Person-Situation Debate

Does our #temperament act as an anchor that we cannot get too far away from, even with the greatest of effort to change it will only pull us back to our base personality no matter how hard we try? Or, on the other hand, does our personality traits shift according to the situation in which we find ourselves in? Perhaps a quiet disposition around family members but a comic around the company of friends? Psychologists call this the “person-situation” debate.¹

Professor Brian Little, former Harvard University psychology lecturer and winner for the 3M Teaching Fellowship, despite his brilliant and engaging lectures with a flair for entertainment that always ended with a hearty applause, he calls himself a devout introvert. Little believes that our personality shape our lives in profound ways based on psychological mechanisms that last our lifetime. This fall squarely on the “person” side of the debate.

On the other side of the debate, a group of psychologist known as the Situationist. “Situationism posits that our generalizations about people, including the words we use to describe one another–shy, aggressive, conscientious, agreeable–are misleading. There is no core self; there are only the various selves of Situations X, Y, Z,” wrote Susan Cain.² This view of personality rose to popularity in 1968 when Walter Mischel Published Personality and Assessment³, rivaling the idea of the “person” side of the debate arguing that situational factors predicts behavior of people more accurately.

Decades after the debate has been raised, Situationism prevailed. “The postmodern view of self that emerged around this time, influenced by theorist like Erving Goffman, author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life⁴, suggested that social life is a performance and social masks are our true selves,” Cain explains, “Many researchers doubted whether personality traits even existed in any meaningful sense. Personality researchers had trouble finding jobs.”

In the end, just as the #nature-nurture debate melted down to interactionism⁵, person-situation debate has been superseded by a more nuanced understanding. Personality psychologists accepted that fluctuations in our behavior are real and situation-dependent, while making aware that there truly are fixed personality traits each of us cannot escape from.

Even Mischel admitted that some traits are fixed, but believed that they tend to occur in patterns. Brian Little tend to posit the same claim as he almost created single-handedly the Free Trait Theory#, claiming that fixed traits and free traits coexist.