The study of personality must be done taking into account that the person develops in situations, which, in turn, are immersed in a certain society or culture. Importance of studying the situation.
It is already sufficiently known in the personality research, that the weight of personal variables in the explanation of behavior will depend on the degree of structuring of the situations: if the situations are highly structured, the possibilities of individual variation are almost nil; But as the situation offers greater ambiguity, differential behavioral manifestations appear among the individuals who face it.
External determinant: Situation
The research data allow us to conclude that the interaction process must be studied as a unit of analysis, but without forgetting that the personal and situational variables integrated in said process must be known. Although personal variables have been studied considerably, this is not the case with situational variables.
Magnusson points out three reasons that justify the analysis of the situation:
- Behavior takes place in situations, it only exists in the situation and cannot be understood without it.
- The consideration of the situation in theories will contribute to more functional models of explaining behavior.
- A more systematic knowledge of situations will contribute to more effective explanations in psychology. In any case, the study of situations in personality is not a goal in itself, but is motivated by the need for a more effective theory, research and application of knowledge about the personality of individuals.
Analysis of the situation
The external world can be organized according to two levels of amplitude, macro and micro, depending on its proximity to the individual. In turn, there will be physical or objective characteristics and social, psychological or subjective characteristics:
- The macro-physical environment: these are the streets, parks, buildings, etc.
- The micro-physical environment: these are the furniture and objects in the room.
- The macro-social environment: would be the laws, norms, or values that are common to a society or culture.
- The micro-social environment: these would be norms, attitudes, habits, etc. of the groups and people with whom an individual interacts directly. It is, at least to some degree, unique to each individual or group.
Another way to characterize the analysis of the external world is in terms of the duration of its influence. Endler defines the environment as the most general and persistent context in which the behavior occurs, while the situation would be the momentary and passing framework. The stimuli would be the elements within the situation.
Approaches to the study of the situation in psychology. The situation can be analyzed from three different perspectives:
- Ecological or environmental perspective: analyzes environments in terms of physical characteristics under which behavior occurs, assuming that they exert more influence on behavior than the person’s own characteristics. That is, they focus on the objective environment, independently of the psychological processes that people feel in it, with the basic unit of study being the behavioral scenarios (environments that occur naturally, not having been created by the experimenter) that have the following properties.
- They include fixed behavioral patterns foreign to the individual within specific spatio-temporal coordinates.
- They consider sets of elements of the scenario of a non-behavioral nature (physical).
- It is understood that there is an interdependence between the physical, temporal and geographical characteristics of the environment, and one’s own behavioral patterns.
Thus the behavioral setting has physical limits. The psychological environment is a subjective representation of the objective situation that the person faces at a given moment. The ecological environment has a more durable and objective existence, independent of the psychological processes of a specific person.
The study of behavioral scenarios allows studying community programs, churches, schools, classes, etc. They are situations so structured that the weight of personal variables in predicting behavior is minimal.
Behavioral perspective: Environments are described in terms of their structure (physical characteristics) and their stimulating function (reinforces, punishes, etc.). People can actively participate in their relationship with the environment, but that does not mean that they are autonomous agents in controlling their behaviors.
Social perspectives: they study social episodes (sequences of interaction that constitute natural units of behavior and that are distinguished because they have symbolic, temporal and physical limits). Attention is paid to the perception and cognitive representation of situations. These 3 perspectives differ in 3 aspects:
- The emphasis given to personal characteristics.
- The weight given to objective aspects vs. subjective of the situation.
- His consideration of space and time.
Approaches to the study of the situation in personality psychology. From which the subjective or perceived nature of the situation has been emphasized, and that the study of the situation is not an objective in itself, but a necessity to make better predictions of behavior. Taxonomies of situations must meet 3 requirements:
- Domain: reflect situations in which the researcher samples at his convenience (for example: stressful, work, academic).
- Units of analysis: they must be specified to classify situations.
- Consideration of the situation: specify whether they are aimed at classifying objective or psychological situations.
Approach based on the perception of the situation: Situations can be analyzed based on how they are perceived and interpreted, that is, based on their stimulating value. In general, two main strategies have been used:
- Intersituational similarity judgments: in which subjects are asked to judge the similarity between situations presented through verbal descriptions, analyzing the data with FA. The results show a high agreement between perceivers on the similarity between situations.
- Prototype analysis: in which prototypes or ideal examples of a category are used. It is assumed that situations have a variety of attributes that are perceived and interpreted by individuals, according to cognitive schemes of the situations that the individual has from previous experiences. Thus, an individual who faces a situation compares its attributes with those of the cognitive prototype that he already possesses. This strategy allows: Establishing a taxonomy of the commonly used categories of situations (for example, social, cultural, political, etc.) which, in turn, are ordered hierarchically (from the most inclusive or superordinate, to the most subordinate).
If we ask subjects to generate prototypes, the consensus prototype can be obtained (averaging the characteristics listed by the subjects). These prototypes suggest that people share sets of beliefs about the characteristics of various situations, or the behaviors expected in them. We can use agreed prototypes to test hypotheses.
Singer measured the similarity between prototypes, finding that those belonging to the same category had more elements in common than those from different categories. It therefore seems that an important part of the common knowledge of situations would be psychological in nature (prototypes provide the individual with expectations about the most probable or socially appropriate behaviors in the situations).
He also measured the time it took for the subjects to form the image, after reading the stimulus, and found that situations are imagined faster, then people in situations, and finally people. So it seems that there are differences in terms of accessibility and richness of this information.
In addition, he studied the attributes of the situations. The results show that the frequency of events that describe the physical nature of the situation, and of the people present in it, is greater in the prototypes of specific or subordinate categories; while in the more abstract ones, psychological aspects prevail.
From this approach it is possible to analyze which behaviors subjects anticipate as most likely in a specific situation. In fact, the more prototypical a situation is, the more consensus there is about the behaviors that will be carried out in it.
Approach based on reaction to the situation:
Rotter proposed classifying situations based on the similarity of the behavior they generate in people, suggesting using the following procedures:
- Resort to expert judgment.
- Take the judgment of subjects from the same culture or group as the one being evaluated.
- Analyze the frequency of specific kinds of behavior in certain situations.
- Measure the expectation that certain reinforcements or consequences will occur in those situations
- Determine the nature (academic, work, emotional, etc.) and the sign of reinforcement (positive or negative) that will most likely occur in the situation.
- Study the generalization gradients of changes that occur in behavior, expectations, or reinforcement values. The generalization gradient indicates similarity.
In addition to these procedures, others have been used: ER inventories: present the verbal description of situations related to some variable that we want to measure (anxiety, pleasantness), asking the subject to report the degree to which they experience somatic or psychic reactions. A famous example is Wolpe’s Systematic Desensitization technique, where patients construct a hierarchy of subjective anxieties.
In the person-situation matching technique, the situation is characterized as a pattern of behavior of an ideal type of person. The behavior of a person in a situation will be a function of the similarity between the characteristics of the person and the ideal pattern of behavior of the individual-type corresponding to that situation.
Bem proposes that a person be analyzed in terms of how he or she responds to a set of hypothetical situations. The similarity between two situations would be a function of the number of main elements they share, the number of unique elements of one or the other, and the degree to which their characteristics (shared and not shared) are distinctive within the set of situations compared.
Pervin asks each subject to:
- Make a list of situations from your real life (place, people, time and activities of each).
- Describe each situation, to generate a list of attributes.
- Describe your feelings in them, to make a list of feelings for each situation.
- Describe your behavior, generating a list of behaviors.
- Judge, once you have made your lists, the degree to which each aspect of the three lists is applicable to each situation.
This way you obtain information about the real situations of the individual and their…