ABSTRACT
For what now approaches 30 years, we have been thinking about and investigating the implications of two personality parameters we have chosen to call ego-control and ego-resiliency. We began while graduate students at Stanford, many eras ago. Reasoning from the constructs as we then understood them, we sought to evaluate their behavioral relevance in a wide range of experimental situations and psychological tests—response extinction in a partial reinforcement context, norm establishment while experiencing movement in an autokinetic situation, performance in the Gottschaldt Embedded Figures Test, reactions to authority, divergent thinking, level of aspiration, reactions to stress, psychological fatigue or satiation, perceptual standards of similarity, ethnocentrism—all administered to the same group of college students. Our dissertation results (J. Block, 1950; J. H. Block, 1951; J. Block & J. H. Block, 1951; J. H. Block & J. Block, 1952) were encouraging: In diverse areas of psychology—learning, perception, interpersonal behaviors, attitudes, problem solving—the observed individual differences (often considered then to be no more than “nuisance variance”) were frequently, reliably, and lawfully related to the personality constructs we had formulated. Especially powerful as a predictor was a composite variable generated by summing the behaviors of an individual over a variety of phenotypically diverse but conceptually related experimental situations (J. Block, 1950, Chapter 10).
