Tias paper advances the claim that personality variables can explain peoples' behavior even tiiough that behavior vanes from situation to situation. The argument is developed m the course of a critique of several mterpretative reviews of personahty research (Mischel, 1968(Mischel, , 1969. Mischel asserts that the hypodiesis that persons exhibit large trans-situational consistencies m their behavior is simply and generally not supported by the available data According to Mischel, the unenhghtened proponents of trans-situational personality consistency mclude nonprofessional users of ordmary language trait names such as "aggressive," "honest" and "fnendly" who reify these attributions. Dynamic personahty theorists who speak of some "inner" or mtrapsychic features of personahty such as "ego strength" or "defensiveness," are likewise void of convincmg empirical support. Both of Mischel's opponents are purportedly committed to the view that response constancies will emerge in spite of situational variation.In the course of the ar^iment presented here the claim will be made that situational specificity (rf response itself is a personality variable. Mischel's assertion is thus regarded as a preposition that ultimately is a misleading summary of previous findmgs and an abortive guide for future personality research. The nearsighted misuse of certain standards of measurement vahdity has obscured this pomt Judgments about the worth of "mtrapsychic" theories have also been biased in the process The Belevance of Personality CoefficientsHie evidence of situational specificity comes accwding to Mischel from a variety of sources. Each of these sources provides 1 Ciatitude mast be expressed to £ennetb Craik and Judy Regan for ^r eztraisive and comtructive reviews ol eaxbex drafts c^ tins paper Remaining erroa is the argument reflect cmly the dbduiate perseveraticHt of die d

Kemston (1968) argues that the intense mvolvement of student activists in the 1960's can be at least partially explained in terms of a "fusion" of their personahty and their politics The present paper is addressed to the conceptual diflFerentiation and empirically aided redefinition of this explanatory notion Our contention is that the recent extensive psychological mvestigations of these mdividuals have imearthed, more or less tuuntentionally, a discovery of theoretical significance. This discovery concerns relations between personality structure and the content of espoused ideologies. Our concern is not with the determinants of activism per se but rather with the relations among a set of psychologic«d vanables that have been salient m the explanation of such activity. It is in these relations, we contend, that general propositions obtain on the order of those previously expounded most sahently by Rokeach (1^). That body of research and theory explored ihe association between certain structural features of a dogmatic or closed belief system^ and the espousal of ideologies on either the extreme pohtical left or right One variable of demonstrated empirical relevance to the intense involvement of mdividuals in politics is Kohlberg's measure of moral maturity (Kohlberg, 1963) This variable, derived from Piaget's thecay, involves three broad stages of moral development. Portions d this mateijal woe pi^eaited m abbreviated fonn at the meetings of the XXth Intematio&alCkji^ress of Psychology, Tokyo, Japan, August 13-19, 1972. An appUcatum erf our facet analysis to the concept of fate control was presetted at medu^ d the Eastern Psydiological Association m Wadimgton, D C, May 3-5, 1973. a The auUuHS widi to diank Hayward Alker, Murray Naditdi, Milton RM:-eadi, and Allen Tan &»: cnUcal leadmgs of eailier drafts dE this piper 3 Amoiw the structural featuresot the dosed mind are (1) the enstenoe of isolated k)^ca]ly contrtdictoiy behefis withm the behef systan, (2) the lad: of differartiation anunffi views that are rejected, (3) a relatively high, tanstant rejection of all disbelief, (4) a categoncal reliance on argument fnmn authonty, d (s) more generally, tendency to confuse the source of a message wiJh tts t

Fifty feminist (WL) and 50 control subjects were administered Rotter's Internal-External scale and a series of questions concerning their backgrounds and their attitudes about and involvement in the women's movement. Three dimensions emerged from a factor analysis of the I-E items: personal control, protestant ethic ideology, and feminist ideology. T h e WL subjects were more internal than the control subjects in their sense of personal control and more external in protestant ethic ideology (PEI) and feminist ideology. Externality on these two dimensions was shown to be related to involvement in the feminist movement. Rejection of PEI was accompanied by an increased sense of personal internality for the feminists.

A correlation analysis of a heterogeneous sample of religiously active individuals provided two main findings. Firstly, persons determined to be more psychologically mature were found to be happier. This finding held for both a Maslovian measure of motivational maturation and for a measure of religious maturity developed by Allport. Secondly, the meaning of happiness, or at least the meaning of our measure of well-being which we used to index this trait, appeared to change as individuals became more mature. For mature individuals moderator analyses indicated that apparently greater discrimination was made between simple well-beiug and the basic acceptance of oneself. The personological tradition offers theoretically meaningful accounts of both this form of intrapsychic specificity as well as of the simpler more nomothetic relations of maturation and happiness."It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatified than a fool satisfied." This assertion in a classical treatise by John Stuart Mill (1907) recapitulates an ancient question raised in the Platonic dialogue Gorgias (Jowett, 1937) concerning the nature of happiness. This quotation prompts consideration of two issues. The first is whether Socrates, a wise, noble, supremely developed example of a human being, is in fact happier than the primitive pig or incompetent fool. In simpler terms, is the more mature person happier than one less mature? The second question is whether happiness as experienced by Socrates and happiness as experienced by the "pig" are in fact the same entity? Does a more 1. The authors wish to thank David Ricks for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.2. Now at Stanford University Medical School. Authorship is equal and in alphabetical order.

This comparison concerns the prediction of (1) success at complex tasks and (2) the presence of unusual shifts in aspiration level following success or failure. The Kogan~Wallach formulation generates predictions concerning these dependent variables without recourse to a concept of the need for achievement. These predictions, furthermore, both yield empirical results that account for significantly more variance (p < .05) in the responses of a sample of 96 high school boys than do comparable predictions from need achievement theory, The interpretation stresses a distinction between merely trying hard and learning from one's mistakes. (1953, 1961, 1966) make no simple prediction that more .0. achievement, compared with less .9. achievement, will invariably produce more successful per-f'or-mance , Circumstances may interfere with an expected relation behoJeen n achievement and performance. The achievement mot ive, for instance, may not be aroused or engaged in a particular classroom or by a particular task. Nevertheless there appears to be room for improvement in predicting successful performance with personality variables, especially performance on particular tasks.