The End of the Person–Situation Debate: An Emerging Synthesis in the Answer to the Consistency Question

We review the history and current status of the person–situation debate. We propose that the person–situation debate (1) is over and (2) that it ended in a ‘Hegelian’ synthesis. Specifically, we propose the following synthesis resolution: There are multiple types of consistency; behavior is consistent for some of those types and not for others; and personality and traits exist in the forms that produce the consistent behaviors. Incorporating both personality processes and trait structures in research will move personality research forward. In this article, we summarize the advances that the two perspectives have generated by working in opposition; we explain why both sides will suffer from continuing to work independently; and we anticipate several future directions that synthesis-informed personality research can and should take.

[1]  David C. Funder.  On the accuracy of personality judgment: a realistic approach. , 1995 .

[2]  M. Eysenck,et al.  Personality and Individual Differences: A Natural Science Approach , 1985 .

[3]  Mark Snyder,et al.  Personality and social behavior , 1985 .

[4]  Jordan B. Peterson,et al.  Sources of openness/intellect: cognitive and neuropsychological correlates of the fifth factor of personality. , 2005, Journal of personality.

[5]  P. Borkenau,et al.  The Big Five as States: How Useful Is the Five-Factor Model to Describe Intraindividual Variations over Time? , 1998 .

[6]  Y Shoda,et al.  Reconciling processing dynamics and personality dispositions. , 1998, Annual review of psychology.

[7]  B. Roberts,et al.  A lexical investigation of the lower-order structure of conscientiousness. , 2004 .

[8]  B. Roberts,et al.  The rank-order consistency of personality traits from childhood to old age: a quantitative review of longitudinal studies. , 2000, Psychological bulletin.

[9]  Jack Block,et al.  Lives Through Time , 1983 .

[10]  V. Benet‐Martínez,et al.  Personality and the prediction of consequential outcomes. , 2006, Annual review of psychology.

[11]  Robert F Krueger,et al.  The heritability of personality is not always 50%: gene-environment interactions and correlations between personality and parenting. , 2008, Journal of personality.

[12]  P. Vernon,et al.  Personality Assessment: A Critical Survey , 1965 .

[13]  C. Randall Colvin,et al.  Explorations in behavioral consistency: properties of persons, situations, and behaviors. , 1991 .

[14]  A. Caspi,et al.  Personality Development Across the Life Course:The Argument for Change and Continuity , 2001 .

[15]  B. D. Raad,et al.  The structure of situations from a personality perspective , 2002 .

[16]  W. Fleeson.  Toward a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: traits as density distribution of states. , 2001, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[17]  David C. Funder,et al.  Towards a resolution of the personality triad: Persons, situations, and behaviors , 2006 .

[18]  John Wallace,et al.  An abilities conception of personality: Some implications for personality measurement. , 1966 .

[19]  W. Fleeson,et al.  Where does personality have its influence? A supermatrix of consistency concepts. , 2008, Journal of personality.

[20]  R. Robins,et al.  PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Personality Predictors of Academic Outcomes: Big Five Correlates of GPA and SAT Scores , 2007 .

[21]  Seymour Epstein,et al.  The stability of behavior: I. On predicting most of the people much of the time. , 1979 .

[22]  J. G. Holmes,et al.  An Atlas of Interpersonal Situations , 2003 .

[23]  W. Mischel,et al.  Intraindividual stability in the organization and patterning of behavior: incorporating psychological situations into the idiographic analysis of personality. , 1994, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[24]  Kenneth H. Craik,et al.  The Act Frequency Approach to Personality , 1983 .

[25]  Daryl J. Bem,et al.  ON PREDICTING SOME OF THE PEOPLE SOME OF THE TIME: THE SEARCH FOR CROSS-SITUATIONAL CONSISTENCIES IN BEHAVIOR , 1974 .

[26]  J. S. Wiggins,et al.  A psychological taxonomy of trait-descriptive terms: The interpersonal domain. , 1979 .

[27]  N. Martin,et al.  A twin-pronged attack on complex traits , 1997, Nature Genetics.

[28]  Lee Anna Clark,et al.  Temperament: A new paradigm for trait psychology. , 1999 .

[29]  L. R. Goldberg.  The structure of phenotypic personality traits. , 1993, The American psychologist.

[30]  John R. Nesselroade,et al.  Interindividual differences in intraindividual change. , 1991 .

[31]  S. Epstein.  A research paradigm for the study of personality and emotions. , 1983, Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation.

[32]  P. Shaver,et al.  Effects of attachment style and relationship context on selection among relational strategies , 2007 .

[33]  G. Āllport.  Personality: A Psychological Interpretation , 1938 .

[34]  Richard H. Price,et al.  Behavioral appropriateness and situational constraint as dimensions of social behavior. , 1974 .

[35]  D. Funder,et al.  The Riverside Behavioral Q-sort: a tool for the description of social behavior. , 2000, Journal of Personality.

[36]  W. Mischel,et al.  A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. , 1995, Psychological review.

[37]  W. Swann,et al.  Personality Psychology’s Comeback and Its Emerging Symbiosis With Social Psychology , 2005, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[38]  Traits, tests, and personality research. , 1977 .

[39]  Tarik Bel-Bahar,et al.  What modifies the expression of personality tendencies? Defining basic domains of situation variables. , 2007, Journal of personality.

[40]  L. Feldman.  Valence Focus and Arousal Focus: Individual Differences in the Structure of Affective Experience , 1995 .

[41]  K. Trzesniewski,et al.  Do people know how their personality has changed? Correlates of perceived and actual personality change in young adulthood. , 2005, Journal of personality.

[42]  R. Larsen,et al.  Person x situation interactions: choice of situations and congruence response models. , 1984, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[43]  D. Moskowitz.  Coherence and cross-situational generality in personality: A new analysis of old problems. , 1982 .

[44]  D. Funder,et al.  Behavior as a function of the situation. , 1983 .

[45]  Seymour Epstein,et al.  Aggregation and beyond: Some basic issues on the prediction of behavior. , 1983, Journal of personality.

[46]  D. Funder,et al.  Profiting from controversy. Lessons from the person-situation debate. , 1988, The American psychologist.

[47]  W. Fleeson.  Situation-based contingencies underlying trait-content manifestation in behavior. , 2007, Journal of personality.

[48]  J. Gray,et al.  The neuroscience of personality. , 1999 .

[49]  W. Mischel.  Personality and Assessment , 1996 .

[50]  J. M. Hunt.  TRADITIONAL PERSONALITY THEORY IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT EVIDENCE. , 1965, American scientist.

[51]  D. Buss.  Selection, evocation, and manipulation. , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[52]  W. Mischel.  Toward a cognitive social learning reconceptualization of personality. , 1973, Psychological review.

[53]  Lawrence A. Pervin,et al.  A Critical Analysis of Current Trait Theory , 1994 .

[54]  Lisa M. Pytlik Zillig,et al.  What Do We Assess when We Assess a Big 5 Trait? A Content Analysis of the Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive Processes Represented in Big 5 Personality Inventories , 2002 .

[55]  N. Waller,et al.  The Big Seven Factor Model of Personality Description: Evidence for Its Cross-Cultural Generality in a Spanish Sample , 1995 .

[56]  James J. Gross,et al.  Insights into emotion regulation from neuropsychology , 2007 .

[57]  M. Ashton,et al.  Empirical, Theoretical, and Practical Advantages of the HEXACO Model of Personality Structure , 2007, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[58]  M. Fleisher,et al.  Molecular Genetics and the Human Personality , 2002 .

[59]  E. E. Jones,et al.  The actor and the observer: Divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior. , 1972 .