Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 17. Rotter and Mischel:
Cognitive Social Learning
Theory(^536) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
where he became passionately interested in art (painting and sculpture) and divided
his time among art, psychology, and life in Greenwich Village.
In college, Mischel was appalled by the rat-centered introductory psychology
classes that seemed to him far removed from the everyday lives of humans. His hu-
manistic inclinations were solidified by reading Freud, the existential thinkers, and
the great poets. After graduation, he entered the MA program in clinical psychology
at City College of New York. While working on his degree, he was employed as a so-
cial worker in the Lower East Side slums, work that led him to doubt the usefulness
of psychoanalytic theory and to see the necessity of using empirical evidence to eval-
uate all claims of psychology.
Mischel’s development as a cognitive social psychologist was further enhanced
by his doctoral studies at Ohio State University from 1953 to 1956. At that time, the
psychology department at Ohio State was informally divided into the supporters of
its two most influential faculty members—Julian Rotter and George Kelly. Unlike
most students, who strongly supported one or the other position, Mischel admired
both Rotter and Kelly and learned from each of them. As a consequence, Mischel’s
cognitive social theory shows the influence of Rotter’s social learning theory as well
as Kelly’s cognitively based theory of personal constructs (see Chapter 18). Rotter
taught Mischel the importance of research design for improving assessment tech-
niques and for measuring the effectiveness of therapeutic treatment; Kelly taught
him that participants in psychology experiments are like the psychologists who study
them in that they are thinking, feeling human beings.
From 1956 to 1958, Mischel lived much of the time in the Caribbean, study-
ing religious cults that practiced spirit possession and investigating delay of gratifi-
cation in a cross-cultural setting. He became determined to learn more about why
people prefer future valuable rewards over immediate less valuable ones. Much of
his later research has revolved around this issue.
Next, Mischel taught for 2 years at the University of Colorado. He then joined
the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, where his interest in personality the-
ory and assessment was further stimulated by discussions with Gordon Allport (see
Chapter 13), Henry Murray, David McClelland, and others. In 1962, Mischel moved
to Stanford and became a colleague of Albert Bandura (see Chapter 16). After more
than 20 years at Stanford, Mischel returned to New York, joining the faculty at Co-
lumbia University, where he remains as an active researcher and continues to hone
his cognitive social learning theory.
While at Harvard, Mischel met and married Harriet Nerlove, another graduate
student in cognitive psychology. Before their divorce, the Mischels collaborated to
produce three daughters and several scientific projects (H. N. Mischel & W. Mischel,
1973; W. Mischel & H. N. Mischel, 1976, 1983). Mischel’s most important early
work was Personality and Assessment(1968), an outgrowth of his efforts to identify
successful Peace Corps volunteers. His experiences as consultant to the Peace Corps
taught him that under the right conditions, people are at least as capable as stan-
dardized tests at predicting their own behavior. In Personality and Assessment, Mis-
chel argued that traits are weak predictors of performance in a variety of situations
and that the situation is more important than traits in influencing behavior. This book
upset many clinical psychologists, who argued that the inability of personal disposi-
tions to predict behavior across situations was due to the unreliability and impreci-
530 Part V Learning Theories