PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Intraindividual Stability in the Organization and Patterning of Behavior Incorporating Psychological Situations Into the Idiographic Analysis of Personality Yuichi Shoda Walter Mischel and Jack C Wright In nomothetic analyses the cross situational consistency of individual differences in social behavior assessed in vivo in a camp setting depended on the similarity in the psychological features of situations As predicted by the social cognitive theory of personality idiographic analyses revealed that individuals were characterized by stable profiles of then situation behavior relationships that formed behavioral signatures of personality e g he aggresses when warned by adults but complies when threatened by peers Thus the intraindividual organization of behavior variation across situations was enduring but discriminatively patterned visible as distinctive profiles of situation behavior relationships Implications were examined for an idiographic reconceptualization of personality coherence and its behavioral expressions in relation to the psychological ingredients of situations Allport 1937 introduced the concept of idiographic analyses half a century ago urging personologists to understand each individual deeply in terms of how that person functions instead of just studying the operations of a hypothetical average mind p 61 Nonetheless the idiographic focus has been bypassed by mainstream personality psychology Probably this neglect reflects not a lack of interest but an absence of appropriate methods and theory for studying individual functioning in ways that are objective and scientific rather than intuitive and clinical In our view understanding individual functioning requires identifying first the psychological situations that engage a particular person s characteristic personality processes and the dis Yuichi Shoda and Walter Mischel Department of Psychology Columbia University Jack C Wright Department of Psychology Brown University and Wediko Children s Services Boston Massachusetts Portions of the present results were presented in Yuichi Shoda s 1991 Society of Experimental Social Psychology Dissertation Award address Columbus Ohio October 1991 Preparation of this article and the research was supported in part by Grants MH39349 and MH45994 to Walter Mischel from the National Institute of Mental Health We thank the administration staff and children of Wediko Children s Services whose cooperation made this research possible We are especially grateful to Hugh Leichtman and Harry Parad Wediko s directors for their support and Mary Powers Philip Fisher and Cynthia Scott for their assistance in data collection We thank Niall Bolger Nancy Cantor Daniel Cervone Chi Yue Chiu Ying Yi Hong Kristi Lemm and Monica Larrea Rodriguez for their valuable comments on drafts of this article Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yuichi Shoda or Walter Mischel Department of Psychology Columbia University New York New York 10027 tinctive cognitions and affects that are experienced in them Then an individual s functioning should become visible in the distinctive or unique ways the person s behavior changes across situations not just in its overall level or mean frequency For example a person may often behave in a warm and empathic way with her colleagues at work but almost always in a very critical manner with her family Another person may show the opposite pattern so that he is warm and empathic with his family but critical with his professional colleagues If two people are similar in their behaviors averaged across situations but differ in the situations in which they display those behaviors are these differences merely a reflection of momentary situational influences Or do such differences reflect differences in enduring and meaningful aspects of their personality These are the main questions addressed in this article In social cognitive theory 1 individual differences in patterns of behavior across situations reflect such underlying person variables as the individuals encoding or construals of their experiences and their expectations values goals and self regulatory strategies Mischel 1973 1990 These relatively enduring person variables within the individual interact with situational characteristics to generate stable but discriminative patterns of behavior It is these unique bundles or sets of temporally stable prototypic behaviors Mischel Peake 1982 p 754 contextualized in relevant psychological situations that constitute a locus in which personality coherence may be revealed Mischel 1990 1991 Shoda 1990 Shoda Mischel Wright 1993a 1993b Wright Mischel 1987 A major goal of the present 1 In current usage the terms social cognitive and cognitive social appear increasingly as essentially interchangeable descriptions of this general approach to personality and social behavior e g Mischel 1993 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1994 Vol 67 No 4 674 687 Copyright 1994 by the American Psychological Association Inc OO22 3514 94 S3 0O 674 STABILITY OF INTRAINDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR PATTERNING research was to obtain empirical evidence relevant to the validity of this conception of intraindividual personality coherence Our analysis of the organization of the individual s behavior is conditional or contextual in the sense that the fundamental unit of observation is not the unconditional probability of traitrelevant behavior e g the tendency to be extraverted but rather the conditional probability of a given type of behavior in given types of psychological conditions or situations e g Patterson 1982 Patterson Reid 1984 Shoda Mischel Wright 1989 Wright Mischel 1987 1988 The traditional use of the unconditional probability of trait relevant behavior is appropriate and useful for many purposes such as selecting persons on the basis of their predicted future behaviors on average in unspecified situations However beyond identifying individual differences in average levels of behavior we view the intraindividual variability of behavior itself as the behavioral phenomenon of interest These patterns of if then relations link psychological situations to the person s relevant behaviors e g Mischel 1973 Responsive to the many calls for a shift from a variable centered approach in personality research to one that is more person centered e g Carlson 1971 John 1990 our analysis is indeed person centered and focuses on the within person
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