Psychological Review 1995 Vol 102 No 2 246 268 Copyright 1995 by the American Psychological Association Inc 0033 295X 95 3 00 A Cognitive Affective System Theory of Personality Reconceptualizing Situations Dispositions Dynamics and Invariance in Personality Structure Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda Columbia University A theory was proposed to reconcile paradoxical findings on the invariance of personality and the variability of behavior across situations For this purpose individuals were assumed to differ in a the accessibility of cognitive affective mediating units such as encodings expectancies and beliefs affects and goals and b the organization of relationships through which these units interact with each other and with psychological features of situations The theory accounts for individual differences in predictable patterns of variability across situations e g if A then she X but ifE then she Y as well as for overall average levels of behavior as essential expressions or behavioral signatures of the same underlying personality system Situations personality dispositions dynamics and structure were reconceptualized from this perspective The construct of personality rests on the assumption that individuals are characterized by distinctive qualities that are relatively invariant across situations and over time In a century of personality research however abundant evidence has documented that individual differences in social behaviors tend to be surprisingly variable across different situations Although this finding has been interpreted as evidence against the utility of the personality construct we show that it need not be and on the contrary that this variability reflects some of the essence of personality coherence When personality is conceptualized as a stable system that mediates how the individual selects construes and processes social information and generates social behaviors it becomes possible to account simultaneously for both the invariant qualities of the underlying personality and the predictable variability across situations in some of its characteristic behavioral expressions In this article we begin with a review of recent empirical data demonstrating that individuals are characterized not only by stable individual differences in their overall levels of behavior but also by distinctive and stable patterns of behavior variability across situations These findings invite a new conception of personality in which such patterns of variability are seen not as mere error but also as reflecting essential expressions of the same underlying stable personality system that produces the in dividual s characteristic average levels of behavior Toward that goal we propose a cognitive affective system theory of personality drawing in part on the growing body of evidence and theorizing on individual differences in social and emotional information processing e g as reviewed in Contrada Leventhal O Leary 1990 Dweck 1991 Gollwitzer Bargh in press Higgins 1990 in press Higgins Kruglanski in press Markus 1977 Mischel 1990 1993 Pervin 1990 1994 Smith Lazarus 1990 Consistent with contemporary findings and theorizing on the biological bases of human information processing e g Kandel Schwartz 1985 the theory assumes enduring individual differences in the features of situations that individuals select and the cognitive affective mediating units such as encodings and affects that become activated and that interact with and activate other mediating units e g expectancies goals behavioral scripts and plans in the personality system This theory will be shown to take account of both the stability of the personality system and the variability of the individual s behaviors across situations in ways that reconcile numerous previously paradoxical findings and resolve basic controversies within personality and social psychology over many decades THE SEARCH FOR PERSONALITY INVARIANCE Conception of Personality in Terms of Behavioral Dispositions Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda contributed equally to this article Preparation of this article and the research for it were supported in part by National Institute of Mental Health Grants MH39349 MH45994 and MH39263 This article has benefitted from the generous constructive comments on earlier drafts from many colleagues We are grateful especially to John Bargh Niall Bolger Daniel Cervone Chi Yue Chiu Kenneth Dodge Geraldine Downey Carol Dweck Scott Feldman Tory Higgins Julian Hochberg Ying Yi Hong John Kihlstrom Robert M Krauss Arie Kruglanski Kristi Lemm Lawrence Pervin and Monica Larrea Rodriguez Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to either Walter Mischel or Yuichi Shoda Department of Psychology Columbia University New York New York 10027 In one long standing tradition of personality psychology individual differences in social behaviors have been conceptualized in terms of behavioral dispositions or traits that predispose individuals to engage in relevant behaviors In its simplest form dispositions and their behavioral expressions were assumed by definition to correspond directly the more a person has a conscientious disposition for example the more conscientious the behavior will be Figure 1 shows behavioral data typical of those found for any two individuals in a given domain of social behavior e g friendliness across different social situations Accord246 247 COGNITIVE AFFECTIVE SYSTEM THEORY Intra individual patterns of behavior variability Behavior X 3 Person B s Person A 4 10 6 12 Situations conditions Figure 1 Typical individual differences in the conditional probability of a type of behavior in different situations ing to this model dispositions determine the elevation of behavior in the profiles shown in Figure 1 and the variations of behavior across situations are irrelevant to personality Guided by this model throughout the century researchers pursued cross situational consistency as evidence for basic coherence in the underlying personality behavioral dispositions of individuals In this search cross situational consistency in the expression of individual differences was defined as a relatively invariant rank ordering of individuals across situations in their tendency to display trait relevant behaviors and was measured with the cross situational consistency correlation coefficient The results in the search for this type of high cross situational consistency were surprisingly discouraging from the start e g Hartshorne May
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