Most of personality tests are based primary on traits theory, which believes traits influence behavior. According to Gordon Allport, the founder of personality psychology, traits are generalized response-units to stimuli that reflect one’s personality. In other words, personality consists of a collection of traits. We know one’s traits through behavior such as habits or tendency. If one’s habits are joking, smiling and talking a lot, then extroversion would be the trait that generalizes and includes those relative habits. Because we possess different traits and they vary in their degree, we response to a stimuli differently, producing different behaviors. Between a stimulus and a behavior is a trait, directing the behavior. For example, if a stimulus is a new friend, one’s behavior can be being shy and nervous or it can be introducing oneself and initiating a conversation immediately. The reason why behavior to the same stimulus varies is because each one of us have different trait, introverted or extroverted in this case. However, trait psychologists cannot predict how an individual will behave in a particular situation because we don’t always behave according to our traits. For instance, you may probably not joke at funeral even if you are extroverted or you may try to talk a lot to impress a potential customer even if you are introverted. Now, if our behaviors differ from situation to situation, then it must be the situation that determines behaviors, not broad personality traits. This position is called “situationalism”, first proposed by Walter Michel with the publication of his groundbreaking book Personality and Assessment. Traits theorists, in response, formulated new theoretical perspectives, trying to save the idea of traits. Two of the most significant changes that they have made are aggregation and the notion of “person-situation interaction”. First, aggregation is the process of averaging several single observations to obtain better results of personality traits than a single observation of behavior. There would be days when your cheerful girlfriend may not be cheerful for some reasons. But what matters to you is her behavior over a long term and not her mood on any given day. The practice of aggregation gives traits theorists better results in assessing personality traits and predicting behavior. Person-situation interaction, on the other hand, can be expressed as follows; B=F (P×S), meaning behavior is a production of the interaction between personality traits and situational forces. This can easily be explained with “If..., if..., then...” statement. If the situation is overwhelming, and if the person is shy, then upset will be the result. Traits theory further proposed some ways personality traits interact with situations, which strengthen their perspective. The most important one is “situational selection”, the tendency to select situations in which one finds oneself. Snyder states, “quite possibly, one’s choice of the settings in which to live one’s life may reflect features of one’s personality; an individual may choose to live his or her life in serous, reserved, and intellectual situations precisely because he or she is a serious, reserved, and thoughtful individual”. Situational forces can certainly influence and direct particular behaviors. Quite frequently however, these situations which produce certain behaviors are the ones that an individual have chosen with the internal causal properties, reflecting or possibly supporting the existence of personality traits. Situational critiques lead to the reformulation of trait theory. But it also made the traits theorist, essentially the personality tests, to admit their defect and invalidity in assessing one’s personality traits though a series of questions. Despite traits theorists’ embrace of situational forces as one of the factors of producing behaviors, inconsistency of behavior across situation still remains in their perspective and personality tests with the absence of situational forces can hardly get to the core of personality and results from such an assessment cannot be a way to predict one’s behavior.
No comments:
Post a Comment