ABSTRACT
This chapter considers four different approaches to personality: person-situation interaction, self-schemas, Murray's personality approach, and psychobiography. The dispositional approach makes the assumption that personality traits are of prime importance in determining how a person will behave in a range of different situations. Cross-situational stability is more difficult to determine and provide clear-cut evidence for and against. Ideally, one would like objectively to observe how a person behaves in all different situations so that good evidence for and against cross-situational consistency or stability can be obtained. The person–situation debate as initially characterised by Mischel was ill-founded because it tended to polarise positions as either personality or situational factors for predicting and explaining behaviour. Murray's approach to personality and the study of a person was unique at the time, and represented a sustained attempt to study a person in their everyday life over a significant period of time.
