Abstract

Many social psychologists believe that characteristics of situations and persons represent two separate and sometimes competing causes of behavior and that situations are the more powerful determinants of behavior. After reviewing some of my previous analyses that explain why the power of situations depends totally upon the characteristics of persons, I will demonstrate further shortcomings of situational explanations with several types of behavior noted by ethologists: in vacuo, appetitive, exploratory, and play behaviors. I will conclude by comparing what situational influences within the reflex-arc, computer, and servomechanism metaphors imply about constraints on freedom and the predictability of human behavior.

Introduction

I feel pleased and honored to share my thoughts about persons and situations. I have followed the person-situation debates since the early 1970s, when we were assigned to read Walter Mischel’s (1973) Psychological Review article on cognitive social learning theory. I know that, as an undergraduate student back then, I barely understood his ideas. I understand his ideas and concerns a little better today. At least I think. We have learned much through these debates, as documented by Kenrick and Funder in their 1978 American Psychologist article. In fact, Kenrick and Funder (1978) claim that the person-situation debate is largely over. This optimism continues in a recent, special issue of the European Journal of Personality, in which the editors discern a major trend towards “reconciliation, synthesis, and integration” (van Mechelen & de Raad, 1999).

However, anyone who has read my contribution to that special issue of EJP (Johnson, 1999a) or heard the talk I gave at the 6th European Congress of Psychology, Rome (Johnson, 1999b) knows that I believe that the debate is far from over. Although I agree with Kenrick and Funder’s assessment that we have learned some things through the debate, there is still much to talk about. Despite all of the discussions, mistakes in thinking still lead researchers to say things about persons and situations that are simply not true. Certain ambiguities about situations and persons remain. Finally, there is a subtext to this entire debate, an undercurrent of issues being hinted at, but not brought out. My hope today is to correct the misconceptualizations, to clear up some of the ambiguities, and to bring to light some of the hidden issues that we need to address. To accomplish this, I plan to apply some ideas from the better-established sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology to bear upon our psychological issues.

Correcting Two Serious Mistakes In Thinking About Persons and Situations

The two most serious mistakes in thinking within the person-situation debate are:

(1) mischaracterizing personality dispositions as cross-situational consistencies; and

(2) misconceptualizing personality dispositions and situations as two separate forces that determine behavior.

I am not sure who first asserted that personality dispositions imply consistent behavior across diverse situations. I am also not sure why so many people accepted this assertion and spent so much time trying to measure how consistent our behavior is across situations. Physicists and chemists certainly do not define dispositions in terms of cross-situational consistencies in behavior.

Consider the disposition ferromagnetic as a property of certain metals like iron and nickel. To determine whether a substance is weakly or strongly ferromagnetic, we do not require the substance to show behavioral consistency across a wide variety of situations. What we require is replicable, relevant behavior (magnetic attraction and becoming magnetized) in a particular, relevant situation (a magnetic field). Next, consider the disposition water-soluble as a property of certain substances such as common table salt, Na⁺Cl^‑. To determine whether a substance is water soluble, we do not require it to dissolve in many different solvents, just water.

Analogously, we can determine whether a person is highly cooperative by observing whether the person frequently (relative to some norm) shows the relevant behavior (compliance) in the relevant situation (reasonable requests) (see Alston, 1975). Every personality disposition incorporates, whether explicitly or implicitly, a situational context that literally helps to define the disposition. While it is true that isolated trait words such as cooperative contain no explicit reference to the relevant context (reasonable requests), the context is tacitly built in to the socially shared meaning of the trait word. If one likes, one can conduct empirical studies, as Boele de Raad and his research group have done, that make explicit the implicit situational contexts of traits. The situation-boundness of traits applies equally to so called “broad” or “global” traits as well as “narrow” traits. In Funder’s (1991) words, “Every global trait is situation specific, in the sense that it is relevant to behavior in some (perhaps many), but not all, life situations.” Notions like ‘context-free dispositions’ or ‘dispositions as cross-situational consistencies in behavior’ are straw conceptions constructed by trait critics and have no more meaning than “square circles.”

The second egregious error in the person-situation debate (related, I believe, to the first error) was promulgated by the writings of attribution theorists who encouraged us to think about personality dispositions and situations as two separate and sometimes competing forces that determine behavior. Attribution theory, like behaviorism, is a form of situationism that holds that situations are stronger determinants of behavior than personality dispositions. Even after Kenrick and Funder’s attempt to put the person-situation debate to rest, attribution theorists appear to remain unconvinced, unreformed, unrepentant, and unapologetic. Take, for example, the following quotation from Ross and Nisbett (1992, p. 101): “It is simply indisputable that situational effects can be readily obtained that are far greater than any dispositional effects that have ever been reported.” Perhaps the highest received truth in attribution theory is what these theorists call “The Fundamental Attribution Error,” which is the “general tendency to overestimate the importance of personal or dispositional factors relative to environmental influences” (Ross, 1977, p. 184).

Although attribution theory is allegedly about lay explanations of behavior, Ross (1977) does say at one point that the “professional psychologist, like the intuitive psychologist, is susceptible to the fundamental attribution error” (p. 186). Attribution theorists’ stealthy ad hominem attacks on personality psychologists represents one of those hidden subtexts of the person-situation debate. Rather than repeat the analysis of these hostilities I made in the talk I gave in Rome two years ago, I’ll simply point out the error in attribution theory’s basic premises.

The serious mistake in attribution theorists’ thinking is not that one kind of force is a more powerful cause of behavior than another kind of force. The mistake is in assuming at the outset that situations and personality dispositions are forces whose magnitudes can be compared. Consider the physical and chemical analogies to see how this thinking is faulty. Even an extremely powerful magnetic field cannot magnetize a block of wood. The field’s ability to magnetize an object wholly depends upon that object possessing the structure found in ferromagnetic materials. Chemists have nicknamed water “the universal solvent” because it can dissolve so many substances. But even this powerful solvent cannot dissolve sand. Water’s ability to dissolve a substance wholly depends upon that object possessing a polar molecular structure.

In the case of human beings, the ability of a situation to elicit behavior depends wholly on the person possessing the requisite personality disposition. Even the attribution theorists recognized this, and I can do no better than to quote from Lee Ross’s (1977, p. 1776) anti-dispositional tract on this matter: “… it is apparent that causal statements which explicitly cite situational causes implicitly convey something about the actor’s dispositions; conversely, statements which cite dispositional causes invariably imply the existence and controlling influence of situational factors. For instance, in accounting for Jack’s purchase of a house the ‘situational’ explanation (i.e., ‘because it was so secluded’) implies a disposition on the part of this particular actor to favor seclusion. Indeed, the explanation provided is no explanation at all unless one does assume that such a disposition controlled Jack’s response. Conversely, the dispositional explanation for Jill’s purchase (i.e., because she likes privacy) clearly implies something about the house (i.e., its capacity to provide such privacy) that, in turn, governed Jill’s behavior.”

New Questions

For the past two years I have been rather pleased with myself for hitting upon the two analogies from physics and chemistry to argue that a personality disposition is responsiveness to a particular type of situation rather than a causal force whose magnitude could be compared to the strength of a separate, situational force. I have also enjoyed quoting Lee Ross’s admission of this point, even though he and Dick Nisbett amazingly continue to argue that situations are more important than dispositions.

But two questions began to bother me about these analogies. First, iron bars do not choose to become magnetized by jumping into magnetic fields, and salt does not choose to dissolve by entering a body of water. Now, I won’t deny that people react to situations they find themselves in. Yet shouldn’t we be interested in the dynamic traits that guide people into entering or even creating particular situations? Why must we continue to employ variants of the behaviorist S→R model?

A second question that began to gnaw at me the more I studied Walter Mischel’s writings is, “What is the role of volitional control when dispositions meet situations? Whereas Lee Ross talks about Jack and Jill being controlled by both their dispositional love of privacy and the isolation of the house, Mischel (1984, p. 353) has been concerned with “how persons can overcome ‘stimulus control’--the power of situations--and achieve increasing volitional control over their own behavior even when faced with compelling situational pressures.” Even if the power of an isolated house depends totally upon a person’s dispositional love of privacy, the house’s properties still seem to have control over persons who possess that disposition.

How, exactly, does volition interact with dispositions and situations? This, I believe, is another hidden subtext of the person-situation debate. I believe that Mark Snyder, in his research on self-monitoring, has also been concerned with the issue of volitional, intelligent control of one’s behavior to suit the situation.

Selecting and Creating Situations

To address the first question of selecting and creating situations, I suggest we set aside the experimental paradigm that drops people randomly into experimental conditions, much as one might drop salts randomly into different solvents. One alternative methodology used by ethologists, naturalistic observation, has revealed several interesting types of behavior that appear to be generated wholly by the internal workings of the brain, without any prompting from external situations. In 1918, the comparative psychologist Wallace Craig wrote about appetitive behaviors in animals such as searching for food or for a mate. An appetitive behavior arises spontaneously and persists until the animal achieves what it is searching for. After a period of quiescence, the appetitive behavior begins again. Appetitive behavior therefore occurs in persistent, rhythmic, cyclical patterns. Appetitive behavior shows consistency, but is also flexible and modifiable by learning.

Two additional examples of behaviors noted by ethologists that represent spontaneously generated actions rather than reactions to environmental situations are exploratory behavior and play behavior. The function of exploratory and play behaviors appears to be learning, but they differ from trial-and-error, operant conditioning in two ways. First, these behaviors involve the entire range of an animal’s behavior rather than the repetition of a single motor pattern. Second, these behaviors appear not to be aimed at accomplishing a single consummatory act, but are, rather, performed for intrinsic pleasure, or Funktionslust, to use the term invented by Karl von Groos and used by Karl Bühler. Wallace Craig’s most famous student, Konrad Lorenz (1973, p. 147), claimed that “play was only possible in what Kurt Lewin termed a ‘tension-less field.’”

Lorenz observed that play and exploratory behavior can be found in nearly every recently-evolved species, but is more common in juveniles than adults. But human beings, as neotenous creatures, have retained the juvenile disposition toward exploration and play. Lorenz (1971, p. 234) suggests that “all material research conducted by a human scientist is pure inquisitive behaviour … playful activities conducted in a free field entirely for their own sake.” When he quoted Nietzsche’s observation “In every true man there is a child hidden,” he said that his wife responded, “Hidden? What do you mean?” (Lorenz, 1973, p. 149).

Now, how do we apply these ideas to personality psychology? Wallace Craig may have been speaking about very basic sorts of biological appetites shared by most animals, but I don’t see why personality psychology couldn’t extend the concept of appetitive behavior to include the pursuit of all the various, unique things people strive for. The unique set of persistent strivings that characterize a person represents a way of understanding predictable patterns of behavior that involve searching for and creating events rather than simply reacting to them. In fact, this extension of Craig’s thinking can be found in the literature on what some people call “personal projects” (Little, 1999) or “personal strivings” (Emmons, 1996).

But the notion that people actively strive after certain situations is not news, is it? Doesn’t everyone accept this as a fact? Let us see what Ickes, Snyder, and Garcia (1997, p. 187) say in their concluding paragraph of their chapter on personality influences on the choice of situations in the Handbook of Personality Psychology. The paragraph beings, “As this review has clearly demonstrated, the notion that individuals choose situations on the basis of their personality traits and other dispositions is a well-established fact.” Does this mean that (aside from the recalcitrant attribution theorists) that psychologists are ready to accept the notion that volition rather situations govern behavior? Can we start thinking about situations in terms of affordances (Gibson, 1977), that is, as properties of the environment that determine how a thing could be used by the organism, rather than as causes of behavior?

Letting go of the behaviorist, stimulus-causes-response paradigm seems to be difficult, even for researchers who want to think about behavior as an active striving after situations. Even as Ickes, Snyder, and Garcia present evidence that people strive to enter particular kinds of situations in order to express preferred behaviors, they also assert (without presenting evidence) that the situations people choose reinforce the behaviors within those situations. They believe that this reinforcement creates the temporal stability of situation-selection behavior. Walter Mischel’s (1973) original cognitive-social learning model was loaded with behaviorist terms such as “stimulus-outcome expectancies,” “behavior-outcome expectancies,” and “subjective-stimulus value.” His more recent CAPS model renames these variables with more modern labels, but still follows the behaviorist S→[O]→R format, where the first events mentioned are “situational features” that impinge upon the person (Mischel & Shoda, 1995, p. 254). Even Mischel’s favorite example of subjects gaining “self-regulatory control” over their behavior in his experiments involves the experimenter manipulating them by instructing them how to think.

Why do psychologists continue to worry so much about the instigating or reinforcing properties of the situation? Why can’t psychologists think about the brain as a generator of action rather than a link in a chain of reflexes? Konrad Lorenz discusses our reluctance to abandon the reflex model in his autobiographical statement for the Nobel Foundation (2000, ¶ 7,8). One of the most dramatic “situation-free” behaviors he observed in his early research is what he called Leeraufsreaktion (later, in vacuo activity), which is a behavior sequence that suddenly erupts in the complete absence of a triggering stimulus. He was aware of Craig’s observation, that spontaneous, appetitive behavior occurs prior to the in vacuo activity, and he read Craig’s suggestion that it is nonsense to conceptualize in vacuo behavior as a reaction when an external stimulus has not even occurred! Lorenz describes his reluctance to abandon his reflex perspective as follows, “The reason why in spite of the obvious spontaneity of instinctive behaviour, I still clung to the reflex theory, lay in my belief, that any deviation from Sherringtonian reflexology meant a concession to vitalism.” Not until 1936 did neurologist Erich von Holst convince Lorenz that all of the ethological phenomena he had observed could not be sensibly interpreted as reflex chains, but, rather, in terms of organization within the central nervous system that included the initiating actions of some cells regulated by the inhibitory actions of others.

Today I believe that the fields of cybernetics and artificial intelligence have illustrated how behavioral directedness can be achieved without invoking vitalism (Balkenius, 1995). Thermostats turn heating or cooling units on or off as necessary to maintain a constant temperature. Guided missiles use servomechanisms to adjust their courses to find their targets. Note that these processes are just as mechanistic as a simple reflex-arc or computational models; they merely employ feedback to keep the mechanism on course.

Volitional Regulation of Behavior

This leads to Mischel’s concern with the possibility of volitional regulation of our behavior. A guided missile’s behavior looks intelligent and intentional because it constantly readjusts its course and makes anticipatory changes to track down its target. But we know its behavior is wholly determined by the interaction between the goals programmed into its computer and its readings of the target’s location. Are we ever truly free to choose our actions, or are we completely controlled by our appetites, servomechanisms, and situational feedback? And how does the answer to this question impact upon the way personality and social psychologists should conduct research?

I can’t pretend to answer the question of volitional, self-regulation to everyone’s satisfaction. In my experience, when I discuss issues related to philosophical questions such as free will and determinism, it seems that everyone has already made up his or her mind about the issue, and that their position has more to do with the way they feel than about evidence or logic. I think we would run out of time before we could settle on an answer that would suit everyone. But here is my view of the matter.

Let me begin by suggesting what I think we can never be free from. I do not think that human beings have any special ability to transcend the laws of nature, so we are never free from those laws, whatever they are. Also, we are not free from whatever desires and appetites we possess. Even if we choose to ignore a particular desire, this choice comes from a second desire, the desire to ignore the first desire. If we were capable of choosing not to respond to any of our desires, the result would be total inaction. Wherever we see human action, we can assume that desires are involved. Neither are we free from taking account of the situation. Consider this thought experiment. If you suddenly lost all of your perceptual signals from the outside world, how would you behave? We cannot behave intelligently without considering feedback about how our actions are affecting the world.

I think that what most of us mean by freedom of choice is neither freedom from desires nor freedom from perceptions of the situation. Rather, freedom of choice means awareness of how desires and informational inputs are affecting our decisions. We cannot be completely aware of all of these influences. Awareness is a matter of degree, and so freedom is a matter of degree. Experiments by Nisbett and Wilson (1977) and Michael Gazzaniga (1992) dramatically illustrate how subjects can be directed to perform certain acts while remaining unaware of the experimenter’s manipulations. Furthermore, subjects in these experiments will give a completely erroneous, fabricated explanation for their actions. Note that the subjects’ lack of awareness was crucial to being manipulated. Had the subjects in these experiments been aware of the experimenters’ tricks, their behaviors could not have been manipulated.

I think that this is what Walter Mischel had in mind when he wrote about volitional control and self-regulation. When a person becomes increasingly aware of situational influences and different options for thinking about these influences, this frees a person from necessarily responding in one particular way to the situation. What are the implications of this for psychological research and practice?

Naturally, to be consistent with my own thesis, psychologists are free to do what they like with my ideas. What I would hope they would consider doing is abandoning, once and for all, the behaviorist reflex models of the mind. That would include S→[O]→R models as well. Instead of looking for behavioral predictability based upon persons being unaware of situational influences, psychologists could choose to study behavioral predictability that is generated by a person’s persistent appetites and plans for dealing with their appetites. On the applied side, instead of trying to improve the human condition by creating a Walden II, psychologists could choose to facilitate behavioral change in ways that are congruent with an individual’s own strivings, capabilities, and resources (Ford, 1992). I believe that such facilitation will be most effective when we openly share what we know about how awareness of dispositional and situational influences increases our freedom of choice. Thank you.

References

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