The act frequency approach to personality is advanced in this article. Dispositions are viewed as summaries of act frequencies that, in themselves, possess no explanatory status. As sociocultural emergents, dispositions function as natural cognitive categories with acts as members. Category boundaries are fuzzy, and acts within each category differ in their prototypicality of membership. A series of studies focusing on indices of act trends and on a comparative analysis of the internal structure of dispositions illustrates this basic formulation. The act frequency approach is then placed within a taxonomic framework of the relations among act categories (horizontal dimension) and hierarchic classification (vertical dimension). Theoretical implications of the act frequency approach are examined. Dispositional consistency is distinguished from behavioral consistency and several act frequency indices (e.g., dispositional versatility, situational scope) are defined. Situational analysis and personality coherence are then viewed from the act frequency perspective. Discussion focuses on the possible origins and development of dispositional categories and implications of alternative middle-level constructs for act categorization and personality theory.The concept of disposition has occupied a central place in personality theory and research. Most major efforts have been directed at determining the external relations among dispositions (

Behavioral acts constitute the building blocks of interpersonal perception and the basis for inferences about personality traits. How reliably can observers code the acts individuals perform in a specific situation? How valid are retrospective self-reports of these acts? Participants interacted in a group-discussion task and then reported their act frequencies, which were later coded by observers from videotapes. For each act, observer-observer agreement, self-observer agreement, and self-enhancement bias were examined. Findings show that (a) agreement varied greatly across acts; (b) much of this variation was predictable from properties of the acts (observability, base rate, desirability, Big Five domain); (c) on average, self-reports were positively distorted; and (d) this was particularly true for narcissistic individuals. Discussion focuses on implications for research on acts, traits, social perception, and the act frequency approach.

Three studies of dominance explore the frequency concept of disposition, which entails categories of acts that are topographically dissimilar but nonetheless considered to be manifestations of a common disposition. In the first study, 100 difierent acts presumably belonging to the category of dominance were generated through a nomination procedure. In the second study, expert and student panels rated how prototypically dominant each act is, defined in terms of centrality of membership in the category of dominant acts. In this manner, an internal structure of the act category was specified such that some acts are more prototypically dominant while others are more peripheral members. Substantial agreement in these ratings exists within and between panels. The third study found that a multipleact criterion based on prototypically dominant acts is predicted by personality scales with significantly greater success than are multiple-act criteria based on more peripheral acts within the dominance domain. Discussion focuses on specifying the appropriate act category for other frequency dispositions and follow-up field studies of them. Implications for altemative notions of disposition (e.g., purposive-cognitive concepts) are considered.At the heart of personality research lies the concept of disposition: the tendency of individuals to behave in certain ways, for example, to be self-praising, to be subservient in relation to others, or to adopt a sensation-seeking orientation toward the environment. The diverse meanings of this basic concept of personality are pres-1.

The present research examined trends in the prominence of 4 widely recognized schools in scientific psychology: psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. The results, which replicated across 3 measures of prominence, showed the following trends: (a) psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored by mainstream scientific psychology over the past several decades; (b) behavioral psychology has declined in prominence and gave way to the ascension of cognitive psychology during the 1970s; (c) cognitive psychology has sustained a steady upward trajectory and continues to be the most prominent school; and (d) neuroscience has seen only a modest increase in prominence in mainstream psychology, despite evidence for its conspicuous growth in general. The authors use these findings as a springboard for discussing different views of scientific prominence and conclude that psychologists should evaluate trends in the field empirically, not intuitively.

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