The Person and the Situation

by Lee Ross

Mischel and Peterson launched their challenging assault on conventional assumptions about personal consistency. Essentially, what these theorists did was to clear away the accumulated underbrush of studies that had relied exclusively on agreement of subjective assessments and to refocus attention on the few studies that had employed objective behavioral measures. In giving priority to these objective measures, Mischel and Peterson noted the obvious objections to the use of reliabilities in subjective assessment as a means of demonstrating the existence (much less establishing the magnitude) of enduring individual differences in personality. They insisted that while agreement of measures and stability over time are interesting phenomena that are worthy of investigation, they do not establish the validity of the trait constructs in question. They also summarized the existing literature on information-processing biases and the other shortcomings of human inference that could compromise the validity of social perceptions and even self-perceptions – in particular, reliance upon stereotypes based on appearance, role, or reputation. Moreover, the two decades that followed saw an avalanche of research on biases in social perception and cognition, providing an even stronger foundation for the critique (Dawes, 1988; Fiske & Taylor, 1990; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Taylor & Fiske, 1978). Many of the biases that were demonstrated were of just the sort tha...