Three decades after the personality paradox: Understanding situations
2009; Elsevier BV; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/j.jrp.2009.03.011
ISSN1095-7251
Autores Tópico(s)Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
ResumoPeople’s behavior is characterized by stable if … then … profiles, or if in x situation then behavior a, but if in y situation then behavior b. But how do researchers conceptualize and measure if … then … profiles? Drawing from Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) theory, we discuss recent developments in assessing if … then … profiles, and how such profiles can provide a window for elucidating key aspects of the underlying personality system. Specifically, the Highly-Repeated Within-Person (HRWP) approach assesses how a behavior varies as a function of key features in a situation, and operationalizes if … then … profiles as regression betas. We illustrate how the HRWP approach can be applied to data from often-used social cognitive tasks, wherein an individual is exposed to a large number of situations that differ on a dimension that has been experimentally-manipulated by the researcher, and their behaviors to the situations are tracked. The HRWP approach allows researchers to more precisely assess a given individual’s if … then … pattern, make stronger causal inferences about a given individual’s personality system, and empirically investigate, rather than simply assume, if there are meaningful differences between individuals in the causal processes.
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