Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 17. Rotter and Mischel:
Cognitive Social Learning
Theory(^538) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
found that schoolchildren who were honest in one situation were deceitful in another.
For example, some children would cheat on tests but not steal party favors; others
would break rules in an athletic contest but not cheat on a test. Some psychologists,
such as Seymour Epstein (1979, 1980), have argued that studies such as Hartshorne
and May’s used behaviors that are too specific. Epstein contended that, rather than
relying on single behaviors, researchers must aggregate measures of behavior; that
is, they must obtain a sum of many behaviors. In other words, Epstein would say that
even though people do not alwaysdisplay a strong personal trait, for example, con-
scientiousness, the sum total of their individual behaviors will reflect a generally
conscientious core.
However, Mischel (1965) had earlier found that a three-person assessment
committee, which used aggregated information from a variety of scores, could not
reliably predict performance of Peace Corps teachers. The correlation between the
committee’s judgment and the performance of the teachers was a nonsignificant
0.20. Moreover, Mischel (1968) contended that correlations of about 0.30 between
different measures of the same trait as well as between trait scores and subsequent
behaviors represented the outer limits of trait consistency. Thus, these relatively low
correlations between traits and behavior are not due to the unreliability of the as-
sessment instrument but to the inconsistencies in behavior. Even with perfectly reli-
able measures, Mischel argued, specific behaviors will not accurately predict per-
sonality traits.
Person-Situation Interaction
In time, however, Mischel (1973, 2004) came to see that people are not empty ves-
sels with no enduring personality traits. He acknowledged that most people have
some consistency in their behavior, but he continued to insist that the situation has a
powerful effect on behavior. Mischel’s objection to the use of traits as predictors of
behaviors rested not with their temporal instability but with their inconsistency from
one situationto another. He saw that many basic dispositions can be stable over a
long period of time. For example, a student may have a history of being conscien-
tious with regard to academic work but fail to be conscientious in cleaning his apart-
ment or maintaining his car in working condition. His lack of conscientiousness in
cleaning his apartment may be due to disinterest, and his neglect of his car may be
the result of insufficient knowledge. Thus, the specific situation interacts with the
person’s competencies, interests, goals, values, expectancies, and so forth to predict
behavior. To Mischel, these views of traits or personal dispositions, though impor-
tant in predicting human behavior, overlook the significance of the specific situation
in which people function.
Personal dispositions influence behavior only under certain conditions and in
certain situations. This view suggests that behavior is not caused by global personal
traits but by people’s perceptions of themselves in a particular situation. For exam-
ple, a young man who typically is very shy around young women may behave in an
outgoing, extraverted manner when he is with men or with older women. Is this
young man shy or is he extraverted? Mischel would say that he is both—depending
on the conditions affecting the young man during a particular situation.
The conditional view holds that behavior is shaped by personal dispositions
plusa person’s specific cognitive and affective processes. Whereas trait theory would
532 Part V Learning Theories