The Intra-Individual View
What are the implications of the alternative conceptions of personality—inter-indi- vidual and intra-individual—for the construal of person and situation effects? As should be apparent at this juncture, if by person one is referring to intra-individual personality structure and dynamics, then there are no pure person effects or pure situation effects. If one asks about the determinants of a given intentional act or set of acts engaged in by an individual person, then there are no situation-free personal qualities that cause the person’s actions independently of the situation in which he or she acts and no situational infl uences that cause the actions indepen- dently of the individual’s enduring personal qualities and dynamic here-and-now psychological processes. There also are no person-by-situation interactions in the traditional sense of the term, since the traditional statistical meaning of the term interactions presupposes pure person effects and pure situation effects and asks whether, in addition to these effects, there is an additional effect in which one main effect is dependent on another. From an intra-individual perspective, ques- tions about pure person or situation effects dissolve. There is, instead, a synthetic interplay of the situational and the personal.
This synthesis of the situational and the personal results from two factors, either of which is suffi cient to make the fi eld’s traditional discourse of “person effect size versus situation effect size” an inadequate grammar for understand- ing the social interactions of individual persons. These factors are highlighted above. First, people generally act on, and react emotionally to, the meaning they construct in a given encounter. Features of the encounter activate the cognitive structures that come into play in this process of meaning construction (2.2). Pro- cesses of meaning construction, then, cannot be considered as forces that explain behavior independent of context since the meaning-construction processes are themselves shaped by features of the social context. Second, even if (hypotheti- cally) cognitions were to spring forth from one’s head independently of situational infl uence, those cognitions have the quality of intentionality; that is, they refer to
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features of the environment. They thus cannot be conceptualized in a situation- free manner.
Some may lament this synthetic approach to the personal and the situational. It prevents one from formulating simple and broadly generalizable statements about person and situation effects (statements such as that the effects are about equal).
If one views science as a search for such lawful generalities, then the perspec- tive advanced here may be unwelcome. However, readers inclined toward this view should recall that a complex synthesis of the personal and the situational is demanded not only from an intra-individual psychological perspective, as pursued here, but from an analysis of intra-individual biological processes as well. Consider the role of genes in biological development. From a between-person perspective, one can partition the effects of genes and the environment. But if one inquires about an individual organism, this partitioning simply doesn’t make sense. Genes do not infl uence development independently of the environment, such that one can compute the size of their independent effects. Biologists recognize that separating the effects of genes from the environment is like separating “the contributions of length and width to the area of a rectangle” (Ehrlich, 2000, p. 6). Rather than an old picture in which genes were portrayed as a program that determines develop- ment, research shows them to be “little more than puppets,” with “the strings, telling the genes when and where to turn on or off” being pulled by “an assortment of proteins and, sometimes, RNA’s” (Pennisi, 2001, p. 1064). Cells “respond to environmental signals conveyed by hormones, growth factors, and other regula- tory molecules” (Pennisi, 2001, p. 1064, emphasis added; also see Gottlieb, 1998).
Our basic thesis, then, is not merely that it is desirable to move beyond the computation of separate person versus situation effects. It is that one has no choice but to do so if person and its neighboring term, personality, refer to intra-indi- vidual personality structures and dynamics. The KAPA model (Cervone, 2004a) provides one set of tools for conceptualizing this interplay of the situational and the personal.
Views Complementary to the KAPA Model
Having stated this thesis and embedded it within the KAPA model of personality architecture, we should broaden our view by relating it to past and recent perspec- tives in personality and social psychology. Our provision of a model of person- in-situations—rather than persons and situations—surely is not unique (see, e.g., Smith & Rhodewalt, 1986). Yet it is surprisingly uncommon. Roberts and Pomer- antz (2004) explain that although “the person and the situation are inseparable,” in a wide variety of recent models of person–situation interaction they continue to be
“treated as separate entities” (p. 413). We suggest that this is because of the per- sistent equation of personality with “what the person does on average.” Once the term takes on this meaning, average dispositional tendencies, one is left with no conceptual tools for understanding the situationally embedded person. By comput- ing the average, one sacrifi ces information about situational variability. By adopt- ing dispositional constructs, one is left merely with descriptions of behavior rather than an explanatory model of the psychological functioning of the individual.
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Though less common, the call for synthetic accounts of persons-in-situations has been sounded, loud and clear, in the past. Perhaps the loudest and clearest call was that of Mischel (1973). His provision of a set of social-cognitive person variables commonly is construed as a study of personality “processes” that can be aligned next to a study of trait “structures.” But that reading vastly underestimates the goals and implications of Mischel’s work. As his title indicated, Mischel (1973) was calling for a “reconceptualization of personality.” In the alternative conceptu- alization, personality does not refer to what the person does on average. It refers, instead, to the enduring mental structures and dynamic psychological processes through which people interpret the world, interact with others, and plan and regu- late their own experiences and actions. In this analysis of the mental life of the individual, there is no splitting of the person from the situation; the social-cog- nitive variables develop and function through interaction with the social world.
Mischel (2005) recently has underscored this point, while judging that the persis- tent “person-situation split” has been “destructive to the building of a cumulative science of mind and social behavior.”
A similar perspective is Bandura’s (1978) principle of reciprocal determinism.
In this formulation, which is foundational to Bandura’s social cognitive theory of personality (1986, 1999), personal and situational factors are mutually determi- native. Social behavior similarly is seen as infl uenced by, and as infl uencing, the nature of the person and the environments that he or she encounters.
In the study of personality development, Magnusson and colleagues have long provided a framework in which the personality and social behavior is understood in terms of “an integrated person–environment system” (Magnusson, 2003, p. 5).
Magnusson’s focus is similar to the KAPA model presented here in that Magnusson explicitly begins by analyzing the individual, rather than inter-individual differ- ences (see, e.g., Magnusson & Törestad, 1993). The intra-individual focus elimi- nates the separateness of persons and situations.
The study of purposive behavior and “personal projects” by Little and col- leagues (e.g., Little, 2004, in press) also dissolves the person/situation divide. A distinguishing feature of the personal projects approach is the unit of analysis through which social behavior is understood. Rather than positing separate person and situations factors, Little and colleagues study “how both person characteristics and situation characteristics . . . [interact] within the single case to determine what a person was negotiating in his life, or which direction she intended to take at the next important intersection” (Little, in press, p. x).
Shweder (2007) recently has provided a perspective on personality and social behavior that rids one of the person–situation split in a manner that is complemen- tary to Mischel’s (1973) earlier analysis. Shweder urges personality psychologists and social psychologists to replace their trait/situation vocabulary with a language of preferences and constraints. In this view, people are active agents who construct meaning in social encounters and act according to their goals and preferences.
Action commonly is constrained by the opportunities available in the encounter or by norms that constrain certain behavioral options. This formulation lends itself readily to an analysis of meaning construction and personal agency, in the way that
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a language of average dispositional tendencies does not (Shweder, in press; also see Shweder & Sullivan, 1990).
Assessing Person and Situation Effects: Computations Based on an Inter-Individual Conception of Personality
Despite this range of arguments and fi ndings, some investigators surely will persist in computing separate person and situation effects. It thus is important to assess these efforts. We will do so by asking two questions. First, does the computation of a separate “person effect” even make sense; that is, what can the word person mean for there to be an effect “of person” on social behavior that is independent of the effect of situations?
The computation of independent person effects is perfectly reasonable as long as one recognizes that, in these computations, the word person does not refer to the psychological experiences of any one person. It refers to classifi cations of dif- ferences between people. It is these between-person variations—not the personal- ity dynamics of any individual person—that are the person effect in most studies of personality and social behavior. As long as one does not make the mistake of think- ing that a person effect refers to the psychological life of any particular person, the literature is readily interpretable.
Since the semantics here are a bit unusual, an example is in order. On intuitive grounds, nothing could be more consequential for the life of a person than his or her social relationships. Relationships with friends, family, professional colleagues, romantic partners, etc. are integral to personal development (e.g., Park, 2004) and emotional life (e.g., Ayduk et al., 2000) and have long been the centerpiece of theories of personality (Sullivan, 1953). Asendorpf and Wilpers (1998) studied per- sonality and social relations by assessing the nature of people’s relationships—the experience of social confl ict, of social support, of falling in love, etc.—over a period of 18 months. They found that although “personality affects . . . social relationships, relationships had no effect on personality” (Asendorpf & Wilpers, 1998, p. 1543).
What could this mean? Is it possible that none of the 132 persons in this research was in any way affected psychologically by the experience of social confl ict, of fall- ing in love, etc.? Surely that can’t be. As the investigators themselves were keenly aware, personality in this study does not refer to the inner mental life of any person.
It refers to a taxonomic classifi cation of differences among persons, specifi cally, the Big Five taxonomy. The ease with which one may inadvertently shift back and forth from one meaning of the term personality (a classifi cation of inter-individual dif- ferences) to another (the psychological structure and dynamics of the individual) is apparent from these scientists’ own writing. In their view, their null result “warns against” the “theoretical discussion of personality development [and] reciprocal effects” (Asendorpf & Wilpers, 1998, p. 1543) in the writing of theorists such as Magnusson (1990; cited by these authors as a prototypical dynamic interaction- ist). But these results have little if anything to do with the theoretical position of Magnusson. Magnusson (1990) quite explicitly views personality development as the study of “the individual as an organized whole, functioning as a totality” (p.
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197) and judges that assessments of between-person factors such as the Big Five
“make only limited contributions to an understanding of individual functioning”
(p. 216). To Magnusson, the notion of personality, then, has little to do with the between-person variables assessed by Asendorpf and Wilpers (1998). These writ- ers are employing alternative, inter- versus intra-individual referents for the term.
If one fails to recognize this, one may be led by the ambiguity of the term person- ality to the inappropriate and frankly bizarre conclusion that the research fi ndings indicate that “relationships [have] no effects on” (Asendorpf & Wilpers, 1998, p.
1543) the “functioning . . . [of] the individual as an organized whole (Magnusson, 1990, p. 197).
The second question is: What are the benefi ts and the limits of computing the magnitude of between-person effects, that is, computing the degree to which between-person classifi cations predict psychological outcomes? For many applied purposes, this form of research may be quite meritorious. Psychologists often are asked to classify individual differences in a manner that may enable members of society to predict psychological outcomes. If “any nonzero effect of a personality characteristic” in such applications is viewed as “a large effect in practical terms”
(Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006, p. 416), then these applied efforts are bound to be seen as a success! However, there also are limits to this strategy. As Toulmin (1961) explained years ago, such predictions are not the heart of the scientifi c enterprise.
Science seeks to understand phenomena, not merely to predict them, and pre- diction and understanding often fail to go hand-in-hand. It is here, in the effort to develop scientifi c understanding of the social behavior of individuals, that the limits of the between-person approach show.
These limits may be made clear by an analogy. Suppose one were interested in a personal attribute other than one involving personality, for example, physical attractiveness. One research strategy would be to classify people as being more or less physically attractive and to correlate the classifi cations with people’s degree of success in various social contexts. If one calls the correlation a person effect, then surely the person effect will be nonzero. More attractive persons might be more successful not only in contexts such as “meeting people in bars” but in domains in which attractiveness might not be expected to play a role (cf. Dion, Berscheid, &
Walster, 1972). But whatever the effect size, the approach has three limits: (a) One obtains no understanding of how or why physical attractiveness infl uences social outcomes. (b) One cannot conclude that there is any single process through which attractiveness infl uences social outcomes; although one computed a single person effect, it may refl ect a multiplicity of different processes (e.g., automatic emotional responses, stereotype-driven thinking; deliberate calculated thinking) at the level of the individual in context. The fi nding thus provides no fi rm guidance for a sub- sequent search for underlying processes. (3) One cannot conclude that physical attractiveness itself is a unitary entity. Physical attractiveness may be, like SES, merely an index that summarizes diverse features, with different people who share no signifi cant single physical attribute being classifi ed as equally (un)attractive.
The computation of a single effect size then in no way guarantees that attractive- ness itself is a single thing, that is, a unitary physical entity that exerts a single type of effect.
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These then are the limits of studying personality and social behavior by clas- sifying people within global trait taxonomies and computing person effects: The approach (a) yields no understanding of the processes through which personal attributes infl uence social behavior, (b) is an unsure guide in the search for such processes because any single person effect, computed across multiple persons and settings, could refl ect a multiplicity of such processes, and (c) does not enable one even to conclude that the personality attribute is a unitary quality at the level of the individual. On this last point, decisive data are available. Consider the two most prominent global trait variables: neuroticism and extraversion. Anxiety, a central feature of neuroticism, is not biologically unitary; instead, different brain regions are involved in anxious arousal during a task versus anticipatory anxiety, or worry- ing, prior to a task (Heller et al., 2002; Hoffman et al., 2005). Positive emotion, a central feature of the between-person construct of extraversion, is found to have at least two components—anticipatory versus consummatory pleasure—that are psy- chometrically distinct (Gard, Gard, Kring, & John, 2006) and may be subserved by different brain systems (Berridge & Robinson, 2003).
There can be little doubt that if one (a) classifi es people according to any tax- onomy of global individual differences, (b) correlates the classifi cations with a psy- chological outcome, and (c) calls the correlation a person effect, one will obtain person effects that are non-zero. The challenge for personality science is not to demonstrate this repeatedly until society closes us down (see Mischel, 2005) but to advance the science of personality and social behavior by gaining an understanding of the specifi c psychological capacities through which people interpret, infl uence, and act within the social world. This requires that one investigate the structure and dynamics of intra-individual personality architecture. In the remainder of this chapter, we illustrate how this can be done in two specifi c domains of study.