Behavior is a function of the person and the situation interacting with each other.

The “person–situation debate” triggered by the 1968 publication of Mischel’s Personality and Assessment ended as a serious scientific conversation decades ago (Kenrick & Funder, 1988). Personality traits are real and important. The days are long past when anybody who followed the literature could seriously entertain arguments that they exist only in the eye of the beholder, are mere social constructions, or have relations with behavior that are too small to matter.

One of the most significant passages in Mischel’s book introduced a memorable term:

“…the phrase ‘personality coefficient’ might be coined to describe the correlation between .20 and .30 which is found persistently when virtually any personality dimension inferred from a questionnaire is related to almost any conceivable external criterion involving responses sampled in a different medium – that is, not by another questionnaire.” (Mischel, 1968, p. 78, emphasis in the original).

The .30 correlation described as an upper limit later was raised to .40 (Nisbett, 1980), and is better understood than it used to be. Correlations in this range are now acknowledged to be comparable to the size of the effects of some of the major demonstrations of the power of the situation in the social psychological literature (Funder and Ozer, 1983, Richard et al., 2003), about the maximum that could be theoretically obtained if behavior has multiple determinants (Ahadi & Diener, 1989), and enough to yield correct dichotomous predictions 65–70% of the time (Rosenthal & Rubin, 1982). Even more to the point, measurements of personality – especially but not limited to measurements of five key traits of personality – can predict not only specific behaviors in the lab but also long-term, important life outcomes (Ozer and Benet-Martínez, 2006, Roberts et al., 2007).

These important insights might not have been achieved without the stimulus of Mischel’s controversial phrase. The “personality coefficient” was ahead of its time because its coining anticipated and perhaps helped to instigate the increasing emphasis, in modern research, on effect sizes over significance levels (American Psychological Association, 2001, Wilkinson and The Task Force on Statistical Inference APA Board of Scientific Affairs, 1999). By reframing the evaluation of consistency of personality in terms of correlation coefficients and the goal of personality as the prediction of important behavioral outcomes, Mischel’s book opened to the door to a clearer and more realistic appreciation of the limits, accomplishments, and opportunities for personality assessment.

While the debate is over, some of its less pleasant residue remains. The (oversimplified) bottom line of Personality and Assessment was transformed by some into a putative central theme of social psychology that placed it into opposition with personality (Ross & Nisbett, 1991). For example, a major introductory psychology textbook tells students that “one of the most important lessons of social psychology is that people consistently underestimate the power of situations in affecting human behavior… [the tendency] to overemphasize the importance of personality traits and underestimate the importance of [the] situation… is so pervasive that it has been called the fundamental attribution error” (Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2006, pp. 608–609, emphasis in the original). This passage is not an isolated instance. The exposition of the fundamental attribution error in almost every introductory textbook enshrines it as an established piece of the conventional wisdom.

However, there are good reasons to doubt that attributions are uniformly biased in the direction posited by the fundamental attribution error (Funder & Fast, in press). If we always underestimated the effect of situations, would not we be shocked by how easy it is to change others’ behaviors just by adjusting the situation a little? Would not we be surprised – albeit pleasantly so – by how even small changes in the household environment can change the behavior of our children or spouses in the direction we desire, by how even minor alterations in the classroom situation can improve students’ study behavior, or by how simple it is to design effective means to change opinions, lessen crime and promote healthy behavior? And last, but for a psychologist not least, would not we be surprised (and delighted) by how consistently our experimental manipulations produce the hypothesized behavioral effects in our research participants? Instead, of course, we are more often surprised when massive efforts to affect the behaviors of others – ranging from personal interventions to government programs to experimental designs – have disappointingly weak effects. I would not argue here that the error really runs the other direction, that personality is more powerful than we think.1 But I will observe – as anyone can – that while situations are sometimes surprisingly powerful, sometimes too they are weaker than we might expect or even wish them to be.

Perhaps the fundamental attribution error will be knocked off it its high perch only when it becomes so widely accepted (as it nearly is) that it will be counterintuitive to argue that the error lays the other way. In the meantime, the most constructive path lies in another direction. Since the real argument is over, let us unstick ourselves from the residue of the person–situation debate and try to imagine what direction personality psychology will and should take in a postwar environment where it can reunite with rather than continue to be seen at odds with its historic partner, social psychology.

Restoration of questionnaire research

One possibility for the future of personality psychology is a partial or complete return to the status quo ante, as research was practiced in 1965 or so. The most powerful critique Mischel’s book offered of personality research as it then existed was that it was overwhelmingly dominated by questionnaire methods. Mischel was on to something when he defined the personality coefficient as a limit on correlations among non-questionnaire measures (he acknowledged that correlations among

Narrower trait constructs

One of the many interpretations I and perhaps others have heard of the message of Personality and Assessment is that it is a critique not of trait constructs per se, but specifically of global traits. To the extent that this interpretation is correct, then Mischel was part of a movement from the general to the specific that can also be seen, for example, in the evolution of Social Learning Theory from Julian Rotter to Albert Bandura. Whereas Rotter (e.g., 1954) was interested in Generalized

Focusing on within-person variance

People are different from each other, but they also differ with themselves, in the sense that every individual varies how he or she acts and feels, to some degree, depending upon the situations in his or her life. A new direction that has been prominently suggested for the future of personality psychology is to alter the traditional focus on between person variance to yield a sharper view of within-person variance.

This shift in focus is the basic contribution of Mischel and Shoda’s (1995; see

The personality triad

One potential way to organize the future agenda of personality research, including the issues summarized above, might be in terms of what I have called the personality triad: persons, situations and behaviors (Funder, 2006, Funder, 2008). These are the three terms in the famous equation proposed by Lewin (1951), B = f (P, S), behavior is a function of the person and the situation. While this equation has sometimes been oversimplified and misused (e.g., in attempts to use the analysis of variance

Assessing the elements of the personality triad

To move these conceptions of the personality triad beyond the level of abstract speculation, some way must be found to operationalize each of its elements for empirical research. This observation draws attention to the fact that while methods for assessing dimensions of individual differences across persons abound, equivalently-sophisticated, parallel methods for assessing behaviors or situations are painfully lacking.

The inclusion of behavior in psychological research in social as well as

Agenda for research on the personality triad: three main effects

Each element of the personality triad interacts with the other two, producing three unique interactions. But before plunging into attempts to detect and understand these interactions, with all the entailed difficulties discussed earlier in this article, it might be easier and more fruitful to pause for a bit, and learn more about the associated three main effects. These three main effects are the relations between persons and behaviors, between situations and behaviors, and between persons and

First things first

The research agenda mapped out above will need to overcome some formidable obstacles. Despite the rise (and partial fall) of behaviorism, and despite the many odes written to the power of the situation, psychology is still in the early stages of developing conceptualizations of behavior that recognize not all behavior is the same, and that seek to identify the psychologically active ingredients of situations. The translation of these developing conceptualizations into tools for assessing

Post-interactionism

The goal of developing a thorough understanding of the interconnections among persons, situations and behaviors presents an exciting and challenging agenda that could keep personality psychology busy for many years. But I would like to conclude by taking an even longer view. A complete analysis of person–situation-behavior main effects and interactions is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a means towards understanding something deeper and more mysterious: the nature and workings of

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this article was supported, in part, by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0642243. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. R. Michael Furr provided useful comments on an earlier draft of this article, but the errors and lapses of judgment that remain are solely the responsibility of the author.

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