 31. Persons, Situations, and Person–Situation Interactions  671
personality psychology” (Harman, 2009, 
p. 237). Such conclusions generated seri -
ous attention in philosophy (Athanassoulis, 
2000; Kamtekar, 2004; Miller, 2014) and 
elicited empirical responses in psychology 
(Helzer, Barranti, Meindl, Fleeson, & Furr, 
2017; Helzer et al., 2014; Meindl, Jayawick -
reme, Furr, & Fleeson, 2015). Whether these 
responses have influenced the subsequent 
philosophical discussion is not yet clear.
What is clear, though, is that echoes of 
the person–  situation debate have crucial 
implications. They influence personnel and 
curricular decisions within departments 
or universities, they shape student interest, 
and they even can affect financial support 
of various areas of science, thereby affect -
ing researchers’ ability to reach new under -
standings about human functioning and to 
improve life. In summary, the competitive 
view of persons and situations still exists 
and still matters. To advance understanding 
of human behavior, researchers should con -
tinue demonstrating the power and nature 
of both personality dispositions and situ -
ations, while avoiding the implication that 
the two are competing forces.
Moving Beyond Persons “versus”  Situations
There are indeed strong reasons to reject the 
competitive view of persons and situations. 
First, although the often-used analysis of 
variance (ANOVA) framework appears to 
imply that situational forces gain power over 
behavior at the cost of dispositional sources, 
and vice versa (e.g., Leising & Igl, 2007, but 
cf. Furr, in press), this “either–  or” perspec -
tive is not the only—or even the best—way to 
frame the issue analytically. In fact, it is con -
ceptually and empirically possible to have 
both robust dispositional effects and  strong 
situational effects in the same data. A robust 
dispositional effect can be reflected in strong 
cross-  situational consistency of behavior—  
in which the behavioral differences among 
people are similar from one situation to 
another. For example, imagine observing 
Adam and Betty in several situations, with 
Adam being more talkative than Betty in 
each. The fact that the behavioral difference 
between Adam and Betty is consistent across 
situations suggests that Adam and Betty dif -
fer in their level of a stable personality dis -
position (e.g., extraversion) that affects talk -ativeness in each of those situations. At the 
same time, in the same situations, we might 
observe that both Adam and Betty are more 
talkative in situations that involve friends 
than in situations that involve strangers. To 
the degree that behavioral differences be -
tween situations (e.g., situations involving 
friends vs. situations involving strangers) are 
consistent across people, this is evidence of a 
robust situational effect. Theoretically, it is 
possible for both effects to occur simultane -
ously: The differences among people can be 
highly consistent across situations, while the 
differences among situations are strongly 
consistent across people.
In fact, Funder and Colvin (1991) revealed 
empirically that these effects are indeed in -
dependent of each other. They examined the 
cross-  situational consistency of 62 behaviors 
across two situations, as well as the degree 
to which each behavior changed on average 
(across participants) between the same two 
situations. Across behaviors, the correla -
tion between consistency and situational 
change was r = –.01. Only in extreme cases, 
therefore—  when a situation is so strong 
that everyone acts the same, or a person -
ality disposition (or disorder?) is so strong 
that someone behaves without regard to the 
situation he or she is in—do situations and 
dispositions gain power at the expense of 
the other. In more ordinary and common 
circumstances, there is plenty of behavioral 
variance to go around. More recently, Furr 
(in press) demonstrated that, perhaps con -
trary to common perceptions, ANOVA itself 
does not necessarily lead to (or require) a 
competitive view of persons and situations. 
Rather, ANOVA can reveal perfect consis -
tency of both person effects and situation ef -
fects in a single dataset.
A second reason to reject the competitive 
view of persons and situations is that empiri -
cal estimates of effects have implications be -
yond the bounds of a research study only if 
the nature and range of the situational vari -
ables and of the dispositional variables are 
representative of each type. If only a limited 
range of situations is included—  and what 
experiment is not forced to severely restrict 
the range of situations it includes, compared 
to those that exist in the world?—and if only 
a limited range of individuals is included— 
and what study manages to include a sample 
of people truly representative of the popula -