Walter Mischel’s
Ideas
Walter Mischel, like Bandura, is a social-cognitive theorist.
Mischel’s research showed that situations have a strong effect on people’s
behavior and that people’s responses to situations depend on their thoughts
about the likely consequences of their behavior. Mischel’s research caused
considerable debate because it cast doubt on the idea of stable personality
traits. Mischel himself did not want to abandon the idea of stable personality
traits. He believed that researchers should pay attention to both situational
and personal characteristics that influence behavior.
Today, most psychologists acknowledge that both a person’s characteristics
and the specific situation at hand influence how a person behaves. Personal
characteristics include innate temperaments, learned habits, and beliefs. The
environment includes opportunities, rewards, punishments, and chance
occurrences. Personality results from a two-way interaction between a person’s
characteristics and the environment. This process of interaction is called
reciprocal determinism. People’s characteristics influence the
kind of environment in which they find themselves. Those environments, in turn,
influence and modify people’s personal characteristics.
Criticisms of Behavioral Approaches
Critics of the behavioral approach to personality maintain three
arguments:
- Behaviorist researchers often do animal studies of behavior and then
generalize their results to human beings. Generalizing results in this way
can be misleading, since humans have complex thought processes that affect
behavior.
- Behaviorists often underestimate the importance of biological factors.
- By emphasizing the situational influences on personality, some
social-cognitive theorists underestimate the importance of personality
traits.