The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

by Maria Konnikova

WHEN I WAS WORKING with Walter Mischel as a graduate student in psychology, I grew intimately familiar with a specific model for analyzing behavior: CAPS, or the cognitive-affective personality system. For decades, Walter had argued that the Big Five version of personality—that we can all be rated on five major traits, namely openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness—was fundamentally flawed. Instead of embracing the nuance of humanity, it stripped traits from context and gave people global scores on things that made no sense. Maybe I’m conscientious at work but a slob at home, Walter suggested, or agreeable in the face of authority but a sudden bully in the schoolyard. Personality was all about context and all about dynamics, and you couldn’t hope to crack its puzzle unless you were willing to go through the work of regimented analysis. Walter and Yuichi Shoda formalized the idea of CAPS in 1995, writing: In the proposed theory, individuals differ in how they selectively focus on different features of situations, how they categorize and encode them cognitively and emotionally, and how those encodings activate and interact with other cognitions and affects in the personality system. The theory views the person not as reacting passively to situations, nor as generating behavior impervious to their subtle features, but as active and goal-directed, constructing plans and self-generated changes, and in part creating the situations ...