Psychology - Discuss how Personality and Situational Factors Interact to Determine an Individual's Behaviour. Refer to Empirical Evidence in your Answer

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Discuss how Personality and Situational Factors Interact to Determine an Individual's Behaviour. Refer to Empirical Evidence in your Answer - Exam Prep Essay

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[...] Discuss how Personality and Situational Factors Interact to Determine an Individual's Behaviour. Refer to Empirical Evidence in your Answer There is evidence for both personality and situational factors individually determining an individual's personality. Due to this it can be inferred that personality and situational factors can also interact to determine behaviour. this essay will discuss the extent to which, and how, personality and situational factors interact to determine behaviour by considering interactionism. Interactionism suggests that personality and situational factors combine to form behaviour (Lewin, 1935) as a solution to the debate. [...]

[...] Now that the ways personality and situations can interact have been outlined, it is important to explain that interactionism is comprised of two different types of interaction. Mechanistic interaction, where personal and situation factors jointly determine behaviour and organismic interaction, where the person and the situation affect and are affected by each other. There is evidence for both occurring, Robins and John (1997) tested the effects of mechanistic interaction. They found that people high in narcissism were more likely to rate themselves positively after watching a video of themselves. [...]

[...] The person and the situation have been shown to interact in six different ways. Firstly parts of the same person can be primed differently in different situations. A cognitive-affective system theory (Mischel & shoda, 1995) was developed to explain this by saying: if situation A occurred, the individual would behave in X way. But if situation B occurred, then they would behave in Y ways. This is supported by shoda (1990). The second way personality and situations interact is by the same situation causing two different people to respond differently, although people may fail to realise that the way a persona construes a situation may be different to the way you construe a situation, this is often the case (Ross & Nesbett, 2011). [...]

[...] Those children were then interviewed again when they were 30 and 40 to see whether their personality was consistent across time. They found that the personality traits in childhod could be used to predict their future behaviour. Costa and McCrae (1990) also found that personality traits in adulthood are stable. This isn't always the case, Srivastava et al (2003) found that people tend to get more conscientious with age. However this can be explained by using trait theory. Although there is less evidence for cross-situational consistency, there is still some evidence. [...]

[...] Interestingly, they found that the children's behaviour wasn't consistent across situations meaning that their behaviour was hard to predict, hence providing evidence that behaviour depends upon the situation. Situationists, who believed that the situation was an important factor in predicting behaviour, thought that in previous literature, the role that the situation playing in predicting behaviour was being ignored (Jansen et al, 2013). This could be explained by using the fundamental attribution error, which suggests that when explaining behaviour people tend to overestimate internal factors and underestimate situational factors. Situationists accused psychologists of ignoring the situational factors when explaining behaviour (Ross,1977). [...]