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the power of the first principle of individuality. When we are able to appreciate the jaggedness of other people’s talents—the jagged profile of our children, our employees, our students—we are more likely to recognize their untapped potential, to show them how to use their strengths, and to identify and help them improve their weaknesses,
educational power of jaggedness
trait psychologists, who argue that our behavior is determined by well-defined personality traits,
trait psychology NATURE
Situation psychologists, on the other hand, claim the environment drives our personality far more than personal traits. They believe that culture and immediate circumstances determine how we behave,
situation psych NATURE
arguing,
colndn't theoretical schools develop to hold that behavior is based physical mental emotional social spiritual occupational environmentaleconomical INTERNAL or EXTERNAL dterminants via EVOLUTIONARY or Revolutionary or STATC means?
exa...
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could also use people place thinga qualities activities and ideas as bases which would -- via naming power -- holistically cover all possible determinants
According to situationists, the results of this study proved that a strong situation influences the behavior of most people, even compelling them to acts of cruelty.
check modern discoveries about this experiment
our deep-seated conviction that we can get to the heart of a person’s “true” identity by knowing those traits that define the essence of that person’s personality. We tend to believe that, deep down in the bedrock of a person’s soul, someone is essentially wired to be friendly or unfriendly, lazy or industrious, introverted or extroverted, and that these defining characteristics will shine through no matter what the circumstances or task. This belief is known as essentialist thinking.10 Essentialist thinking is both a consequence and a cause of typing:
essentialism also tied to virtue ethics and character
The counselor believed that aggressiveness was something essential about my character, a defining feature of who I was, and he understandably presumed this knowledge allowed him to make predictions about me. He recommended that I see a psychologist,
STATIC essentialism, not DYNAMIC
we rely on essentialist thinking to size people up: knowing someone’s traits seems to grant us the ability to predict how they will perform in school, on the job, or even (as dating websites insist) as a romantic partner.
BS
Early on he intuited that both approaches were incomplete and, ultimately, misguided.
psych grad direction?
both approaches failed to account for what he saw as the true complexity of the individual.
yes
in terms of the ways in which traits and situations interacted.
but the dimensions still are too small
a team of seventy-seven adult camp counselors who recorded more than 14,000 hours of observation, an average of 167 hours for each child.
ethnography
Trait-based personality tests assume that we can be either extroverts or introverts . . . but not both.
actually they show preferences
The way someone behaved always depended on both the individual and the situation. There was no such thing as a person’s “essential nature.” Sure, you could say someone was more introverted or extroverted on average—this was, in fact, exactly what trait psychology amounted to. But if you relied on averages, then you missed out on all the important details of a person’s behavior.
trait v situuation
Assessing personality on average may have been good enough for academics trying to draw broad conclusions about groups of people, but it is not good enough if you are looking to hire the employee best suited for the job or to deliver the most effective counseling to a student, and it is not nearly good enough for making decisions about you. Defining yourself as “generous” or
mass v individual
However, Shoda’s results also repudiated situation theory, since his data demonstrated that any given situation affected each person differently.
suggesting > two dimensions
Shoda’s research embodies the second principle of individuality, the context principle, which asserts that individual behavior cannot be explained or predicted apart from a particular situation, and the influence of a situation cannot be specified without reference to the individual experiencing it.
context principle
Shoda summarized his trailblazing findings in his aptly titled book:
this builds on Walter Mischel's work: why is this secondary source emphasized in this book?
he provides an alternative to essentialist thinking he calls “if-then signatures.”
if-then signatures isn't this classic S-R
earliest large-scale scientific investigations of character was conducted in the 1920s by a psychologist and ordained minister named Hugh Hartshorne.
Hartshorn
honesty, charity, cooperation, inhibition, and persistence are particular habits rather than general traits.”
habits v traits
The marshmallow study was invented more than forty years ago by a Columbia University psychologist named Walter Mischel.
this the fellow who's work is the basis of the Shoda work this author presents as Shoda's original work
Celeste Kidd.
is she a contrubutor to to anthology re. Mischel of which Shoji is primary editor?
the one domain where society remains most bound to essentialist thinking is in our attitude toward ability, talent, and potential.
essentialism bastion
the context principle suggests that a better starting point is to focus on the performance that we need the employee to perform, and the context in which that performance will occur.
more effective hiring strategy
the mindset of an engineer.
how is this NOT quantitative essentialism?
“performance-based hiring.” Instead of describing the person they want, Alder tells employers to first describe the job they want done.
performance based hiring
“Companies always lament there’s a shortage of talent, that there’s a skills gap,” Adler told me. “But really there’s just a thinking gap. If you spend the effort thinking through the contextual details of the job, you’re going to be rewarded.”
thinking gap > talent gap
the context principle—companies that attempt to match the if-then signatures of candidates with the performance profiles of the positions they are trying to fill—will end up with more successful, loyal, and motivated employees.
context principle hiring
The idea that who we are changes according to the circumstances we find ourselves in—even if those changes are unique to our own self—seems to violate the fundamental tenet of identity: to us, our personality feels stable and steadfast.
relativism > absolutism
we tend to interact with most people within a narrow range of contexts.
range of contexts
Another reason people’s behavior feels trait-like is that you are a part of their context.
participants are part of context
Understanding the if-then strategies of others is especially important when we find ourselves entrusted with helping them succeed—as their manager, parent, counselor, teacher, and so on. When we are acting in that capacity, the context principle allows us to deal more productively whenever we see our child, employee, student, or client engaging in negative behaviors we want to change.
leading and training
reframe the question in terms of context and ask ourselves, “Why are they behaving that way in that context?”
tactic A
any time she finds herself judging someone based on behaviors that strike her as insensitive or irrational, she stops herself, takes a step back, and tries to imagine a set of circumstances that would make the behavior rational and sensible.
tactic B
remembering that we only see others we interact with—like a coworker or boss—in a single context
tactic C
Many of us—not just my friend—instinctively regard deviation from the normal pathway as an unmistakable signal that something is wrong.
outliers
But it also dupes us into believing in normal pathways—the idea that there is one right way to grow, learn, or attain our goals, whether that goal is as basic as learning to walk or as challenging as becoming a biochemist. This conviction stems from the third mental barrier of averagarianism: normative thinking.
normative thinking
Taylor’s standardization of factory time also inspired the inflexible pathways of our educational system developed and implemented by Thorndike and the educational Taylorists.3 Our schools still follow the same rigid march through time as they did a century ago, with fixed class durations, fixed school days, and fixed semesters, proceeding through the same unyielding sequence of “core” courses, all of which ensure that every (normal) student graduates from high school at the same age with, presumably, the same set of knowledge. When you put together a normal educational path with a normal
...more
Taylorized education
The presumption that there must be a normal pathway to walking seemed so intuitive and obvious it was almost never challenged. But one person who did was a scientist named Karen Adolph.
concept ANY "normal" is in doubt
a cultural artifact—the result of averaging together the behavior of a highly unusual sample
cultural artifact
far too often we interpret average patterns of behavior as proof that something is innate and universal, when in fact the patterns might stem entirely from social customs that constrain what pathways are even possible in the first place.
danger ofcultural artifacts
Normative thinking—the belief there is one normal pathway—has fooled scientists in many fields, not just child development.
normative thinking danger
Normative thinking also permeates mental health.
effects of normative thinking in mental health and psychology
The fact that there is not a single, normal pathway for any type of human development—biological, mental, moral, or professional—forms the basis of the third principle of individuality, the pathways principle. This principle makes two important affirmations. First, in all aspects of our lives and for any given goal, there are many, equally valid ways to reach the same outcome; and, second, the particular pathway that is optimal for you depends on your own individuality.
pathways principle
equifinality, in any multidimensional system that involves changes over time—like a person interacting with the world—there are always multiple ways to get from point A to point B.
equifinality what about multifinality?
It is in understanding the why that we discover how to leverage the pathways principle to work for us
causality is key
we bestow tremendous meaning on the pace of personal growth, learning, and development, equating faster with better.
mistake quantity for quality
Edward Thorndike.
evidently had SERIOUS confusion of quantity with quality
