Persons and situations act together to shape the course of human lives

Abstract

2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. All the while that personality psychologists were embroiled in the person–situation debate, child psychologists were busy developing their own frameworks for explaining the interplay of persons and situations across the life course. For personality and social psychologists, a key question arising from the person–situation debate was whether aspects of the person or the situation were more powerful in shaping behavior at any one point in time. For the most part, child psychologists have not found this to be a particularly interesting question. Rather, child psychologists, much like parents, teachers, and others invested in children’s well-being, have wanted to know what aspects of persons and situations shape the kind of people children become as their lives unfold. Thus, rather than focusing on the prediction of immediate behavior from present circumstances, child psychologists have focused on the prediction of cumulative behavioral outcomes (e.g., violence, friendships, academic achievement) from the interplay of individuals’ characteristics and the situations that such individuals experience repeatedly (e.g., family, peer, school, and societal environments). This focus on developmental processes and outcomes has yielded two key insights. First, a transactional perspective on development posits that life outcomes result from the complex reciprocal transactions between people and their environments. Although early developmental research focused on the effects of socialization on children, a seminal paper by Bell (1968) complicated the picture by pointing out that children help to shape their own socialization by influencing their parents’ behavior. Parents’ behavior in turn impacts children’s development. Since the time of Bell’s critique, child psychologists have been engaged in the difficult task of tracing the pathways of mutual influence between children and their environments (Bugental & Grusec, 2006). Second, the same real-life environments yield varied long-term outcomes, a principle known asmultifinality. Some of the most dramatic evidence for this principle comes from work on maltreatment, an intense and typically recurrent situation. Maltreated children vary widely in their life outcomes, with some maltreated children showing internalizing or externalizing disorders and others manifesting resilience (Cicchetti, 2008); these varied outcomes are predicted in part by children’s genes and personalities. Research on temperament likewise highlights that children’s early traits interact with their experiences in the development of adaptation and disorder (Caspi & Shiner, 2008). Developmental work points to two conclusions pertinent to the person–situation debate. First, although some situations in life may be immutable, many other situations are changed by the people encountering them; persons and environments thus mutually influence each other over time. Second, many situations have diverse effects, because the effects vary depending on the pre-existing characteristics of the people encountering the situations. Even powerful and sustained situations vary in their long-term outcomes. The fields of personality and social psychology, in their own ways, have come to these same two conclusions in the years following the person–situation debate. What developmental work has to offer to the ongoing resolution of this debate is a rich set of frameworks, methods, and findings that illuminate these complex, nonlinear processes over time.