of masculinity and femininity, by

But the announcement of the child's sex is based on the perception and categorization of the child's external genitalia. In this sense, the external genitalia structure the child's social environment, by evoking behavior from others that would be different, if the genitalia were different.

The process of evocation is nicely illustrated by what are known as the "Baby X" studies. In these experiments, adults are asked to assist in a study of infants' responses to strangers. They are asked simply to interact with the infant, and are given some toys which they may use for the purpose.

In the first study (Seavey et al., 1975), the infant was a 3-month-old girl, but the adults (actually university graduate students) were told that the child was either a girl, or a boy, or were given no information. Adults who thought they were interacting with a girl were much more likely to choose a doll as a prop for the interaction, as opposed to those who thought they were interacting with a boy. Moreover, men engaged in more physical contact with the child when it was identified as a boy, while women engaged in more physical contact with the same child when it was identified as a girl.

A follow-up study (Sidorowicz & Lunney, 1980) employed both male and female infants (in order to control for the possibility that the adults' behavior in the first study had been shaped by subtly "feminine" behavior on the part of the infant), and replicated the doll-choice finding (the investigators did not assess physical contact).

In both cases it was the (perceived) gender of the child that evoked differential behavior from the adults who interacted with her.

Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Evocation is also exemplified by stereotyping and prejudice based on race and ethnicity, as well as gender. These are social categories marked by physical attributes -- males look different from females (even with their clothes on -- well, mostly), and whites, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans generally look different from each other as well.Muslims may wear headscarves or caps that make them look different. When a woman is present in a mostly male environment (or vice versa), or a black person is present in a mostly white environment (or vice-versa), it is not necessary for that person to do anything in order to change the situation (mostly by eliciting discriminatory, hostile, or other unpleasant) behavior. His or her mere presence is sufficient to evoke the stereotype and prejudice.

An interesting example of this is portrayed in Out of Africa, a film starring Meryl Streep based on the memoir by Isaak Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen). At one point, Blixen enters a men's club room in Nairobi (or somewhere like that). A moment before, the room had been full of boisterous (at least for the British) hale-fellow-well-met man-talk. But the moment she walks into the room, the entire place falls silent. Her mere presence has changed the character of the situation, by virtue of the behavior it evoked in others.

Many acts of racial prejudice and discrimination have this kind of character to them -- when someone "doesn't know his place", and finds himself "where he doesn't belong". However innocent, by his mere presence he has changed the situation.

Link to an interview with Claude Steele, UC Berkeley psychology professor, about stereotype threat as a barrier to achievement.

Link to an interview with Mahzarin Banaji.

Ingroups and Outgroups

Setting aside gender and racial prejudice, this kind of evocation occurs whenever a member of an outgroup enters a situation populated by an ingroup majority -- Yankees and Red Sox fans, 49s and Raiders, Berkeley and Stanford, Sigma Chis and Sigma Nus. The ingroup member(s) will almost inevitably evoke behavior from the outgroup members that change the situation for both of them. Members of the ingroup will behave differently than they would otherwise, if the outgroup member were not present. Gender or racial stereotyping doesn't require any behavior on the part of the person.

Evocation is especially salient with respect to issues of race and gender -- characteristics which are, for the most part, easily observed by other people.  Elijah Anderson, a sociologist, makes this point provocatively in his paper on "The White Space", in which he discusses interracial interactions in urban environments that are populated mostly by white people, and in which blacks are "typically absent, not unexpected, or marginalized".  He writes: "The city's public spaces, workplaces and neighborhoods may now be conceptualized as a mosaic of white spaces, black spaces and cosmopolitan spaces".  Black people "intruding" on white spaces (or so it may seem to whites), or for that matter white people "intruding" on black spaces, can cause severe discomfort on the "owners" of the space in question -- just by being there.  Of course, this sort of evocation can only occur when the outgroup is identifiable as such -- for example, by some distinguishing physical characteristic, as when black people enter "White" space".  Or women enter "Men's space".  It may not happen when Catholics in Northern Ireland enter "Protestant space" -- unless, of course, they're wearing some distinguishing object, like a cross on a necklace.  And it may not happen when gay people enter "Straight space" -- unless, not to put too fine a point on it, they're waving a Rainbow Flag.

The critical feature of evocation is that the person need not do anything to change the situation. His or her mere presence and appearance is sufficient to evoke behavior from others that changes the situation for everyone.

Selection

The notion of selection entails the idea that the match between persons and their environments is not random. Rather, individuals choose environments that are congruent with their personalities -- with their traits, attitudes, beliefs, moods, goals, and values. In this way, people place themselves in environments that support and promote their own behavioral tendencies. The selection of the situation is not a trivial effect: each choice pre-empts alternatives, and thus provides little support for the acquisition of new traits, attitudes, and the like. This can result in a kind of positive feedback loop between the person and the environment -- with the person choosing compatible environments, and the environment eliciting behavior that makes it unlikely that the person will chose another environment.

Every act of selection chooses for something, and against something else -- a point nicely illustrated in the film Sliding Doors starring Gwyneth Paltrow (when one door opens, another one closes).  This is a common theme in literature, as discussed by Andrew H. Miller, a literary scholar, in On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (2020; reviewed by Joshua Rothman in "In Another Life: Making Sense of Who We Might Have Been", New Yorker, 12/21/2020).  In the Iliad, Achilles chooses between death as a hero and a boring life.  In Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken", the choice made at the fork in a road "made all the difference" (though, the poet wryly does not say, the other choice would have "made all the difference" too).  Rothman writes:

[The] mere presence [of unled lives] in our minds may reveal something about how we live: "Unled lives are a largely modern preoccupation," Miller writes.  It used to be that, for the most pat, people lived the life their parents had, or the one that the fates decreed.  Today, we try to chart our own courses....

Among secular people, the absence of an afterlife raises the stakes.  In Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, the psychologist Adam Phillips warns that "once the next life -- the better life, the fuller life -- has to be in this one, we have a considerable task on our hands.  Given just a single shot at existence, we owe it to ourselves to hit the mark....  It's no wonder that for many of us "the story of our lives becomes the story of the lives we were prevented from living" [or, one might add, the story of the lives our choices prevented us from living]....

The nature of work deepens the problem.  "unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it," Miller writes, our "professional society" is "made up of specialized careers, ladders of achievement".  You make your choice, forgoing others: year by year, you clamber up into your future", thinking back on the ladders unclimbed....

In Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, the philosoher Kieran Setiya points out that, thanks to the "butterfly effect", even minor alterations to our pasts would likely have major effects on our presents.

On the more mundane level of experimental social psychology, consider, for example, a child in the delay-of-gratification situation. If he is asked whether he would like to wait in the presence or absence of the reward, or in the presence of the preferred or non-preferred reward, his choice will affect his behavior by determining whether he will wait in a situation in which long delays are easy or hard to achieve. If he chooses to wait in the presence of both rewards, he will be unable to wait for very long. If he chooses to wait in the absence of both rewards, he may very well outlast the experimenter!

The Person-Environment Fit

A study of environmental selection by college undergraduates illustrates the correlation between persons and environments (Emmons, Diener, & Larsen, 1986). These investigators first assessed a number of personality traits, and then asked the subjects where they spend their time -- distinguishing between freely chosen and imposed situations (e.g., working out at the gym vs. mandatory physical education classes). Finally, they assessed the subjects' self-reported mood in each situation. The general finding was of personality-environment congruence.

Personality and Mate Preference

Another example of selection at work is personality and mate preference. Recall from the discussion of interpersonal attraction that similarity attracts: people tend to like others who are like them in personality and attitudes. Not only that, people actively select among potential mates, based on similarity. Walster et al. (1966) proposed a matching hypothesis proposes that, when choosing a partner from the "dating market", assess their own level of social desirability, and then select partners whose (perceived) self-esteem matches their own. This narrowing of the field to those who already match accounts, in part, for the fact that people are more attracted to those who are similar to themselves in various personality and social characteristics.

Actually, most of the research on the matching hypothesis finds that people tend to prefer highly desirable partners -- regardless of their own self-esteem. But what people prefer is not the same thing as what they can actually get -- if for no other reason than that targets are not passive in this process, and are actively engaged in selection of their own. The process of self-other matching is more dynamic than a simple matter of preference. When surveying the dating market, people quite quickly determine that some potential mates are "out of my league", and focus their attention elsewhere.

Surveying the literature on interpersonal attraction, Taylor et al. (2011) found that matching does indeed occur on self-worth, but also extends to physical attractiveness and popularity.

As a case in point, Buss (1987) measured subjects' in terms of the "Big Five" personality traits, and then asked the subjects to indicate, via an adjective checklist, the psychological qualities that they would prefer in a mate. There was a high correlation: extraverts preferred mates who were extraverted, and neurotics even preferred mates who were neurotic! Even more than our friends, our mates constitute an important part of our social environment. By selecting mates with personalities that are similar to ours, we help insure that our environments will be compatible with our personalities.

This process can be modeled by a parlor game demonstrated (at a party, of course) by Harold Kelley (he of attribution-theory fame) of UCLA. The host writes numbers (e.g., from 1-10) on sticky labels, and affixes these labels to the foreheads of his guests, in such a manner that they cannot see their own number. He then instructs his guests each to find a partner, with a promise that the couple with the highest total points will win a prize (in California, that usually means a nice bottle of wine). As the guests mill about, you can see them spurning each other, and then pairing off. The result, almost inevitably, is a near-perfect correlation between numbers, as the 10s match with 9s and 10s, and the 1s are stuck with 1s and 2.

Selection of the environment by the person is ubiquitous. Every personal choice changes the environment in which the person resides, and in which his or her behavior takes place. Each of us plays a number of different social roles (professor, friend, husband, brother, son), and each of these imposes different role-demands on the individual. In a sense, each of these roles is a different environment, and choosing one forecloses on others -- at least temporarily. Catholic priests can't be husbands (at least, not yet). Each choice the person makes opens up some opportunities, and imposes some demands, but it also closes off some others. In any event, every act of selection literally changes the person's environment, because it puts the person in one behavior setting rather than another.

Manipulation

But what if you find yourself in a situation you didn't choose, or for some other reason the environment is wrong? People have the capacity to alter their environments through their behavior -- activity that changes the actual character of the environment. We all know someone who can turn any situation into a party -- and most of us also know someone who can turn any party into a funeral.

In manipulation, the person engages in overt, publicly observable behavior that alters the environment -- and alters it in objective terms, for everyone who is also in that environment.

It almost seems superfluous to cite examples of behavioral manipulation of the environment. As noted earlier, every act of instrumental or operant behavior changes the organism's environment in some way: the rat who presses the key in a Skinner box changes the environment from one that doesn't contain food to one that does. In fact, we've already discussed some of this literature, in terms of the influence of behavior on the environment.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

This is a famous problem in game theory, a paradigm often used to study interpersonal behavior (Luce & Raiffa, after a suggestion by A.W. Tucker). Consider two individuals who have been arrested on suspicion of armed robbery. The district attorney does not have enough evidence to convict, so he makes each of them the following offer:

Under these circumstances, there really isn't a logical response -- which is why it's called a dilemma:

Under these circumstances, there is often an initial tendency to compete. However, as the game is played over multiple trials, gradually the players will evolve into a cooperative strategy. This is often a response to a "tit for tat" strategy in which the victim of competition on one trial will retaliate against the defector on the next trial. Eventually, both players figure out that it's in both their best interest to remain silent.

Kelley & Stahelski (1970) used the prisoner's dilemma to look at the relationship between cooperation and competition as the game is played out over time. Their subjects played a standard prisoner's dilemma game, like the one illustrated above, for 3 blocks of 10 trials each. At the outset of the game, the investigators assessed the subjects' initial goals -- to cooperate or to compete -- and then looked at what happens with various combinations of cooperators and competitors are pitted against each other. The results were striking. Examining just the behavior of one player, arbitrarily designated as the actor:

Kelley & Stahelski referred to these effects as behavioral assimilation of cooperators to competitors. In other words, competitors, by their competitive behavior, created an environment that elicited competitive behavior from cooperators as well.

Strategies for Social Manipulation

One way of manipulating the environment is to manipulate the people in that environment. David Buss and his colleagues (1987) interviewed people about the strategies they use to get people do to certain things (or stop doing them). He classified their responses into six broad strategies:

Buss also found that subjects' preference for these strategies was related to their personality characteristics.

Apparently, people with different personalities have characteristically different ways of manipulating other people. When these strategies for social manipulation are successful, they change the objective, publicly observable environment, because the other people in that environment are now doing something they weren't doing before.

Delay of Gratification

Examples of behavioral manipulation of the environment also crop up in the literature on delay of gratification. Rather than looking to children's personality traits to understand delay of gratification, Mischel and his colleagues (1989) have asked the question: "What do 'high-delay' children do?"

Consider, for example, children in an experiment in which children must wait in the presence of a promised reward. We know from a previous study that, on average, children do not wait very long in such a situation. But some children do: How do they do it? Traditional personality psychologists would attribute these differences in delay of gratification to differences in personality traits, such as ego-control and ego-resiliency. But while traditional personality psychologists focus their analyses on the traits that children have, interactionists would focus on what the children do.

We know from studies of situational influence that features of the environment affect delay of gratification -- such as whether the rewards are physically present. But even when the rewards are physically present, some children show a high capacity for delay of gratification. Mischel and his colleagues (Mischel et al., 1989) observed high-delay children engaging in a number of interesting behaviors:

In other words, these children were behaving in such a way as to put the rewards out of sight -- to change the environment into one in which the reward, though physically present, is not really there.

A formal experiment by Mischel, Ebbesen, and Zeiss (1972, Exp. 1) makes the same point. Children were given the choice of marshmallows or pretzels, and then asked to wait for the experimenter to return before he could receive the preferred reward. The child could also signal for the experimenter to return, in which case he would get the non-preferred reward. Children who were given no distraction could not wait very long. But children who were told to play with a "Slinky" toy were able to wait much longer. Out of sight, out of mind. The rewards can be physically absent, as is the case in situational influence. Or the subject can do something to make them absent, in which case the person's behavior is altering the environment.

The Marshmallow  Test Mischel's "Marshmallow Test" -- as in, "Would you like to have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later?" -- has entered popular culture as a metaphor for people's ability to control themselves.  Although many commentators misinterpreted self-control as something people have, in varying degrees, Mischel's own research makes clear that self-control is something people do, and can learn.  In these lectures, I'll return to the MT several times to illustrate various aspects of the person-situation interaction.  Mischel's own research on self-regulation and delay of gratification is summarized in his book, aptly titled The Marshmallow Test: Why Self-Control is the Engine of Success (2014).  The marshmallow test entered popular culture following an Op-Ed article by David Brooks, who often interprets social science research for his readers ("Marshmallows and Public Policy", New York Tmes, 05/07/2006).  Emblematic of its status is the cartoon at the left by Paul Noth, which appeared in the New Yorker, 01/23/2016, around the time of the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States; and the one on the right by Meredith Southard, which appeared in the New Yorker five years later (09/20/2021).

Transformation

Even when we have no choice over our environment, and are unable to manipulate it through our overt behavior, we can still change the environment through covert, cognitive operations -- by changing its private, subjective meaning. The environment is changed through cognitive activity, not overt behavior.

The "n Effect"

A nice comparison of the objective situation with the subjective, mental representation of the situation is the "n Effect" of group size on test performance. Garcia and Tor (2009) examined SAT performance records for 2005 as a function of the average number of test-takers per testing venue in each state. As the average number of test-takers in a venue increased, SAT scores decreased, and this was true for both the verbal and math portions of the test. They followed up with a formal experiment in which they gave college-student subjects a general-knowledge test. All the students took the test alone, but half were told that they were competing against 10 other students for a prize of $5, while the others were told they were competing against 100 students. It was an easy test, so most of the subjects got most of the items right. But subjects who believed that they were competing against 10 people finished the test significantly faster than those who thought they were competing against 100 people.

Garcia and Tor suggest that, when faced with a large number of competitors, people -- especially those who tend to compare themselves to others -- figure that it is not worth trying too hard. Accordingly, they suggest, the number of people in competitive situations should be controlled, so that everyone competes on the same level playing field. Maybe that's what's happening, and maybe that's the implication. But for present purposes the point of the experiment is that it's the subjects' beliefs about the situation -- that they have many rivals, or only just a few -- that affects performance.

Delay of Gratification

Out of sight, out of mind. We have already seen that if the reward is physically absent from the situation, children can delay longer. And we have also seen that even if the reward is physically present, children can delay longer if they behave as if it is absent. But this behavior does not have to entail overt action. It can also entail covert, purely mental, activity.

For example, consider the experiment by Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss (1972), discussed earlier, in which children were able to delay for a long time by distracting themselves with a "Slinky" toy. It turns out that the distraction doesn't have to involve overt behavior, like playing with a toy. In another condition of the "Slinky" experiment, children were simply instructed to spend their time thinking of "anything that's fun to think of". These children were able to delay gratification even longer than those who played with the "Slinky" toy. By putting the reward out of sight, or by directing their attention elsewhere (e.g., to a game, a song, or a Slinky toy, or just "fun" thoughts), the have effectively their environment from one in which they cannot wait very long to one in which they can.

An experiment on the role of ideation in delay of gratification by Mischel and Baker (1975) further illustrates the power of cognitive transformation. In this experiment the children were given the usual choice of marshmallows vs. pretzels, and during the waiting period the preferred reward remained in sight.

The results of the experiment were very striking. Children who focused their thoughts on the consummatory aspects of their preferred reward were not able to delay gratification for very long. Those who transformed their preferred reward into something that did not taste sticky-sweet, or crunchy-salty, were able to delay for a long time. What caused their delay (or lack thereof) was not their personality traits, or the environment, or even their own behavior. The important factor was how they thought about the rewards.

Thus the notion of delay of gratification as a trait that people have, proves to be an oversimplification. Ego-control is not just a personality characteristic, it is also a product of strategic activity. Delay of gratification is accomplished through a combination of selection, manipulation, and transformation, all oriented around the general principle of "out of sight, out of mind".

Through the process of social learning, children acquire both knowledge of effective behavioral and cognitive strategies for delay of gratification, and the ability to deploy these strategies effectively.

In the cognitive view of social interaction, an individual's behavior in some situation is determined by his or her mental representation of that situation, in the context of that person's history of social learning and goals for the future -- in other words, by the meaning of that situation. This meaning is determined by processes of perception and categorization, memories of past experiences in similar situations, and other cognitive factors, including the self-concept, the perception of other people, and the interpretation of one's own and others' behavior. Cognitive transformations alter the meaning of the environmental situation for the actor, and thus the actor's behavioral response to that situation. We cannot understand a person's behavior in a situation unless we understand the meaning of that situation for that person.

Consider, for example, the behavior of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other heroes of the American civil rights movement. King, Medgar Evers, and other black civil rights workers, as well as whites like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and others associated with such movements as the Mississippi Summer Project, actively confronted civil authorities in the South, putting themselves in situations, and engaging in behaviors (such as sit-ins, protest marches, and voter-registration drives) that increased the likelihood that they would be jailed, beaten, or killed (in fact, Evers was killed in 1967, King in 1968; the 1967 deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner formed the basis of the film Mississippi Burning). Most of us would avoid these situations and behaviors. The civil rights workers behaved differently not just because they were braver than the rest of us (which, admittedly, they probably were), but because the meanings of the situations were different for them, and they believed that their actions were necessary to obtain civil rights for American blacks. For King, being jailed by Bull Connor was the opportunity to write his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", rallying people all across the country to his cause.

The example of the American civil rights workers reinforces the implications of the doctrine of mentalism: mental states cause actions. People behave in accordance with their beliefs. If you want to understand someone's actions, you don't look at their genetic heritage or their physiology. You look inside their minds, to determine what they know and believe, feel, and want. That will explain what they do.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Cognitive transformations of the environment are not entirely private, because they lead to overt, public behavior which can alter the objective situation for other people as well. This process is exemplified by what the American sociologist Robert K. Merton (1947) called the "self-fulfilling prophecy".

In the self-fulfilling prophecy, the definition of the situation may be false, but it is the definition that leads to behavior that makes the initially false conception come true.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is illustrated by Rosenthal and Jacobson's study of "Pygmalion in the Classroom" (1968), an experiment involving children (grades 1-6) enrolled in a number of public elementary schools. Early in the fall, in addition to a standard IQ test, the children were administered what was presented to the teachers and (administrators) as a nonverbal IQ test that would identify "intellectual late-bloomers" -- that is, children who might not be doing well now, but who could be expected to catch up and even exceed the achievement of their age-peers. In fact, the test had nothing to do with IQ, or the prediction of late-blooming. It was a fake. Nevertheless, the children's teachers were given false feedback about the children's test scores, identifying a random 20% of pupils in each class as "late-bloomers". Later, in the spring of that same academic year, the children were retested with the standard IQ test. On average, children in all classes and grade levels showed increases -- school really does make you smarter!. But those children who had been falsely identified as intellectual late-bloomers showed greater gains than the other children.

The important point of the study is that the children weren't really "late-bloomers" -- but their teachers believed that they were, and treated them accordingly. Thus, the effect of the cognitive transformation (identifying some students as late-bloomers) was mediated by behavioral manipulations (treating students identified as late bloomers differently than the other students). These behavioral differences boiled down to four factors:

In other words, teachers who believed that a child was a late bloomer behaved as if that child were already doing well -- in short, they treated late-bloomers as if they were already smart. In so doing, they created a different environment for the late bloomers than for the other children -- who after all were in the same physical classroom. And, not surprisingly, the late-bloomers responded by -- well, blooming.

The self-fulfilling prophecy begins with a cognitive transformation -- in this case, by putting children in one category rather than another. The teachers then behaved in accordance with this cognitive categorization, and the children responded by behaving in a manner consistent with how they were treated. In other words:

private belief created public reality.

Note: Rosenthal and Jacobson's study aroused immediate controversy in the teaching profession, and some criticism -- mainly statistical -- from psychologists and other social scientists (particularly Richard Snow). However, the essential point of the Pygmalion experiment -- that expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies -- has been borne out many times since.

Social Intelligence and Personality

The study of Pygmalion in the Classroom reinforces a point from our earlier discussion of learning: the objective stimulus situation rarely determines behavior. With the exception of reflexes, taxes, and instincts, behavior is a response to the subjective situation, as it is perceived by the behaving organism.

Perception is an intelligent process, in which perceivers actively construct mental representations of the world around them, drawing on information extracted from the stimulus, which is then combined with knowledge retrieved from memory. Through this inferential, problem-solving process, the perceptual representation goes beyond the information given by the stimulus.

Because behavior is based on perception, it too reflects intelligent thought. In contrast with reflexive or instinctual behavior, intelligent action shows a number of characteristic features:

Social behavior, whether mundane (asking a drugstore clerk for toothpaste) or monumental (asking someone to marry you) is also intelligent. Every social interaction represents a problem to be solved -- or, perhaps, a series of problems to be solved in turn.

The person's behavior in ill-defined social interactions may reveal his or personality -- by the manner in which problems are represented, and the means by which their solutions are approached. In other words, the problems presented by social interaction are solved through the individual's application of his or her fund of social intelligence (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987, 1989; Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1989), by which we mean the cognitive structures involved in social interaction:

The concept of social intelligence has implications for personality traits. These traits, to the extent that they exist at all, are not merely passive attributes of the individual. They also reflect situational demands and personal choices. Consider, for example, a trait like independence:

Personality is not best construed in terms of traits. It is not established once and for all time. Like all other aspects of human intelligence, it is continuously open to change, as people define and redefine themselves, and are defined and redefined by others. Personality emerges out of the interaction between the person and the situation -- an interaction that is cognitively mediated.

This page last modified 07/05/2021.