Research on social development often attempts to predict social status in children's peer groups using personality features or traits of the individual child. Yet few personality measures consistently predict social acceptance across different groups, and those predictors that are consistent generally account for small proportions of the variance in status. This article proposes that social status is a function of both individual and group characteristics. It is argued that two factors are necessary to predict peer popularity: prosocial interaction and person-group similarity. Prosocial behavior is viewed as a prerequisite for high social status and is predicted to be consistently correlated with status across peer groups. The relation between status and other social behaviors such as aggression is predicted to be mediated by the degree of similarity between the individual and the peer group. The results of two studies, employing both acceptance and rejection measures of status, provide support for the proposed model. This evidence helps to integrate apparently discrepant findings in the sociometric literature and demonstrates the utility of social psychological theories of interpersonal attraction in the study of peer status.Peer relations in childhood play a central role in social and emotional development. Probed initially by Moreno (1934), Northway (1944), and Bonney (1947, social acceptance and rejection have become the focus of renewed research efforts (e.g.,

In nomothetic analyses, the cross-situational consistency of individual differences in social behavior, assessed in vivo in a camp setting, dependent 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 if ... 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.

A conditional approach to dispositions is developed in which dispositional constructs are viewed as clusters of if-then propositions. These propositions summarize contingencies between categories of conditions and categories of behavior rather than generalized response tendencies. A fundamental unit for investigating dispositions is therefore the conditional frequency of acts that are central to a given behavior category in circumscribed situations, not the overall frequency of behaviors. In an empirical application of the model, we examine how people's dispositional judgments are linked to extensive observations of targets' behavior in a range of natural social situations. We identify categories of these social situations in which targets' behavior may be best predicted from observers' dispositional judgements, focusing on the domains of aggression and withdrawal. One such category consists of subjectively demanding or stressful situations that tax people's performance competencies. As expected, children judged to be aggressive or withdrawn were variable across situations in dispositionally relevant behaviors, but they diverged into relatively predictable aggressive and withdrawn actions in situations that required the social, self-regulatory, and cognitive competencies they lacked. Implications of the conditional approach for personality assessment and person perception research are considered.

This study examined the influence of feeling states on person variables viewed as central mediators of self-regulation and performance within a cognitive social learning formulation of personality. Subjects generated either positive, neutral, or negative affective states through their own ideation and were then exposed to success or failure outcomes over a series of trials. Positive affect resulted in increased expectations, higher estimates of past successes, and more favorable global selftevaluations. Conversely, negative affect led to lower expectations, lower estimates of previous successes, and more negative general self-assessments. The combination of negative affect and negative outcomes led to the lowest selfevaluations and to self-defeating patterns of goal setting (in which minimal goals exceeded expectations). The results demonstrate how affect may bias the processing of self-relevant information and help to clarify the links between affect and person variables in the cognitive social learning framework.

Consistency in the natural organization of aggressive and prosocial (constructive) behavior, assessed repeatedly in vivo over a summer in a residential camp for children, was predicted from situational and personal characteristics. Similarity of situations in the types of competencies they demand in part predicted cross-situational consistency in individual differences in aggressive behaviors (Study 1). Study 2 examined the effect of cognitive competence on the discriminative patterning of behavior variation across situations. More cognitively competent Ss showed such discriminative patterning, which was reflected in greater Person X Situation interaction variance in their prosocial behavior.