Table of contents:
- External determinant: Situation
- Analysis of the situation
- Approach based on the reaction to the situation:
- Culture
- Cultural dimensions.
The study of personality must be done taking into account that the person develops in situations, which in turn, are immersed in a certain society or culture. Importance of the study of the situation.
It is already well known in personality research that the weight of personal variables in explaining behavior will depend on the degree of structuring of the situations: if the situations are highly structured, the possibilities for individual variation are almost nil; but as the situation becomes more ambiguous, differential behavioral manifestations appear among the individuals who face it.
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- Analysis of the situation
- Approach based on the reaction to the situation:
- Culture
External determinant: Situation
The research data allow us to conclude that the interaction process should be studied as a unit of analysis, but without forgetting that the personal and situational variables integrated in said process should be known. Although personal variables have been studied considerably, this is not the case with situational ones.
Magnusson points out three reasons that justify the analysis of the situation:
- Behavior takes place in situations, it exists only in the situation and cannot be understood without it.
- Consideration of the situation in theories will contribute to more functional models of explanation of behavior.
- A more systematic knowledge of situations will contribute to more effective explanations in psychology. In any case, the study of situations in personality is not a goal in itself, but is motivated by the need for a more effective theory, investigation and application of knowledge about the personality of individuals.
Analysis of the situation
The external world can be organized according to two levels of amplitude, macro and micro, depending on its proximity to the individual. In turn, there will be physical or objective characteristics and social, psychological or subjective characteristics:
- The macro-physical environment: they are the streets, parks, buildings, etc.
- The micro-physical environment: they are the furniture and objects in the room.
- The macro-social environment: would be the laws, norms, or values that are common to a society or culture.
- The micro-social environment: these would be norms, attitudes, habits, etc. of groups and people with whom an individual interacts directly. It is at least to some degree unique to each individual or group.
Another way to characterize the analysis of the external world is in terms of the duration of its influence. Endler defines the environment (environment) as the most general and persistent context in which the behavior occurs, while the situation would be the momentary and passing frame. The stimuli would be the elements within the situation.
Approaches to the study of the situation in psychology. The situation can be analyzed from three different perspectives:
- Ecological or environmental perspective: analyzes the environments in terms of the physical characteristics under which the behavior takes place, starting from the assumption that they exert more influence on the behavior than the characteristics of the person. That is, they focus on the target environment, regardless of the psychological processes that people feel in it, the basic unit of study being the behavioral scenarios (environments that occur naturally, not having been created by the experimenter) that have the following properties.
- They include fixed behavior patterns alien to the individual within specific spatio-temporal coordinates.
- They consider sets of elements of the scenario of a non-behavioral nature (physical).
- It is understood that there is an interdependence between the physical, temporal and geographical characteristics of the environment, and the own patterns of behavior.
Thus the stage of conduct has physical limits. The psychological environment is a subjective representation of the objective situation that the person does at a given moment. The ecological environment has a more durable and objective existence, independent of the psychological processes of a specific person.
The study of behavior scenarios allows studying community programs, churches, schools, classes, etc. These are situations so structured that the weight of personal variables in predicting behavior is minimal.
Behavioral perspective: environments are described in terms of their structure (physical characteristics) and their stimulating function (reinforces, punishes, etc.). People can actively participate in their relationship with the environment, but that does not mean that they are autonomous agents in controlling their behaviors.
Social perspectives: they study social episodes (sequences of interaction that constitute natural units of behavior and that are distinguished because they have symbolic, temporal and physical limits). Attention is paid to the perception and cognitive representation of situations. These 3 perspectives differ in 3 aspects:
- The emphasis given to personal characteristics.
- The weight given to objective vs. subjective of the situation.
- Your consideration of space and time.
Approaches to the study of the situation in personality psychology. From which the subjective or perceived character of the situation has been emphasized, and that the study of the situation is not an objective in itself, but a necessity to make better predictions of behavior. Situation taxonomies must meet 3 requirements:
- Domain: they reflect situations in which the researcher samples at his convenience (for example: stressful, work, academic).
- Units of analysis: they must specify them to classify situations.
- Consideration of the situation: specify if they are aimed at classifying objective or psychological situations.
Approach based on the perception of the situation: Situations can be analyzed according to how they are perceived and interpreted, that is, according to their stimulating value. In general, two main strategies have been used:
- Intersituational similarity judgments: in which the subjects are asked to judge the similarity between the situations presented through verbal descriptions, analyzing the data with FA. The results show a high agreement between the perceivers on the similarity between situations.
- Prototype analysis: in which prototypes or ideal examples of a category are used. It is based on the assumption that situations have a variety of attributes that are perceived and interpreted by individuals, according to cognitive schemata of situations, that the individual has from previous experiences. Thus, an individual who is faced with a situation compares its attributes with those of the cognitive prototype that he already possesses. This strategy allows: Establishing a taxonomy of the categories of situations commonly used (for example, social, cultural, political, etc.) that, in turn, are hierarchically ordered (from the most inclusive or superordinate, to the most subordinate).
If we ask the subjects to generate prototypes, the consensual prototype can be obtained (by averaging the characteristics listed by the subjects). These prototypes suggest that people share sets of beliefs about the characteristics of various situations, or the behaviors expected of them. We can use consensual prototypes to test hypotheses.
Cantor measured the similarity between prototypes, finding that those belonging to the same category had more elements in common than those of different categories. It therefore seems that an important part of the common knowledge of situations would be of a psychological nature (prototypes provide the individual with expectations about the most probable or socially appropriate behaviors in situations).
It also measured the time it took for the subjects to form the image, after reading the stimulus, and found that situations are imagined faster, then people in situations, and finally people. So it seems that there are differences in terms of accessibility and richness of this information.
In addition, he studied the attributes of the situations. The results show that the frequency of the events that describe the physical nature of the situation, and of the people present in it, is higher in the prototypes of specific or subordinate categories; while in the most abstract, aspects of a psychological nature prevail.
From this approach, it is possible to analyze what behaviors the subjects anticipate as more likely in a specific situation. In fact, the more prototypical a situation is, the more consensus there is about the behaviors that will take place in it.
Approach based on the reaction to the situation:
Rotter proposed classifying situations based on the similarity of behavior they generate in people, suggesting the following procedures:
- Resort to expert judgment.
- Take the judgment of subjects from the same culture or group as the one being evaluated.
- Analyze the frequency of specific kinds of behavior in certain situations.
- Measure the expectation that certain reinforcements or consequences will occur in those situations
- Determine the nature (academic, work, emotional, etc.) and the sign of reinforcement (positive or negative) that is most likely to occur in the situation.
- Study the generalization gradients of changes that occur in behavior, expectations, or values of reinforcement. The generalization gradient indicates similarity.
In addition to these procedures, others have been used: ER inventories: present the verbal description of situations related to some variable that we want to measure (anxiety, liking), asking the subject to report the degree to which they experience somatic or psychic reactions. A famous example is Wolpe's Systematic Desensitization technique, where patients construct a hierarchy of subjective anxieties.
In the person-situation matching technique, the situation is characterized as a pattern of behavior of an ideal type of person. The behavior of a person in a situation will depend on the similarity between the characteristics of the person and the ideal pattern of behavior of the individual-type corresponding to that situation.
Bem proposes that a person be analyzed in terms of how he responds to a set of hypothetical situations. The similarity between two situations would be a function of the number of main elements they share, the number of unique elements of one or the other, and the degree to which their characteristics (shared and non-shared) are distinctive within the set of compared situations.
Pervin asks each subject to:
- Make a list of your real life situations (place, people, time and activities of each).
- Describe each situation, to generate a list of attributes.
- Describe your feelings in them, to make a list of feelings for each situation.
- Describe your behavior, generating a list of behaviors.
- Judge, after the lists are made, the degree to which each aspect of the three lists is applicable to each situation.
In this way it obtains information on the individual's real situations and their characteristics. Another taxonomy based on people's consensus on the conceptualization of situations is that of Van, who constructed lists of attributes for each situation, interviewing 160 subjects.
There were 659 attributes belonging to the categories: context, physical environment or location, objective characteristics of the physical environment, people, objective characteristics of people, activities, equipment or objects, and temporal aspects. Thus, 10 situational factors were identified (intimacy, leisure, conflict, etc.) that can be used to predict the behavior that may occur in the different categories. Approach based on situational preferences:
Analyze what kind of situations are chosen by the subjects. People avoid certain situations and choose others; they can modify situations to suit their characteristics, and they can create situations that facilitate certain behaviors. The choice of one or the other is influenced by personal characteristics.
Other aspects such as environmental and cultural pressures, or the real possibility of accessing them, also intervene in these elections. Approach based on personality traits: One way to build a taxonomy of personality traits that systematically captures situational information would be by asking a large number of subjects to indicate situations or behaviors that are typically associated for each characteristic of the Five Factors. with that trait. In this way, we would have a knowledge of the situations that better allow the expression of a certain trait.
Ten Berge and De RaadThey constructed a repertoire, based on descriptions of subjects, on the situations in which a certain personality characteristic was shown. They obtained 237 situations that they classified according to the extent to which each participant could deal with it. The idea was that the ways of relating to situations involve coping styles (dispositional or personal tendencies). From this perspective, certain types of people may have preferences towards situations that are different from those shown by other people; certain situations would allow more behavioral variation; and people characterized by a certain trait may have a greater preference for those situations that allow the expression of that trait. The results show a 4-factor structure:
- pleasure situations
- adverse situations for the individual
- situations of interpersonal conflict
- situations of social demand.
Generally speaking, people who score high on one of the 5 factors are better at dealing with the situations associated with that factor. There are many situations in which extroverts, emotionally stable and open to experience hold up better than introverts, unstable and closed to experience.
However, Agreeableness and Tenacity are more situation-specific factors (they are character factors; while Extraversion, Emotional Stability, and Openness are temperament factors).
Culture
The personality does not refer to connotations of dignity or prestige, that is, it is free of values. However, personality psychology is driven by certain social and cultural values that can affect our interpretations of behavior. These cultural aspects are important because, possibly, they determine many psychological processes and affect the personality (the own concept of oneself or self).
Concept and implications. Culture includes what is transmitted from generation to generation in a given society: procedures, habits, norms, beliefs and shared values that also affect the information that is considered important. Individuals differ in the extent to which they adopt and comply with the values and behaviors of the cultural group to which they belong, and it is even possible to speak of different subcultures within the same culture.
The process by which a culture is transmitted is acculturation. As a result of this process, we can interact with people from our own culture because we share the same verbal and non-verbal language.
Cultures differ in fundamental aspects such as:
- His view of human nature as essentially good, positive, bad or evil, as well as to what degree the possibility of personal change is defended.
- The relationship of man with nature. In industrialized societies, nature is at the service of man; in indigenous populations, man depends on nature; in eastern societies tranquility is achieved by being in harmony with nature.
- The way to understand time. In the West the future prevails, in southern Europe, the present, and in the East or England the past and tradition.
- The most valued personality type.
- The usual forms of relationship between members. In individualistic societies, personal satisfaction is expected from relationships with others; in collectivists, harmony in relationships and collaboration of each person for the collective well-being are valued.
In addition, cultures are influenced by ecological variables. For example, raised reliefs reduce the probability of cultural diffusion, making the culture homogeneous.
Cultural dimensions.
Cultures differ in complexity, whose indices are: per capita income, size of cities, percentage of urban versus rural population, computers per person, etc. In complex ones there are more possibilities of choice and lifestyles.
They also differ in the rigidity of their rules. Isolated societies tend to be hermetic (they are not influenced by neighboring societies), they have clear ideas about appropriate behavior and apply sanctions to people who do not follow the rules. In relaxed cultures deviation is tolerated.
Cultures also differ in their individualistic or collectivistic character. The more complex a culture is, the more likely it is to be individualistic; the more rigid its rules, the more likely it is to be collectivist. In individualistic societies, people are autonomous and independent of their groups, prioritize their goals, and emphasize autonomy, the right to privacy, etc.
In collectivists, collective identity, dependence, group solidarity, sharing duties and group decision are emphasized. To define a culture as individualistic or collectivist, the following is taken into account:
- How the self is defined, which can emphasize personal or collective aspects.
- Which goals have more priority, personal or group.
- What kind of relationships are strengthened between its members, those of exchange or equality.
- What are the most important determinants of social behavior, whether they are attitudes or norms.
Within collectivism and individualism there are many varieties. The most analyzed dimension is that of horizontality-verticality of the relationships, depending on whether equality or hierarchy is emphasized respectively. It speaks of 4 types of cultures:
- Individualist-horizontal: independence prevails. People want to be unique and different from groups.
- Individualist-horizontal: independence prevails. People want to be unique and different from groups.
- Individualist-vertical: people want to differentiate themselves and also be the best. There is high competitiveness.
- Collectivist-horizontal: people cooperate with their group, common goals are emphasized, but they do not submit to authority easily. Collectivist-vertical: people submit to the authority of the group and are capable of sacrificing for the interest of the group. They are traditionalist cultures.
When we refer to the personality of these cultures, we speak of 60% allocentric in collectivist cultures and 60% idiocentric in individualistic ones. The allocentric emphasize interdependence, sociability and family integrity, and take into account the needs and desires of the members of your group. The idiocentrics emphasize self-exaltation, competitiveness, uniqueness of the person, hedonism, and emotional distance from the group.
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