 30. Attachment Theory and Personality  647
playmates) with the expectation that others 
will behave in a benevolent manner. This, in 
turn, biases those interactions to be cooper -
ative and rewarding, allowing relationships 
skills to develop and reinforcing existing at -
tachment representations.
The organizational perspective on attach -
ment has its origins in C. H. Waddington’s 
(1957) discussion of the cybernetics of cell 
development. Waddington was a develop -
mental embryologist who was attempting 
to understand how a cell maintains a par -
ticular developmental trajectory in the face 
of external disturbances. He and others had 
observed that once a cell begins to assume 
specific functions (e.g., becomes integrated 
into a structure that is destined to become 
the visual system), weak experimental inter -
ventions are unlikely to alter the cell’s devel -
opmental trajectory. Although early in de -
velopment a cell has the potential to assume 
many different fates, once a developmental 
trajectory becomes established, its pathway 
becomes “canalized” or buffered, to some 
degree, making it less and less likely that 
the cell will deviate from that developmental 
course.
The concept of canalization was central to 
Bowlby’s ideas about stability and change in 
attachment patterns. In the context of per -
sonality development, Bowlby believed that 
once an individual started developing along 
a specific trajectory, there were a number of 
processes that would tend to canalize that 
pathway, making it increasingly unlikely 
that the person would change. Bowlby sepa -
rated these processes into two broad catego -
ries. The first concerns the caregiving envi -
ronment . To the extent that an individual’s 
caregiving environment is stable, he or she 
is unlikely to experience interactions that 
challenge his or her representations of the 
world. Bowlby (1973) noted that many chil -
dren have relatively stable caregiving envi -
ronments which are reinforced at different 
levels of analysis: a parent provides a context 
for education, educational settings provide 
a context for the development of peer rela -
tions, and so on. Each of these can provide 
a “force” that helps to guide the developing 
child along a specific pathway.
Bowlby (1973) also discussed intraindi -
vidual  or psychodynamic  processes that can 
promote canalization. He noted that people often select their environments in ways that 
maximize the overlap between the psycho -
logical qualities of the situations and their 
experience-  based expectations and prefer -
ences. Moreover, Bowlby argued, the mind 
generally assimilates new information into 
existing schemas rather than accommodat -
ing to it (an idea Bowlby borrowed from 
Piaget, whom he knew personally; see Col -
lins & Read, 1994, for a discussion of this 
issue as it arises in the study of adult attach -
ment and social cognition). Consistent with 
these ideas, empirical research has shown 
that people’s working models influence 
the kinds of reactions they elicit from oth -
ers (Arend, Gove, & Sroufe, 1979; Troy & 
Sroufe, 1987; Waters, Wippman, & Sroufe, 
1979) and the kinds of inferences they make 
about people’s intentions in experimen -
tal contexts (Brumbaugh & Fraley, 2006; 
Collins, 1996; Pierce, Sarason, & Sarason, 
1992; Pietromonaco & Carnelley, 1994). 
Such dynamics allow working models to 
shape the kinds of interactions a person ex -
periences, and in concert, help to maintain 
the individual’s already partially canalized 
pathway through development. To the ex -
tent that an individual diverges from such a 
pathway, the changed route seems likely to 
be fairly close to its predecessor.
Attachment in Adults
Although Bowlby was primarily concerned 
with understanding the infant–  caregiver 
relationship, he believed that attachment is 
relevant to understanding human experience 
from “the cradle to the grave.” It was not 
until the mid-1980s, however, that research -
ers began to take seriously the possibility 
that attachment processes operate in adult -
hood in ways that go beyond what had been 
observed in infancy or childhood. Ideas 
about adult attachment were explored and 
developed in slightly different ways within 
different research traditions. Among devel -
opmental psychologists, researchers began 
to refine methods, such as the Adult Attach -
ment Interview (AAI; Main, Kaplan, & Cas -
sidy, 1985; see review by Hesse, 2016), for 
understanding how young adults represent 
their early attachment experiences with par -
ents. By studying transcripts based on hour-