Toward an integrative science of the person.

Key Words personality, social cognitive theory, personality processes, personality dynamics, role of situation, personality paradox, personality signatures

* Abstract To build a science of the person, the most basic question was, and remains, how can one identify and understand the psychological invariance that distinctively characterizes an individual and that underlies the variations in the thoughts, feelings, and actions that occur across contexts and over time? This question proved particularly difficult because of the discrepancies that soon emerged between the expressions of consistency that were expected and those that were found. The resulting dilemma became known as the classic "personality paradox": How can we reconcile our intuitions--and theories--about the invariance and stability of personality with the equally compelling empirical evidence for the variability of the person's behavior across diverse situations? Which is right: the intuitions or the research findings? In this chapter I review and discuss some of the advances made to answer this question since it was posed. These findings have allowed a resolution of the paradox, and provide the outlines for a conception of the underlying structure and dynamics of personality that seems to better account for the data.

 
CONTENTS 
 
INTRODUCTION 
FINDING THE INVARIANCE--IN THE VARIABILITY 
  Eliminating Context by Aggregation Across Situations 
  Incorporating the Situation into the Search for Coherence 
  Personality Coherence in the Pattern of Variability 
  Looking for Coherence in the Variability: Empirical Evidence 
    from Directly Observed Behavior Patterns 
  Behavioral Signatures of Personality 
SEARCHING FOR THE UNDERLYING ORGANIZATION 
  Framework for a Dynamic Personality System 
  A Next Challenge: Organization and Dynamics of 
    Personality Systems? 
CONCLUSION: PERSONALITY AND ASSESSMENT (1968) 
  IN RETROSPECT 

INTRODUCTION

In this essay, I discuss advances made in the long search to identify and understand the invariance that characterizes personality, focusing on the consistencies that are being found in unexpected places that violate earlier assumptions that previously had guided the field. The consistencies are seen in the stable patterns of cross-situational variability, rather than constancy, which characterize the individual when behavior is examined in relation to the situations in which it occurs. These distinctive patterns of person-situation interactions, in turn, hint at the organization of the underlying system that generates them. I consider the outlines of that system, its implications for the conceptualization of personality structure, processing dynamics, and assessment, and the role of the situation in the organization and expressions of personality. This effort draws on findings on mind, brain, and behavior coming from advances in the larger science that are still waiting to be integrated into the theory and assessment of the individual as an organized, dynamic, agentic system functioning in the social world--an often-forgotten aim that motivated the study of personality in the first place.

FINDING THE INVARIANCE--IN THE VARIABILITY

My entry into the search for the basic coherence of personality began four decades ago when I reviewed the state of the field at that time in the 1968 monograph, Personality and Assessment (Mischel 1968). The conclusions to which it led were upsetting because I proposed that for many years researchers had been looking in the wrong places, guided by untenable assumptions, and therefore could not find the expected results.