ABSTRACT
The familiar assertion that behavior is a function of both the person and the situation is now as tiresome as the parental admonition that “it will never heal if you pick at it.” But this was not always so. The belief that behavior is person-determined and transsituationally consistent is rooted in antiquity. Thus, Theophrastus (372–287 B.C.) inform us:
A Penurious Man is one who goes to a debtor to ask for his half-obol interest before the end of the month. At a dinner where expenses are shared, he counts the number of cups each person drinks and he makes a smaller libation to Artemis than anyone…. If his wife drops a copper, he moves furniture, beds, chests and hunts in the curtains…. [Quoted in Allport, 1937, p. 57].
The situationist challenge to this personological view did not appear until 19 centuries later (an excessive publication lag even by today's standards), and the first situationist to rush into print appears to be Michel—(de Montaigne, not Walter):It has often seemed to me that even good authors are wrong to insist on weaving a consistent and solid fabric out of us. They choose one general characteristic, and go and arrange and interpret all a man's actions to fit their picture…. The surest thing, in my opinion, would be to trace [our actions] to the neighboring circumstances without getting into any further research and without drawing from them any other conclusions…. [pp. 118, 120]. Michel deMontaigne “Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions” (1580/1943).
Now because this is a volume on situations, and because I am known as a social psychologist, truth-in-packaging considerations compel me to declare at the outset that I have always been a closet personologist. It has now been 6 years since I came out, embracing not only personology but its most oppressed variant, idiographic personology. The tactical problem I faced at that time was how to declare an affectional preference for an idiographic approach to personality without appearing vulnerable to the situationist arguments of friends and colleagues like Mischel (Walter, not de Montaigne). At the time, my options were limited. I could punt. Or I could finesse (Bern & Allen, 1974):The failure of traditional assessment procedures and the belief that person-situation interactions will account for most of the psychologically interesting variance in behavior have led several recent writers to emphasize that personality assessment must begin to attend seriously to situations. We agree. We have merely chosen to emphasize the perfectly symmetric, but perhaps more subtle point that personality assessment must also begin to attend seriously to persons [p. 518].
With that holding action in print, I then sat down to ponder how one could incorporate the assessment of situations into the personological enterprise in some systematic fashion. In particular, I wanted some way of characterizing both persons and situations in a directly commensurate language (Murray, 1938).