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Interactionism (Explaining variance in social behaviour (Traditional…
Interactionism
Explaining variance in social behaviour
Fundamental shift in how we approach things:
Behaviour is a function of the person and the situation
Personality traits/behaviour isn't something that's the same at all time, but rather something that varies over time and in different situations.
personality factor represents
between-person variance
in behaviour
situational factor represents
within-person variance
in behaviour
Traditional approach
Traits are stable across time, maybe some small deviations to a specific situation, but mostly the same
One study found low correlations between dishonesty in one aspect of life to dishonesty in other aspects of life (ex lying/cheating in school and stealing money)
Within-person variability in trait expression across situations is noise, and the way to work around this is to take more samples to find a "true" stable value of a personality
Study: People were rated on their personality across 28 days, and the data was split into even-numbered days and odd numbered days. In theory,
odd-even day correlation should increase as more days are sampled
New approach
Measure personality as a state: Take measures of traits across different times, and record properties like mean and SD (within person variability)
Study
Participants were asked questions related to the big 5 traits, but the questions were asked in specific time intervals asking the participants things relative to the current time interval (ex, how extroverted are you feeling
right now
)
Found that all traits have lots of variance across time, and that
within-person variance for a particular trait was always greater than variance between subjects
(with the exception of variance of intellect being slightly higher between subjects)
Factors like
time of day
and
number of other people present
affected extroversion, and whether or not a situation was
task-oriented
or not affected conscientiousness
There is however some stability
If one selects a set of trait scores for one randomly selected half of reports and averages it,
almost perfect correlation to the other randomly selected averaged half
(between-person variability in mean levels of trait expression over time)
Interactionism
: Alternative approach to explaining within-person variability
Within-person variability in trait expression across situations is not random; rather, it reflects systematic, stable relations between behavioural dispositions and situational cues
Document and study stable patterns of individual differences in within-person variability to gain deeper insights into individual’s personality structure and dynamics (so look for relationship between particular environments and particular measured levels, like how altruistic and caring someone is when they're with their family vs when they're with strangers)
Social Learning Theory
Learning is a
cognitive process
that takes place in a
social context
and can occur purely through observation or direct instruction, even in the absence of motor reproduction or direct reinforcement
History
1940s
Skinner: Behaviourism
personality as pure outcome of behavioural learning
Clark Hull (Miller, Dollard): stimulus-response based Interpretation of psychoanalysis.
1954: Julian Rotter (Ohio State)
-Social Learning and Clinical Psychology
-holistic interaction between the individual and the environment
1959: Noam Chomsky
Chomsky stated that pure stimulus-response theories of behavior could not account for the process of language acquisition
1963: Albert Bandura
“The weaknesses of learning approaches that discount the influence of social variables are nowhere more clearly revealed than in their treatment of the acquisition of novel responses”
Origin of idea that people might show situation-specific behaviour profiles that are stable signatures of their personality came from this
behaviour patterns are learned adaptations to past experiences, both one’s own experiences and vicarious experiences
Discrimination principle
: Organisms with flexible learning abilities learn to make distinct responses to different stimulus situations. Only make certain responses to certain situations that resemble or are an older situation