The Person-Situation Debate
If you’re asked to describe someone (a boss, a friend, an old teacher) you’ll probably describe them using personality characteristics or terms like nice, demanding, helpful, careless, or friendly. Most of us generally think that the descriptions that we use for individuals accurately reflect their “characteristic pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors,” or in other words, their personality.
But what if this idea isn’t entirely accurate?
Walter Mischel’s Challenge to Personality Psychology
In 1968, Walter Mischel published “Personality and Assessment,” which sparked a significant debate in psychology. Mischel argued that:
- People’s behavior isn’t as consistent across situations as we might think.
- Specific behaviors (like honesty) in one context don’t necessarily predict similar behaviors in different contexts.
- The belief in broad personality traits might be an illusion.
This challenge to traditional personality psychology became known as the person-situation debate.
The person-situation debate
The person-situation debate addresses the relative importance of internal personality traits versus external situational factors in determining human behavior. This debate centers on whether consistent personality characteristics or specific environmental contexts have a greater influence on how people act across different situations.
This debate centered on two main perspectives:
- Trait Perspective: Broad personality traits consistently influence behavior across situations.
- Situationist Perspective: Behavior is primarily determined by specific situational factors.
Mischel and other situationists argued that instead of studying broad traits like extraversion or neuroticism, psychologists should focus on:
- People’s distinctive reactions to specific situations
- How individuals evaluate risks and rewards in each context
- The interaction between situational features and a person’s unique perception of them
For instance, although there may not be a broad and general trait of honesty, some children may be especially likely to cheat on a test when the risk of being caught is low and the rewards for cheating are high. Others might be motivated by the sense of risk involved in cheating and may do so even when the rewards are not very high. Thus, the behavior itself results from the child’s unique evaluation of the risks and rewards present at that moment, along with her evaluation of her abilities and values. Because of this, the same child might act very differently in different situations.
Thus, Mischel thought that specific behaviors were driven by the interaction between very specific, psychologically meaningful features of the situation in which people found themselves, the person’s unique way of perceiving that situation, and their abilities for dealing with it. Mischel and others argued that it was these social-cognitive processes that underlie people’s reactions to specific situations that provide some consistency when situational features are the same. If so, then studying these broad traits might be more fruitful than cataloging and measuring narrow, context-free traits like extroversion or neuroticism.
Does Personality Exist?
In the years after the publication of Mischel’s (1968) book, debates raged about whether personality truly exists, and if so, how it should be studied. And, as is often the case, it turns out that a more moderate middle ground than what the situationists proposed could be reached. It is certainly true, as Mischel pointed out, that a person’s behavior in one specific situation is not a good guide to how that person will behave in a very different specific situation. Someone who is extremely talkative at one specific party may sometimes be reticent to speak up during class and may even act like a wallflower at a different party. But this does not mean that personality does not exist, nor does it mean that people’s behavior is completely determined by situational factors. Indeed, research conducted after the person-situation debate shows that on average, the effect of the “situation” is about as large as that of personality traits.
Walter Mischel and the Marshmallow Test
In what is now a famous study of whether behavior is consistent in equivalent situations across time, Walter Mischel, conducted research on the ability of kids to delay gratification. He created a study called the marshmallow test to measure self-regulation, or willpower.
In the most basic form of marshmallow study, Mischel and his colleagues placed a preschool child in a room with one marshmallow on the table. The children were told they could either eat the marshmallow now, or wait until the researcher returned to the room, and then they could have two marshmallows (Mischel, Ebbesen & Raskoff, 1972). What Mischel and his team found was that young children differ in their degree of self-control and that the types of distraction varied how long the children would wait.
One of the biggest discoveries came later—Mischel and his colleagues continued to follow this group of preschoolers through high school, and what do you think they discovered? The children who had more self-control in preschool (the ones who waited for the bigger reward) were more successful in high school. They had higher SAT scores, had positive peer relationships, and were less likely to have substance abuse issues; as adults, they also had more stable marriages (Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989; Mischel et al., 2010). On the other hand, those children who had poor self-control in preschool (the ones who grabbed the one marshmallow) were not as successful in high school, and they were found to have academic and behavioral problems.
This was a pretty big finding, but wait—correlation is not causation! And our psychological understanding adapts as data reveals new insights. A more recent study using a larger and more representative sample found the associations between the early delay of gratification and measures of achievement in adolescence to be half as strong as originally reported (Watts, Duncan, & Quan, 2018). The later research also found that situational factors such as early measures of cognitive capacity, family background, and home environment, likely impacted delayed gratification. This research suggests that consideration of situational factors is important to better understand behavior.
To learn more about the marshmallow test, watch this video from Practical Psychology.
Today, the person-situation debate is mostly resolved, and most psychologists consider both the situation and personal factors in understanding behavior. For Mischel (1993), people are situation processors. The children in the marshmallow test each processed, or interpreted, the rewards structure of that situation in their own way. Mischel’s approach to personality stresses the importance of both the situation and the way the person perceives the situation. Instead of behavior being determined by the situation, people use cognitive processes to interpret the situation and then behave in accordance with that interpretation.
While it is true that if psychologists assess a broad range of behaviors across many different situations, there are general tendencies that emerge. Personality traits give an indication of how people will act on average, but frequently they are not so good at predicting how a person will act in a specific situation at a certain moment in time. Thus, to best capture broad traits, one must assess aggregate behaviors, averaged over time and across many different types of situations. Most modern personality researchers agree that there is still a place for broad personality traits and for the narrower units such as those studied by Walter Mischel.