Confessions of a Social Personologist
Zlatan Krizan
It was with some excitement and trepidation that I began my graduate training in the fall of 2001. As a new student in the departmental area of “Personality and Social Psychology”, little did I know that these two fields had important differences, and that many viewed them as partners forced into an uneasy marriage. While outsiders often rooted for their union, they themselves were very leery of any long-term relationship. Although I was fortunate to receive training from both accomplished personality and social psychologists, I learned that they often looked upon one another with reservations, suspicions, and even disdain.
While navigating the complex environment of distinct institutional traditions, methodological paradigms, and theoretical orientations endemic to these sub-fields, I increasingly began to appreciate both perspectives. Unfortunately, I did not anticipate the confusion and subtle disappointment that my unwillingness to solely commit to either perspective would occasionally cause in mentors, colleagues, and reviewers alike. Whether I was talking to a social or personality psychologist, I often felt like I had a confession to make. It was as if I was cheating on them with another lover, someone they frequently considered an enemy. Such experiences were instrumental in my professional development, and I would like to take this opportunity to share what I have learned straddling these two different worlds as a self-identified “Social Personologist.”
The first thing that struck me was an emphasis on different sources of thought, emotion, and behavior. While social psychologists usually discussed the impact of social situations, shared heuristics, and universal processes, personality psychologists focused on individuals’ motives, traits, and bio-behavioral systems. Behind these different foci is an underlying appreciation of either situational variability (for social psychologists) or individual variability (for personality psychology) as central to psychological expression. In short, while social psychologists generally focus on the individual’s plasticity of expression, personality psychologists focus on the stability of that same expression. The potential for division is obvious when realizing that in a statistical analysis, social psychologists’ error term is often personality psychologists’ main effect. In this sense, the person-situation debate is alive and well, with both sides clinging to some victory.
We should not despair, however. Increasing realization that situations and traits are both key has led to important advances toward keeping peace in the marriage. Social psychologists increasingly measure individual differences to augment their understanding of situational impacts and often study person-environment interactions. Personality psychologists increasingly rely on transactional approaches that help us them understand how persons and situations co-vary and shape one another over time. The notion of person-environment transactions has been especially illuminating when it comes to understanding how social situations combine with genetic influences on personality and shape personality development. Work on person and situation perception offers further integration. I am heartened by these developments, and so, perhaps, the divorce may not be inevitable.
However, other marital problems lurk just around the corner. Besides focusing on different sources of variability in psychological expression, personality and social psychologists also adopt different stances in explaining this variability. These different stances reflect enduring institutional traditions as well as different values. Contemporary personality psychologists usually think in terms of long-term structure. Specifically, psychological expression is viewed within the context of a broader structure of individual differences, and a given expression is understood vis-à-vis this structure and its biological bases. For example, the tendency of football players to be aggressive would be typically approached by examining concomitant individual differences (e.g., differences in competitiveness, agreeableness, or testosterone levels), how they inter-relate, and constraints on these differences imposed by the setting. Social psychologists, on the other hand, usually think in terms of momentary process. In the football example, this would mean focusing on situational demands of a football competition (e.g., rivalry, spectator influences, and competitive norms) as well as social learning that occurred during past competitive situations.
Inherently, these different perspectives are likely to lead to disagreements about “true” causes of behavior, aggression in this case. As a Social Personologist, I often find this debate to be a caricature of a debate the fields ought to have. It reminds me of the Indian parable about the three blind men and the elephant. Is the elephant long and skinny (as touching his tail would indicate), or is it large and round (as touching his body would indicate)? It is, of course, both. Similarly, both social and personality perspectives have enduring value and broad applicability as accounts of psychological expression. The appreciation of both structure and process is again reflected in transactional approaches to personality that offer hope for further integration.
It is important to recognize that our debates are much more likely to be productive on the molecular, rather than the molar, level. A successful marriage requires focused discussions, careful listening, and diligently working through disagreements without reverting to global accusations and canned criticisms. The same applies to our fields; we should argue about when and why persons or situations make a difference and how they combine to do so, rather than arguing about the categorization of the ultimate cause. Furthermore, effective marriages avoid criticism, contempt, and defensiveness. If nothing else, I hope this column makes the marriage between personality and social psychology slightly more bearable, even if a second honeymoon is what is ultimately needed.
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