ABSTRACT
Since its beginnings as a scientific discipline, psychology has embraced two contrasting approaches to the study of behavior. These distinct orientations have had a variety of overlapping designations, such as: experimental versus correla tional (Cronbach, 1957); mind-in-general versus mind-in-particular (Allport, 1937); situational versus dispositional. Whatever its specific label, the dichotomy is one between a search for general principles of behavior that would account for most people’s behaviors most of the time versus an attempt to provide a systematic account of differences among individuals, and perhaps even of per sonal uniqueness (mind-in-particular). It is, also, a methodological distinction between observing responses to experimentally created differences in the envi ronment and the study of relationships between observed or measured character istics of individuals and their other characteristics or behaviors. The situational versus dispositional dichotomy involves, additionally, assumptions about the primary causes of behavior: the characteristics of the situation the person finds himself in or the personal characteristics he brings into the situation. According to the situational view, changes in a person’s behavior over time as well as differences among individuals are seen as resulting from environmental or situa tional influences. The second approach, the dispositional one, has been guided by the belief that, while it is true that there may be general principles of behavior that apply to most people, it is no less true that people differ among each other in a variety of ways. In order to properly account for the diversity of behavior, according to this view, it is necessary to provide some systematic framework for understanding individual differences. For the most part, this has involved the development of constructs encompassing some relatively stable predispositional attributes of the individual such as his abilities, personality traits, beliefs, attitudes, or motives, and the construction of measures of these
attributes. These contrasting approaches to the study of behavior were already present in the earliest days of psychological research. Even in the pioneering experimental psychology laboratories of Wilhelm Wundt in the late 1800s, there were researchers interested in studying the variation they found among their subjects (Tyler, 1963, p. 26).
