Question

10. Why does it make sense to study personality, even though correlations between measured personality and behavior in specific situations are often quite low?

Answer 1

Personality is the sum total of all those psychophysical system within an individual which determine its unique adjustment with the environment.

According to dispositional approach given by Millar and Dollard, traits are mental structures that can be used to understand and predict behavior and explain the consistency in an individual’s behavior across range of situations which is ‘cross situational consistency.’

Walter and Mischel challenged cross situational consistency assumption. According to him behavior is more situation specific and situationally determined i.e most people do not display same type of behavior across a range of situations.

They gave the interaction perspective where interaction between a person and situation is the determinant for behavior. Both situation and trait and important and neither alone is sufficient to predict or explain behavior.

Psychological Features of situations: tells how differently people interpret and perceive similar situation differently.

Sometimes situations are more powerful determinants of behavior due to:

1. Response Freedom: When there is high degree of freedom of response, personality traits bear a strong influence on behavior. When there is of degree of freedom, situational factors dominate.

2. Competency demand hypothesis: In situations where there is high competency demand, the behavior is determined by cognitive and social skills thus reflecting particular personality traits of an individual.

To conclude, studying personality is important as these 2 features provides ways for understanding whether behavior is determined by personality or situation.