President’s Column: Do Powerful Situations Make the Study of Personality Essential?
William Fleeson
It is widely agreed that if situations are not powerful, then it is important to study personality. But what if situations instead are powerful, as the results of social psychology suggest they are? During my term as president of ARP, I reflect a lot on the relationship between personality and other fields. Fortunately, this is something I’ve always enjoyed. One question that has puzzled me greatly is the focus of this essay. In it, I take the unusual position that the more powerful situations are, the more critical the study of personality is. I don’t argue that the power of situations and personality are orthogonal, but rather that the power of situations in fact implies the need for the study of personality.
In this essay, I’ll use the straightforward, everyday meaning of power as the ability to change things, for example, the ability to change behavior. The argument has three basic steps. The first step is that when we say something is powerful, we normally are implying that the changes it creates are lasting and that its effects are not transient or dependent on the presence of the powerful thing. For example, a powerful supervisor has effects even when he or she is not around, powerful life events are powerful because they result in far-reaching changes, and generosity is powerful because it creates lasting positive feelings. The same can be said of storms, love, and law enforcement. None of those would be considered particularly powerful if they didn’t make changes that lasted beyond their immediate presence. In fact, our judgment that something is powerful often is precisely because the powerful something leaves lasting marks. Applying this to situations, then, the statement that situations are powerful would seem to imply that situations are powerful because they create lasting changes.
The second step is that, if situations create lasting changes, these lasting changes have to be carried by and within the person, and must affect the person’s behavior on a later date. Changes that are carried by and within a person, and affect the person’s behavior, are what are commonly meant by the concept of personality. If situations are to have effects that last longer than their concurrent presence, then those effects have to change people in a way that is different than the ways most other people are changed (because they experienced different situations); additionally, those changes in people have to affect their behavior later. Since personality consists of those variables within people on which people may differ and which affect their behavior, the changes wrought by situations are part of the person’s personality.
The final step in the argument is that an efficient way to study such lasting effects of situations would be to study personality, since personality usually will be much more accessible to the researcher than will be situations in the person’s past. Personality would be akin to the mediator of any situation effects that lasted longer than the situation lasted. Thus, if situations are powerful, then personality is essential to study, partly in order to understand the effects of situations (in addition to the other many reasons for studying personality).
However, there are at least three plausible counter-arguments to the idea that the power of situations entails the importance of personality. First, it may be true that lasting effects of situations exist as mediating variables in the person, but those variables are not included in the domain of personality. Second, situations may not have lasting effects. Third, personality may be genetically determined, so situations can’t affect them.
The first counter-argument is that lasting effects of situations don’t require the study of personality because those lasting effects are not part of the domain of personality. Personality consists of traits, it could be said, and the lasting effects of situations are not part of traits. Furthermore, these effects may be fragmented and small. It would be a mess to try to study these countless, specific, and incoherent effects. On the first point, there is no widely agreed upon limitation of personality to specific variables such as traits; quite the contrary, nearly all definitions of personality accept nearly any variable that represents a long-standing psychological characteristic that exists within individual persons and on which individuals may differ. According to such definitions, any effects of situations that lasted beyond the life of the situation would be included in personality. The second point, that the effects of situations may be numerous and fragmented, is admittedly an empirical question. However, it seems likely that effects of situations may be organized within the person into coherent variables. The organization may result from similar effects of multiple situations accumulating into prominent variables, some situations being stronger than others and predominating in the person’s psyche, or some situations repeating in individuals’ lives, amplifying their effects into strong variables. Quite possibly the organization will be such that effects of situations are modified by other features of the individual (including the lasting effects of other situations), building up structures of variables that organize the incoming effects of subsequent situations. Given the validity evidence for traits, the Big Five, and for countless other personality variables, it is quite likely that some kind of organizing principle does arrange the effects of situations into these variables, because these are the variables that are in personality. But even if not, then some situations would have to be strong enough or repeated enough to create important variables to study. The only way to hold to the fragmentation counter-argument is to limit the lasting effects of situations to small, insignificant ones, that is, to weaken situations.
The second counter-argument is that situations do not have lasting effects, even though they are powerful. This counter-argument involves making a distinction between types of power, such as immediate power versus lasting power, and then arguing that situations have only the one kind (e.g., immediate power) but not the other (e.g., lasting power). In this counter-argument, the statement that situations are powerful means that situations can change behavior only when the situations are immediately present, but cannot change behaviors beyond the situations’ presence. The effects of situations are both mighty and impotent. I would say two things in response to this interesting counter-argument. First, this amounts to a significant limit on the power of situations. Because the everyday sense of power is often based on the ability to create lasting change, this would mean that situations are not powerful in at least one important way. The phrase “the power of situations” seems more impressive than the phrase “the power of situations while they are immediately present”. This argument would have to be applied to all situations, including all experimental manipulations, in advance. It might be hard for a researcher to give up as a matter of principle on the idea of discovering lasting effects of any of his or her manipulations. My second reaction to this counter-argument is that it requires all basic psychological mechanisms to be strange, such that they are entirely pliable to immediate situations, but simultaneously impervious to modifications by situations. I am not aware of a psychological theory that describes psychological mechanisms in a way consistent with this position, and it is hard for me to imagine what such a psychological mechanism would look like. Surely the brain and the mind are modifiable by at least some situations, if only a subset of them or only the repeated ones, and these modifications would become part of personality. Thus, this second counter-argument both acknowledges limits on the power of situations and also necessitates an unusual account of psychological mechanisms.
The third counter-argument is that personality is determined by genetics, and situations cannot modify the effects of genetics. There are very few personality psychologists who take such a strong genetic determinism stance (I realize there are a few), but in any event, this counter-argument also deeply weakens situations. It argues that situations are impotent against personality variables.
Interestingly, each of these three counter-arguments acknowledges limits on the power of situations, either by removing situation effects from the domain of personality and making them inconsequential, by distinguishing types of power and acknowledging that situations only have the one type of power, or by claiming that situations are unable to impact the forces of genes. In addition, these counter-arguments entail dubious theoretical implications, in that they require any lasting effects of situations to be fragmented or they require unusual psychological mechanisms. Thus, the viable alternatives seem either to accept limitations on the power of situations, or to agree that powerful situations necessitate the study of personality. I believe that situations are powerful, and that is one of the main reasons I study personality.
I would like to thank Alan Sroufe, Mike Furr, and Erik Helzer for comments on an earlier draft of this article.