Psychological Review1995, Vol. 102, No. 2, 246-268Copyright 1995 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.0033-295X/95/$3,00A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality:Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics,and Invariance in Personality StructureWalter Mischel and Yuichi ShodaColumbia UniversityA theory was proposed to reconcile paradoxical findings on the invariance of personality and thevariability 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 witheach other and with psychological features of situations. The theory accounts for individual differ-ences in predictable patterns of variability across situations (e.g., if A. then she X, but ifE then sheY), as well as for overall average levels of behavior, as essential expressions or behavioral signaturesof the same underlying personality system. Situations, personality dispositions, dynamics, and struc-ture were reconceptualized from this perspective.The construct of personality rests on the assumption that in-dividuals are characterized by distinctive qualities that are rela-tively invariant across situations and over time. In a century ofpersonality research, however, abundant evidence has docu-mented that individual differences in social behaviors tend to besurprisingly variable across different situations. Although thisfinding has been interpreted as evidence against the utility ofthe personality construct, we show that it need not be and, onthe contrary, that this variability reflects some of the essence ofpersonality coherence. When personality is conceptualized as astable system that mediates how the individual selects, con-strues, and processes social information and generates social be-haviors, it becomes possible to account simultaneously for boththe invariant qualities of the underlying personality and the pre-dictable variability across situations in some of its characteristicbehavioral expressions.In this article, we begin with a review of recent empirical datademonstrating that individuals are characterized not only bystable individual differences in their overall levels of behavior,but also by distinctive and stable patterns of behavior variabilityacross situations. These findings invite a new conception of per-sonality in which such patterns of variability are seen not asmere "error" but also as reflecting essential expressions of thesame underlying stable personality system that produces the in-Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda contributed equally to this article.Preparation of this article and the research for it were supported inpart by National Institute of Mental Health Grants MH39349,MH45994, and MH39263. This article has benefitted from the gener-ous, constructive comments on earlier drafts from many colleagues. Weare grateful especially to John Bargh, Niall Bolger, Daniel Cervone, ChiYue Chiu, Kenneth Dodge, Geraldine Downey, Carol Dweck, ScottFeldman, Tory Higgins, Julian Hochberg, Ying Yi Hong, John Kihl-strom, Robert M. Krauss, Arie Kruglanski, Kristi Lemm, LawrencePervin, and Monica Larrea Rodriguez.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to eitherWalter Mischel or Yuichi Shoda, Department of Psychology, ColumbiaUniversity, New York, New York 10027.dividual's characteristic average levels of behavior. Toward thatgoal, we propose a cognitive-affective system theory of person-ality, drawing in part on the growing body of evidence and the-orizing on individual differences in social and emotional infor-mation 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; Markus1977; Mischel, 1990, 1993; Pervin, 1990, 1994; Smith & Laza-rus, 1990). Consistent with contemporary findings and theoriz-ing on the biological bases of human information processing(e.g., Kandel & Schwartz, 1985), the theory assumes enduringindividual differences in the features of situations that individ-uals select and the cognitive-affective mediating units (such asencodings and affects) that become activated, and that interactwith 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 stabilityof the personality system and the variability of the individual'sbehaviors across situations in ways that reconcile numerouspreviously paradoxical findings and resolve basic controversieswithin personality and social psychology over many decades.THE SEARCH FOR PERSONALITYINVARIANCEConception of Personality in Terms of BehavioralDispositionsIn one long-standing tradition of personality psychology, in-dividual differences in social behaviors have been conceptual-ized in terms of behavioral dispositions or traits that predisposeindividuals to engage in relevant behaviors. In its simplest form,dispositions and their behavioral expressions were assumed bydefinition to correspond directly: the more a person has a con-scientious disposition, for example, the more conscientious thebehavior will be. Figure 1 shows behavioral data typical of thosefound for any two individuals in a given domain of social behav-ior (e.g., friendliness) across different social situations. Accord-246COGNITIVE-AFFECTIVE SYSTEM THEORYIntra-individual patterns of behavior variability: Behavior X2473s §Person B' Person A4 6Situations (conditions)1012Figure 1. Typical individual differences in the conditional probability of a type of behavior in differentsituations.ing to this model, dispositions determine the elevation of behav-ior in the profiles shown in Figure 1, and the variations of be-havior across situations are irrelevant to personality.Guided by this model, throughout the century researcherspursued cross-situational consistency as evidence for basic co-herence in the underlying personality (behavioral) dispositionsof individuals. In this search, cross-situational consistency inthe expression of individual differences was defined as a rela-tively invariant rank-ordering of individuals across situations intheir tendency to display trait-relevant behaviors and was mea-sured with the cross-situational consistency correlation coeffi-cient. The results in the search for
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