these measures of only .23. Because personality traits are assumed to show
some consistency across situations, this finding was widely cited as a chal-lenge to the trait approach. Knowing that a child is honest in one situation,
such as telling the truth to a parent, may reveal little about whether the child
will cheat on the playground or steal something from another child’ s desk.
Mischel also challenged the evidence for cross-situational consistency in
traits. Although people appear to show fairly strong consistency in behavior
across situations, Mischel referred to this as “more apparent than real. ”For
many reasons, we tend to see consistent behavior that, on close examination,
is not really there. For example, people often see what they expect to see. If
you expect Karen to be unfriendly, you tend to notice when she insults some-one but ignore the times when she pays a compliment. In addition, we typi-
cally see people in only one type of situation or role and fail to fully realize
the extent to which the situation, not the person, is responsible for the behav-ior. Students are sometimes surprised to find that their stuffy, conservative
professor is a fun-loving, adventurous person outside the classroom.
Sometimes the way we treat people causes them to act more consistentlythan they otherwise might. If you assume Ron is going to be hostile, you will
probably approach him in such a confrontational way that he will react with
hostility. For all of these reasons, we may see people acting more consistently
across situations than they really are.
In Defense of Personality Traits
Naturally, attacks on something as central to personality theory as the use of
traits have not gone unchallenged. Responses to Mischel ’s criticisms center
around the question of how behaviors and traits are measured and the impor-
tance of the variance these traits explain.
Measuring Behavior
Proponents of the trait approach argue that, on the surface, denying the exis-
tence of personality traits is absurd (Epstein, 1980, 1983). If behavior were
completely inconsistent over time and across situations, how would we knowwhom to marry or whom to hire? Without predictable behavior patterns, we
might as well marry someone at random because our spouse ’s behavior will
change from day to day depending on the situation.
Trait psychologists argue that researchers often fail to produce strong
links between personality traits and behavior because they don ’t measure be-
havior correctly. The typical investigation held up by critics uses trait scores
to predict only one measure of behavior. For example, investigators might
measure the number of minutes spent on an activity or ask people to indicate
on a 7-point scale the likelihood that they will volunteer for a charity drive.This approach violates a basic concept in psychological testing. A behavior
score based on one item or one measure is so low in reliability that it is
almost impossible to find a correlation with any test score higher than the
.30 to .40 “personality coefficient. ”
To understand this principle, think about why a final examination would
never consist of just one true-false question. A student who knows theThe Situation Versus Trait Controversy 167