Evolution of Research

Evolution of Research
Until the late 1960’s, the field of personality psychology was dominated by
trait and state theories. Their central assumption, that people have traits
that produce enduring consistencies in their behavior, went unchallenged
for many years. The widespread appeal of these trait assumptions notwithstanding, since the late 1960’s personality and social psychologists have been
entangled in the “person-situation debate,” a controversy over whether the
presumed stability in behavior might be based more on illusion than reality.
While doubts about the existence of traits were already raised in the middle
of the twentieth century, the work of Walter Mischel was instrumental in
bringing the controversy into the forefront of academic psychology. In reviewing
a voluminous body of literature, Mischel showed in 1968 that virtually
all so-called trait measures, except intelligence, change substantially
over time and even more dramatically across situations. Traits such as honesty,
assertiveness, or attitudes toward authority typically showed reliability
across situations of .20 to .30. This means that if the correlation of behavior
presumably reflecting a trait in two different situations is .30, less than onetenth
(.30 × .30 = .09, or 9 percent) of the variability in the behavior can be
attributed to the trait. Mischel therefore concluded that perceptions of behavioral
stability, while not arbitrary, are often only weakly related to the
phenomenon in question.