Persons in situations: distinguishing new wine from old wine in new bottles

Abstract

An ambitious scientist dreams of overturning conventional wisdom and establishing a new paradigm that will provide a grand theoretical synthesis of the ®eld. This commentary examines the articles of this special issue to distinguish what might be new from what is deÂjaÁ vu to traditional, mainstream trait psychology. To accomplish this, the commentary begins with an exposition of how trait concepts are used in the natural sciences. This exposition is meant to correct a straw-man concept of traits, o€ered by some psychologists, asùnmodulated consistencies in. .. behavior across time and diverse situations' (Kenrick and Funder, 1988, p. 24). After presenting an accurate view of the trait concept, I examine what the authors of these articles o€er as alternatives to traits, traditionally conceived. This examination shows that the authors occasionally misrepresent traits, and that in some cases their o€ered alternatives are actually quite similar to traditional trait conceptions. I end by describing what the traditional trait approach considers to be reasonable goals for personality psychology and the most promising methods for reaching those goals. In its most generic sense, the term trait refers to any distinguishing characteristic, feature, property, or quality by which we identify something. More speci®cally, we have traits that refer to (a) physical appearance, (b) observable behavior patterns, and (c) inferred structural properties. For example, white and granular are traits that describe the physical appearance of both sodium chloride (table salt) and silicon dioxide (sand). Salt and sand show di€erent behavior patterns in particular situations; salt is water-soluble whereas sand is non-water-soluble. Chemists explain what we observe about salt and sand in terms of their inferred atomic structures.

Emotional transmission in the classroom: Exploring the relationship between teacher and student enjoyment.

“…In line with earlier research on emotions in the classroom, we used a traitlike approach to assess students’ and teachers’ emotions by asking students how they “generally feel in this class” and by asking teachers how they “generally feel when teaching this particular group of students.” This corresponds with an interactionist view of emotional traits, which assumes that emotions remain relatively stable across time but only across sufficiently similar situations (e.g., Johnson, 1999; Shoda, 1999; Tett & Guterman, 2000), implying that teachers’ and students emotional traits are considered context specific. Context specificity of students’ emotions in terms of domain specificity has been well-documented in recent research (e.g., Goetz, Frenzel, Pekrun, & Hall, 2006; Goetz, Frenzel, Pekrun, Hall, & Lüdtke, 2007)—students feel quite different in their mathematics classes than in their English classes, for example.…”

Putting Lewin’s Equation to the Test: Assessing the Person-Situation Interaction with the B5PS

“…There is considerable agreement on the fact that the environment -or the situationinfluences behavior. This was shown empirically (Bem & Allen, 1974;Deinzer et al, 1995;Fleeson, 2004;Furr & Funder, 2004;Mischel & Peake, 1982;Mischel, 1968;Sherman et al, 2010;Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1994) as well as theoretically argued for (Endler & Magnusson, 1976;Fleeson & Noftle, 2009;Johnson, 1999;Lewin, 1936;Magnusson, 1971;Mischel & Shoda, 1995;Mischel, 2004Mischel, , 2009Reis, 2008;van Mechelen & De Raad, 1999;Wagerman & Funder, 2009). Since the environment does influence behavior, it is important to further investigate its effect as well as the underlying mechanism.…”

The Situational Eight DIAMONDS: A taxonomy of major dimensions of situation characteristics.

“…The DIAMONDS dimensions are compatible in content with major dimensions of personality (see Study 1). This squares with Johnson’s (1999, pp. 450–451) critique that “one of the problems is researchers’ failure to use the same kind of descriptive unit for traits and situations.” In other words, situational taxonomies ought to bear some content resemblance to personality taxonomies to make them most useful for personality research (see also Ten Berge & de Raad, 1999, 2001, 2002).…”