What is it like to be a person? The social-cognitive approach views personality in terms of how the person thinks about the situations encountered in daily life and behaves in response to them. Bringing together insights from social psychology, cognitive psychology, and learning theory, this approach emphasizes how the person experiences and interprets situations (Bandura, 1986; Mischel & Shoda, 1999; Ross & Nisbett, 1991; Wegner & Gilbert, 2000).

Researchers in social cognition believe that both the current situation and learning history are key determinants of behaviour, and focus on how people perceive their environments. People think about their goals, the consequences of their behaviour, and how they might achieve certain things in different situations (Lewin, 1951). The social–cognitive approach looks at how personality and situation interact to cause behaviour, how personality contributes to the way people construct situations in their own minds, and how people’s goals and expectancies influence their responses to situations.

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Although social–cognitive psychologists attribute behaviour both to the individual’s personality and to his or her situation, situation can often trump personality. For example, a person would have to be pretty strange to act exactly the same way at a memorial service and at a keg party. In their belief that the strong push and pull of situations can influence almost everyone, social–cognitive psychologists are somewhat at odds with the basic assumptions of classic personality psychology; that is, that personality characteristics (such as traits, needs, unconscious drives) cause people to behave in the same way across situations and over time. At the core of the social–cognitive approach is a natural puzzle, the person-situation controversy, which focuses on the question of whether behaviour is caused more by personality or by situational factors.

This controversy began in earnest when Walter Mischel (1968) argued that measured personality traits often do a poor job of predicting individuals’ behaviour. Mischel reviewed decades of research that compared scores on standard personality tests with actual behaviour, looking at evidence from studies asking questions such as “Does a person with a high score on a test of introversion actually spend more time alone than someone with a low score?” Mischel’s disturbing conclusion: The average correlation between trait and behaviour is only about 0.30. This is certainly better than zero (i.e., no relation at all) but not very good when you remember that a perfect prediction is represented by a correlation of 1.0.

Mischel also noted that knowing how a person will behave in one situation is not particularly helpful in predicting the person’s behaviour in another situation. For example, in classic studies, Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May (1928) assessed children’s honesty by examining their willingness to cheat on a test and found that such dishonesty was not consistent from one situation to another. The assessment of a child’s trait of honesty in a cheating situation was of almost no use in predicting whether the child would act honestly in a different situation, such as when given the opportunity to steal money. Mischel proposed that measured traits do not predict behaviours very well because behaviours are determined more by situational factors than personality theorists were willing to acknowledge.

Is there no personality, then? Do we all just do what situations require? The person–situation controversy has inspired many studies in the years since Mischel’s critique, and it turns out that information about both personality and situation are necessary to predict behaviour accurately (Fleeson, 2004; Mischel, 2004). Some situations are particularly powerful, leading most everyone to behave similarly regardless of personality (Cooper & Withey, 2009). At a funeral, almost everyone looks sombre, and during an earthquake, almost everyone shakes. But in more moderate situations, personality can come forward to influence behaviour (Funder, 2001). Among the children in Hartshorne and May’s (1928) studies, cheating versus not cheating on a test was actually a fairly good predictor of cheating on a test later—as long as the situation was similar. Personality consistency, then, appears to be a matter of when and where a certain kind of behaviour tends to be shown (see the Culture & Community box). Social–cognitive theorists believe these patterns of personality consistency arise from the way different people interpret situations and from the ways different people pursue goals within situations.

How can we understand differences in the way situations are interpreted? Recall our notion of personality often existing in the eye of the beholder. Situations may exist in the eye of the beholder as well. One person’s gold mine may be another person’s useless hole in the ground. George Kelly (1955) long ago realized that these differences in perspective could be used to understand the perceiver’s personality. He suggested that people view the social world from differing perspectives and that these different views arise through the application of personal constructs, dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences. Consider, for example, different individuals’ personal constructs of a clown: One person may see him as a source of fun, another as a tragic figure, and yet another as so frightening that McDonald’s must be avoided at all costs.

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Kelly assessed personal constructs about social relationships by asking people to (1) list the people in their life, (2) consider three of the people and state a way in which two of them are similar to each other and different from the third, and (3) repeat this for other triads of people to produce a list of the dimensions used to classify friends and family. One respondent might focus on the degree to which people (self included) are lazy or hardworking, for example; someone else might attend to the degree to which people are sociable or unfriendly.

Kelly proposed that different personal constructs (construals) are the key to personality differences; that is, different construals lead people to engage in different behaviours. Taking a long break from work for a leisurely lunch might seem lazy to you. To your friend, the break might seem an ideal opportunity to catch up with friends and she or he may wonder why you always choose to eat at your desk. Social–cognitive theory explains different responses to situations with the idea that people experience and interpret the world in different ways.

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Social–cognitive theories also recognize that a person’s unique perspective on situations is reflected in his or her personal goals, which are often conscious. In fact, people can usually tell you their goals, whether they are to find a date for this weekend, get a good grade in psychology, establish a fulfilling career, or just get this darn bag of chips open. These goals often reflect the tasks that are appropriate to the person’s situation and, in a larger sense, fit the person’s role and stage of life (Cantor, 1990; Klinger, 1977; Little, 1983; Vallacher & Wegner, 1985). For instance, common goals for adolescents include being popular, achieving greater independence from parents and family, and getting into a good university. Common goals for adults include developing a meaningful career, finding a mate, securing financial stability, and starting a family.

People translate goals into behaviour in part through outcome expectancies, a person’s assumptions about the likely consequences of a future behaviour. Just as a laboratory rat learns that pressing a bar releases a food pellet, we learn that “if I am friendly toward people, they will be friendly in return,” and “if I ask people to pull my finger, they will withdraw from me.” So we learn to perform behaviours that we expect will have the outcome of moving us closer to our goals. Outcome expectancies are learned through direct experience, both bitter and sweet, and through merely observing other people’s actions and their consequences.

Outcome expectancies combine with a person’s goals to produce the person’s characteristic style of behaviour. An individual with the goal of making friends and the expectancy that being kind will produce warmth in return is likely to behave very differently from an individual whose goal is to achieve fame at any cost and who believes that shameless self-promotion is the route to fame. We do not all want the same things from life, clearly, and our personalities largely reflect the goals we pursue and the expectancies we have about the best ways to pursue them.

People differ in their generalized expectancy for achieving goals. Some people seem to feel that they are fully in control of what happens to them in life, whereas others feel that the world doles out rewards and punishments to them irrespective of their actions. Julian Rotter (1966) developed a questionnaire (see TABLE 12.5) to measure a person’s tendency to perceive the control of rewards as internal to the self or external in the environment, a disposition he called locus of control. People whose answers suggest that they believe they control their own destiny are said to have an internal locus of control, whereas those who believe that outcomes are random, determined by luck, or controlled by other people are described as having an external locus of control. These beliefs translate into individual differences in emotion and behaviour. For example, people with an internal locus of control tend to be less anxious, achieve more, and cope better with stress than do people with an external orientation (Lefcourt, 1982). To get a sense of your standing on this trait dimension, choose one of the options for each of the sample items from the locus-of-control scale in Table 12.5.

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