The second assumption underlying the trait approach is that personality
characteristics are stable across situations. Aggressive people should exhibit
higher-than-average amounts of aggression during family disagreements as
well as when playing football. Again, we all act more aggressively in some
situations than in others. But the trait approach assumes that over many dif-
ferent situations a relatively stable average degree of aggressiveness can be
determined. As discussed later, these assumptions of trait stability across time
and situations have not gone unchallenged.
Finally, we use the term trait rather broadly here. Thus, as you will see in
this and the next chapter, trait theorists include people who study individualdifferences in needs and strategies, among other concepts. In each case, thepsychologist is interested in relatively stable patterns of behavior that can be
measured and categorized along a normal distribution.
Special Features of the Trait Approach
The trait approach to personality differs from the other approaches presented
in this book in several important ways. Unlike psychologists from other ap-
proaches, trait researchers are usually not interested in predicting one per-
son’s behavior in a given situation. Instead, they want to predict how people
who score within a certain segment of the trait continuum typically behave.
Thus a trait researcher might compare people who score relatively high on
a social anxiety scale with those who score relatively low. The investigatorsmight find that, on average, people high in social anxiety make more eye con-
tact than those low on this trait. However, they probably would not attempt
to predict any one person ’s behavior. Surely a few high-anxiety people in the
study would make little eye contact and a few low-anxiety participants would
make a lot. The goal of this kind of study is to identify differences between
the typical behavior of someone who falls into one of the two groups. Thiscontrasts with the psychoanalytic approach, in which therapists try to under-
stand the behavior of one particular person.
Another distinguishing feature of the trait approach is that, compared to
theorists from other approaches, trait theorists often place less emphasis on
identifying the mechanisms underlying behavior. Rather than explaining why
people behave the way they do, many trait researchers focus on describing per-
sonality and predicting behavior. When psychologists try to explain behavior
with traits alone, they often fall victim to the problem of circular reasoning.
For example, if asked to explain why Bob hit Scott, we might say, “because
Bob is aggressive. ”If we are then asked how we know Bob is aggressive,
we might answer, “because he hit Scott. ”We could substitute any word for
aggressive in this example, and the logic would be just as compelling.
However, it would be incorrect to conclude that trait researchers are
interested only in describing traits. Identifying traits and predicting behaviorare often just the first steps in the explanatory process. As the examples in
Chapter 8 illustrate, trait researchers often examine the processes behind the be-
haviors associated with a particular trait. For example, some trait researchersThe Trait Approach 151