15.4 Personality as Mental Processes II: Social-Cognitive Views

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How, in general, do social-cognitive theories differ from psychodynamic theories?

Social-cognitive theories of personality, sometimes called social-learning or social-cognitive-learning theories, draw both from clinical psychologists’ experiences with their clients and from academic psychologists’ research on learning, cognition, and social influence. In place of the instinctive, unconscious motives posited by psychodynamic theories as the prime shapers of personality, social-cognitive theories emphasize the roles of general beliefs about the nature of the world, which are acquired through one’s experiences in the social environment.

These beliefs may be conscious, but they may also be so ingrained and automatic that they exert their influence without the person’s conscious awareness. They can be thought of as automatic habits of thought, which can influence many aspects of a person’s behavior. Thus, to social-cognitive theorists, the term unconscious generally refers to automatic mental processes, in the same sense as discussed in earlier chapters in this book, not to thoughts that are actively barred from consciousness by defense mechanisms. As you will see, social-cognitive ideas overlap very much with humanistic ideas about personality, but they are based more on laboratory research, and they have more to do with predicting people’s behavior in specific situations, and less to do with global life choices, than is the case for humanistic theories.

Beliefs Viewed as Personality Traits

The kinds of beliefs that social-cognitive personality theorists have studied most frequently have to do, in one way or another, with the value or futility of action. Some beliefs tend to promote an affirmative, take-charge orientation toward the world, while their opposites tend to promote a more passive orientation. Here we describe the dimensions of belief that have been most thoroughly studied as personality traits. As you will see, these belief dimensions seem to overlap considerably with one another, but they have at least different shades of meaning, and some social-cognitive theorists think they are quite distinct from one another.

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Skill or luck? People approach an activity—such as a game of cards—very differently depending on whether they believe its potential rewards are controlled by skill or luck. This insight lay behind Rotter’s concept of locus of control.
© Andersen Ross/Blend Images/Alamy

Beliefs About the Locus of Control Over Desired Effects

If there is a principal founder of the social-cognitive perspective on personality, it is Julian Rotter, who wrote the first book explicitly describing a social-cognitive approach to personality (Rotter, 1954/1980). In his own early research, Rotter found that people behaved differently at various tasks or games in the laboratory, depending on whether they believed that success depended on skill or luck (Rotter et al., 1961). To the degree that they believed that success depended on skill (which it did), they worked hard and improved. To the degree that they believed that it depended on luck, they did not work hard and did not improve. Partly on the basis of these observations, Rotter argued that people’s behavior depends not just on the objective relationship between their responses and rewards but also on their subjective beliefs about that relationship.

In many life situations it is not clear to what degree we have control over rewards. For example, it is not completely clear that studying hard will lead to a good grade on an exam or that diet and exercise will prevent us from having a heart attack. Rotter (1966) suggested that in such situations people tend to behave according to a generalized disposition (a personality trait), acquired from past experience, to believe that rewards either are or are not usually controllable by people’s own efforts. He referred to this disposition as locus (location) of control and developed a questionnaire designed to measure it. Table 15.5 shows sample test items from Rotter’s locus-of-control questionnaire. People whose answers reflect a belief that individuals control their own rewards (and, by extension, their own fate) are said to have an internal locus of control. People whose answers reflect a belief that rewards (and fate) are controlled by factors outside themselves are said to have an external locus of control.

Table 15.5: Table 15.5
Sample test items from Rotter’s locus-of-control scale

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What sorts of behaviors correlate with an internal locus of control?

Since its development, hundreds of studies have shown consistent, though usually not very high, correlations between scores on Rotter’s locus-of-control scale and actual behavior in various situations. People who score toward the internal end of the scale are, on average, more likely than those who score toward the external end to try to control their own fate. They are more likely to take preventive health care measures (Reich et al., 1997); to succeed in weight-loss programs (Adolfsson et al., 2005); to seek information on how to protect themselves during a tornado warning (Sims & Baumann, 1972); to resist group pressure in laboratory tests of conformity (Crowne & Liverant, 1963); and to prefer games of skill over games of chance (Schneider, 1972). Business leaders who have an internal locus of control implement more innovative, high-risk strategies for growing the business than do those who have an external locus of control, which can be good or bad depending on the economic climate (Wijbenga & van Witteloostuijn, 2007).

Other research indicates that people who score toward the internal end of the scale are, on average, less anxious and more content with life than those who score toward the external end (Phares, 1978, 1984). Apparently, the sense of control helps calm people’s fears about potential mishaps and dangers.

Of course, as with all correlational research, we cannot be sure what is cause and what is effect. Does a sense of control promote hard work, responsible behavior, innovative action, and general satisfaction with life? Or do hard work, responsible behavior, innovative action, and general satisfaction promote a sense of control? Most social-cognitive theorists would contend that both of these causal hypotheses are correct to some degree. Successful action in any realm tends to lead to a stronger sense of control, which may promote further successful action; and vice versa. Most of us lie somewhere in the middle of the internal–external dimension because, truth be told, we really can control some things and not others, and it’s not always clear which things lie in which category.

Beliefs About One’s Own Ability to Perform Specific Tasks

Self-efficacy According to Albert Bandura, the first step in acquiring a skill like rock climbing—or in doing anything that is difficult—is to believe you can do it.
Henn Photography/Cultura/Getty Images

Another pioneer of the social-cognitive perspective on personality is Albert Bandura (see discussion of Bandura’s social-learning theory in Chapter 4), who, like Rotter, earned a degree in clinical psychology and then went on to a career of laboratory research. Much of Bandura’s research centers on people’s beliefs about their own abilities to perform specific tasks, which he refers to as self-efficacy. People who expect that they can perform a certain task are said to have high self-efficacy about the task, and people who expect the opposite are said to have low self-efficacy about it.

Self-efficacy may seem similar to locus of control, but Bandura (1997) considers the two to be distinct. Self-efficacy refers to the person’s sense of his or her own ability, while locus of control refers to the person’s belief that ability will produce desired effects. Although self-efficacy and an internal locus of control usually go together, they do not always. If you believe, for example, that you are skilled at math but that the skill is worthless (perhaps because it is unrecognized by your math professor or others in society), then you have high self-efficacy but an external locus of control in that area. Conversely, if you believe that skill at math would bring rewards but that you don’t have the skill, then you have low self-efficacy and an internal locus of control in that area. As is the case for locus of control, self-efficacy may be quite specific to a very narrow range of tasks or quite general over a broad range of tasks (Cervone, 1997; Welch & West, 1995).

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What evidence supports the theory that high self-efficacy (a) predicts high performance and (b) may help cause high performance?

Bandura and his colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated that improved self-efficacy for a task predicts improvement in actual performance of the task. In one study, for example, various treatments were used to help people overcome their fear of snakes. The subjects who claimed after treatment that they now expected to be able to pick up and handle a large snake were indeed most likely to succeed at the task, regardless of which treatment they had received (Bandura et al., 1977). Correlations between changes in self-efficacy and changes in performance have likewise been found in such diverse realms as mathematics, physical exertion, tolerance for pain, giving up smoking, and social skills (Bandura & Cervone, 1983; Bandura & Locke, 2003; Gwaltney et al., 2009; Schunk & Hanson, 1985).

Bandura argues that self-efficacy is not simply a correlate of good performance, but is also a cause of it (Bandura & Locke, 2003). As evidence, he has cited experiments showing that false feedback, which raises or lowers a person’s self-efficacy, can improve or worsen performance. In one experiment, for example, some subjects, randomly chosen, were told that, based on a previous measure, they had much higher than average pain tolerance, and others were told the opposite. When subsequently given a test of pain tolerance, those who were led to believe that they had excellent pain tolerance tolerated more pain than did those who were led to believe that they had poor pain tolerance (Litt, 1988). Another experiment showed similar results in the realm of problem solving. Those who were led to believe that they were good problem solvers worked more persistently, used better strategies, and were more successful at solving problems than were those who were led to believe that they were not so good (Bouffard-Bouchard, 1990).

Beliefs About the Possibility of Personal Improvement

Another dimension of belief explored by social-cognitive theorists concerns the degree of malleability of one’s own personal qualities. Some people see themselves as rather fixed entities. They see themselves as having a certain degree of intelligence, a certain level of athletic ability, and certain rather unchangeable personality traits. In their minds they are what they are and they will always be that. People at the other end of this dimension have a relatively malleable view of themselves. They see themselves at any given point, even late in life, as changing, developing, improving. Their intelligence is not fixed, but is something that can grow or atrophy depending on their own efforts or lack of efforts. Their personality traits are moldable, not set in plaster.

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What is the benefit of the belief that the self is malleable? How can people’s belief in their own malleability be enhanced, and what effects have been observed of such enhancement?

Carol Dweck, who has studied this belief dimension extensively, contends that your position on it makes a big difference in your approach to life. Dweck (2006, 2008) and her colleagues have found that people who view themselves as malleable are more likely to strive for self-improvement in all realms of life than are those who see themselves as fixed. They embrace education. They rebound from setbacks, which they interpret as growth experiences rather than failures. They seek out difficult problems to solve so they can learn from them. They strive to improve their personal relationships with others, rather than accept them for what they are. Because of such efforts, they tend to succeed in life.

Several experiments have demonstrated that people can be taught to think of themselves as malleable and that such teaching can change their behavior. In one experiment, college students were shown a film depicting how neurons in the brain can make new connections throughout life and how the brain grows, like a muscle, with use. At the end of the semester, those students exhibited more enthusiasm for their academic work and had higher grade-point averages than did otherwise comparable students who had not seen the film (Aronson et al., 2002). Similar results were found, in another experiment, with students who had just entered junior high school (Blackwell et al., 2007). People also tend to develop either fixed or malleable views of themselves from the kinds of praise they hear (Mueller & Dweck, 1998). Global praise about attributes, such as “you are intelligent,” tend to create a fixed, stagnant view of the self, while praise about effort or choice of strategy for specific tasks—such as “you worked hard and did a great job on that report”—tend to create a malleable, dynamic view of the self.

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The Power of Positive Thinking

Much has been written, by psychologists and nonpsychologists alike, about the benefits of a positive, optimistic outlook on life (Cousins, 1977; Peale, 1956; Seligman, 1990). You have just read about research indicating that people who believe in their own abilities (have high self-efficacy), believe that their abilities will be rewarded (have an internal locus of control), and believe in the possibility of personal improvement (have a malleable self-view) are generally happier and more successful than people who don’t have those beliefs.

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What evidence supports the value of optimism? Through what mechanisms might optimism produce its beneficial effects?

Optimism The belief that one can overcome adversity may become a self-fulfilling prophecy if that belief leads to effective actions. This young woman, the victim of a head-on automobile collision, works hard at strengthening her legs so she can walk again.
AP Photo/The Decatur Daily, Emily Saunders

A number of psychologists have developed questionnaires designed to assess people’s general tendency to think either positively or negatively. C. Rick Snyder (1994) and his colleagues developed a questionnaire to assess hope, which they construe as a belief in one’s ability to solve solvable problems (generalized self-efficacy) combined with a belief that most problems in life are solvable. Martin Seligman (1990) and his colleagues developed a questionnaire to assess the degree to which people explain negative events in their lives in a pessimistic or optimistic manner. Michael Scheier and Charles Carver (1993) developed a questionnaire to assess dispositional optimism, the tendency to believe in a rosy future. On the questionnaire, people indicate the degree to which they agree or disagree with such statements as “In uncertain times, I usually expect the best.”

Correlational studies using all these questionnaires have shown that, in general, people with an optimistic style of thought are happier and tend to cope more effectively with life’s stressors than do people who have a pessimistic style (Bailey et al., 2007; Nes & Segerstrom, 2006; Peterson, 2000; Snyder, 1994; Taylor et al., 2003). In one such study, Scheier and his colleagues (1989) used their questionnaire to assess dispositional optimism in middle-aged men who were about to undergo coronary artery bypass surgery. They found that those who scored high on optimism before the surgery made quicker recoveries than did those who scored low, even when the medical conditions that led to surgery were equivalent. The optimists were quicker to sit up on their own, to walk, to resume vigorous exercise, and to get back to work full time than were the pessimists.

The most likely explanation for this and other positive correlations with optimism is that optimistic thinking leads people to devote attention and energy to solving their problems or recovering from their disabilities, which in turn leads to positive results. Pessimists are relatively more likely to say “It won’t work out anyway, so why try?”

The Optimistic Child

Perhaps the most optimistic of any people on the planet are young children. When preschoolers are asked who are the smartest, most popular, most athletic, most attractive, or toughest kids in their class, they typically list themselves among the top. They typically also list other children whom the teacher and their classmates think are highly popular, attractive, athletic, and so forth, showing that they know talent when they see it. However, they typically include themselves among the list of the “best and the brightest,” even if their classmates think otherwise (Boulton & Smith, 1990; Lipko, et al., 2009; Stipek & Daniels, 1988).

Such optimism can be adaptive in young children. Children’s tendencies to overestimate their abilities and characteristics enhance their self-efficacy and give them the confidence to try things they would not otherwise try (Bjorklund & Green, 1992; Stipek, 1984). For example, 3- and 4-year-old children who overestimate their abilities to imitate a model (“How well do you think you can juggle three balls like the man is doing?) had higher verbal IQs than more accurate children (Bjorklund et al., 1993), 8- to 11-year-old children who overestimated their abilities had higher school grades than did less optimistic children (Lopez et al., 1998), and kindergarten and first-grade children who overestimated how much they had remembered on early trials of a memory task showed greater memory improvement on later trials than more accurate children (Shin et al., 2007). Such patterns are consistent with Deborah Stipek’s (1984) proposal that, rather than trying to make young children’s self-assessments more accurate, we should “try harder to design educational environments which maintain their optimism and eagerness” (1984, p. 53).

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Adaptive and Maladaptive Optimism and Pessimism

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What seems to differentiate adaptive from maladaptive optimism and adaptive from maladaptive pessimism?

Before concluding that optimism is always best, before rushing out to trade the clear lenses on our glasses for rose-tinted ones, we should consider a potential hazard of optimism. Health psychologists have long pointed out the danger of unrealistic, self-delusional forms of optimism. Many people, especially adolescents and young adults, optimistically believe that they are invulnerable to such catastrophes as AIDS, lung cancer, drug addiction, and automobile accidents and fail to take precautions to avoid such dangers (Schwarzer, 1994; Weinstein, 1980, 1982). Similarly, an optimistic, inflated belief in their academic or career abilities blinds some people to their own shortcomings and prevents them from taking steps to improve (Dunning et al., 2004). Optimism of this sort, which in the psychodynamic tradition is called defensive optimism, may reduce anxiety by diverting thoughts away from fearful possibilities, but it may also lead to serious harm. The optimistic belief that you can control your fate through active self-care and self-improvement usually leads to constructive behaviors, but the optimistic belief that fate will protect you without your participation can lead to dangerously imprudent behaviors.

Just as optimism can be adaptive or maladaptive, depending on whether or not it translates into constructive action, so can pessimism. In research on the cognitive underpinnings of success in college, Julie Norem and her colleagues found students who use apparently opposite mental strategies to perform well academically (Norem & Illingworth, 1993, 2004). Some students use an adaptive form of optimism. They believe they will do well, and that belief, coupled with their thoughts about the positive consequences of doing well, motivates them to work hard and actually do well. Other students, however, use an adaptive form of pessimism. They believe that there is a good chance that they will not do well, despite having done well in the past, and that belief, along with thoughts about the negative consequences of failure, motivates them to work hard to avoid failure. As a result, and apparently to their surprise, they not only pass but achieve high grades. Still, the optimists are probably better off in the long run than the pessimists. One study of adjustment to college life revealed that the pessimists’ constant anxiety about failure led them to focus too narrowly on grades and lose the intrinsic pleasure of academic work (Cantor & Harlow, 1994).

Wiley Miller reprinted by permission of United Features Syndicate

Our guess is that the difference between those who use either optimism or pessimism constructively and those who do not has to do with beliefs about locus of control and personal malleability. People who believe that rewards are controllable (internal locus of control) and that they themselves can improve through effort (malleable self-belief) are likely to work hard and do well regardless of whether or not their focus is on achieving anticipated success (the goal of optimists) or preventing anticipated failure (the goal of pessimists). Consistent with this view, Norem (2008) reports that the defensive pessimists she has studied believe more strongly than do other anxious people that they can improve themselves through effort.

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The Idea of Situation-Specific Personality Traits

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Social-cognitive theorists have long contended that global traits-such as those specified by the five-factor model—tell only part of the story of personality. To understand a person, according to these theorists, one must not only know that a person tends to be extraverted or introverted, for example, but must also know the contexts in which the person typically manifests those tendencies. One person might be shy (introverted) at parties but outspoken (extraverted) at formal meetings, while the opposite might be true of another person. One person who scores as disagreeable on the NEO-PI might be most disagreeable to subordinates while another, with the same score, might be most disagreeable to authority figures. The leading advocate for this contextual view of personality is social-cognitive theorist Walter Mischel (1984, 2007).

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What evidence supports Mischel’s concept of situation-specific dispositions?

In one study, Mischel and Phillip Peake (1982) assessed repeatedly, by direct observation, 19 different forms of behavior presumed to be related to the trait of conscientiousness in a group of students at Carleton College in Minnesota. Included were measures of regularity of class attendance, promptness in completing assignments, bed neatness, and neatness of class notes. They found high consistency within any one of these measures but relatively low consistency across measures. For instance, students who kept neat notes for one class were very likely to keep neat notes for another class but only slightly more likely than average to keep their beds neat.

In another study, Mischel and his colleagues found that children with social adjustment problems at a summer camp were not well described by such global traits as “aggressive” or “withdrawn” but were quite well described and differentiated from one another by terms that referred to the social situations that prompted them to act aggressively or to withdraw (Mischel & Shoda, 1995; Shoda et al., 1994). Figure 15.10 shows sample results from that study for verbal aggressiveness for two children. As shown in the figure, both children were somewhat more verbally aggressive than the average child at the camp, but the two were very different from each other with regard to the situations in which they exhibited aggression. Child 28 was highly aggressive to peers who approached him in a friendly manner but not particularly aggressive in other situations, and child 9 was highly aggressive to adults but not to peers. Knowledge of that difference is essential to any clinically useful understanding of the children, but that knowledge would be obscured in a global rating of aggressiveness or disagreeableness for the two children.

Figure 15.10: Situation-specific profiles of verbal aggression for two children Shoda, Mischel, and Wright (1994) recorded various categories of behaviors among children who had emotional disturbances in various social situations at a summer camp. Shown here are results concerning verbal aggressiveness for two children. Zero on the y axis represents the average aggressiveness for all the children observed. In overall verbal aggressiveness, these two children were similar, but they were very different with respect to the situations that elicited their aggression.
 

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Cross-Cultural Differences in Personality

If personality is, in part, ingrained beliefs and habits of thought that affect behavior, as social-cognitive theorists contend, then we should expect personality to vary across cultures. People growing up in different cultures are exposed to different values, philosophies, economic conditions, and models of how to behave.

Collectivism-Individualism as a Personality Dimension

As noted in Chapter 13, cultures vary in the degree to which they have a collectivist versus an individualist orientation. Collectivist cultures are those that emphasize the interdependence of people and the duties that people have to other members of their family and community. Individualist cultures, in contrast, place relatively more emphasis on personal freedom and rights, and relatively less emphasis on responsibilities to others. The cultures of North America, Australia, and Western Europe generally fall on the individualist side of this dimension, and the cultures of East Asia, Africa, and South America generally fall on the collectivist side. Many studies indicate that personalities of people in collectivist and individualist cultures differ from each other in predictable ways. Thus, collectivism and individualism can be thought of as personality traits as well as cultural characteristics (Heine & Buchtel, 2009; Triandis & Suh, 2002).

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In general, how do personalities in collectivist cultures differ from those in individualist cultures? What problems might arise in people whose personalities conflict with the norms of the culture in which they live?

People with collectivist orientations are highly concerned with personal relationships and promoting the interests of the groups to which they belong. In contrast, those with individualist orientations focus more on their own interests and abilities and less on the interests of the group. While collectivists emphasize the similarities between themselves and other group members, individualists emphasize their own uniqueness. While collectivists see themselves as responding primarily to the conditions of their social environment, individualists see themselves as motivated by their own inner needs and aspirations. The humanistic concept of self-actualization, with its focus on resisting social pressures in order to “be yourself,” is a quintessentially individualist concept.

As you would expect, personality tests that are aimed at assessing the collectivist-individualist personality dimension show that people in collectivist cultures generally score as collectivists in personality, and people in individualist cultures generally score as individualists. The differences, however, are by no means all or none; there is lots of overlap. In fact, according to data summarized by Harry Triandis and his colleagues, roughly 40 percent of people in collectivist cultures score on the individualist side of this personality dimension, and roughly 40 percent of people in individualist cultures score on the collectivist side (Triandis & Suh, 2002). Collectivists in individualist cultures tend to be loyal members of groups and avoid the “rat race” of individual competition; individualists in collectivist cultures often report feeling oppressed and held back by their culture’s demands for conformity and obligations to the group (Triandis & Suh, 2002).

A study comparing personalities in Turkey (a collectivist culture) with those in the United States (an individualist culture) suggests that there is considerable cost to a personality that is too far out of sync with one’s culture (Caldwell-Harris & Aycicegi, 2006). The researchers focused on people who scored at either extreme of the collectivism-individualism dimension. Extreme collectivists in Turkey seemed to be well adjusted, but in the United States extreme collectivists tended to be anxious and depressed. Perhaps their strong need for community could not be satisfied in the individualist culture. In contrast, extreme individualists in the United States seemed to be well adjusted, but in Turkey extreme individualists scored high on measures of antisocial tendencies and paranoia (unwarranted suspicion of other people). Perhaps high individualism in a collectivist culture results in rejection by others, which may in turn promote paranoid thoughts and antisocial behavior. Or maybe only those people who for other reasons are paranoid or antisocial become extreme individualists in a collectivist culture. At any rate, the study illustrates the point that the relationship between personality style and life satisfaction depends on the cultural context.

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Cultural differences in personality training In the American dance class (top photo), a major goal is to allow children to express their individuality. In the Chinese dance class (bottom photo), a major goal is to impart traditional Chinese methods so that the children’s dancing will resemble the model. Such differences in expectations and training lead children in China and the United States to develop different personality styles.
© Jeff Greenberg/PhotoEdit-All rights reserved.
© Xu Yu/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Cultural Differences in Conceptions of Personality

People in different cultures tend to differ not only in their average scores on various personality measures but also in their views about the significance of personality and the relative importance of particular traits. As discussed in Chapter 13, people in collectivist cultures, especially East Asian cultures, place less emphasis on personality than do people in individualist cultures. They are more likely to attribute individual differences in behavior to differences in the environmental situation than to personality differences. East Asians also generally see personality as more malleable than do Westerners (Heine & Buchtel, 2009). Consistent with the theory that belief in a malleable self leads to efforts toward self-improvement, that difference may help explain why East Asians tend to embrace schooling more fully than do Westerners and tend to learn more in school.

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What sorts of trait dimensions are emphasized in China more than in Western cultures?

When East Asians do talk about personality, they tend to emphasize trait dimensions that are somewhat different from those emphasized in individualist cultures. For example, in China much emphasis is placed on such traits as harmony (inner peace of mind and a harmonious way of interacting with others), face (a concern with maintaining one’s dignity or reputation in relationships with others), and ren qing (a relationship orientation that emphasizes the mutual exchange of favors) (Lin & Church, 2004). None of these traits quite matches any of the facets of Western psychologists’ five-factor model (the model depicted in Table 15.3). When psychologists in China developed their own indigenous trait theory, using Chinese terms rather than translated versions of Western terms, their factor analysis produced factors that were in some ways quite different from those of Western psychologists’ five-factor model. The most clearly different factor was one that they labeled interpersonal relatedness, which includes elements of harmony, concern for reciprocity, and concern for traditional Chinese ways of relating to others (Cheung, 2004; Cheung et al., 2008).

Even today, most personality tests used in non-Western cultures are translated versions of those developed in the West. As many cultural psychologists have pointed out, the results of such tests may often be misleading because people in other cultures may interpret the questions differently than do people in the West and because the questions may not map well onto concepts and dimensions that are meaningful in their culture. Only recently have psychologists in non-Western cultures begun to develop their own personality tests, using their cultures’ own terms and concepts. Such research promises to enrich our understanding of the potential ways that human beings can differ from one another and of the value of such differences.

SECTION REVIEW

Social-cognitive theorists stress the roles of beliefs and social contexts in personality.

Beliefs as Personality Traits

  • People have an internal or external locus of control, depending on whether they do or do not believe that rewards are controlled by their own efforts.
  • People have high or low self-efficacy, depending on whether they do or do not believe they can accomplish the relevant tasks.
  • People vary in the degree to which they see themselves as fixed entities or malleable.
  • People with an internal locus of control, high self-efficacy, and malleable self-view tend to apply themselves more and to be more successful.
  • Young children tend to be overly optimistic about their own abilities, which enhances their self-efficacy and results in improved performance in some situations.
  • In general, people with optimistic styles of thought cope better than others with life’s demands. However, defensive optimism can cause harm, and some people use pessimism adaptively.

Domain-Specific and Situation-Specific Traits

  • Locus of control and self-efficacy beliefs can be general, applying to many tasks, or domain-specific, applying to particular types of tasks. Domain-specific measures of these beliefs have the greatest predictive value.
  • Social-cognitive theorists have also shown that traits such as conscientiousness and aggressiveness can vary across contexts, with the pattern of variation depending on the individual. They contend that situation-specific measures of traits have more predictive value than do global trait measures.

Cross-Cultural Personality Differences

  • Because the social environment differs from one culture to another, social-cognitive theorists expect beliefs and habitual ways of thinking to differ cross-culturally.
  • In collectivist cultures, most people have collectivist personality styles, which focus on interdependence; in individualist cultures, most have individualist personality styles, which focus more on individuality and independence.
  • In non-Western cultures, the traits that are most useful in characterizing personality may not fully match the five-factor model.

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