Predicting Behaviors from Situated Identities

Abstract

We postulate that persons form expectations about social behavior by encoding their past observations into schemata composed of dispositional dimensions characterizing participant actors. These schemata enable the observer to anticipate an actor's choice to the extent that hislher present action alternatives produce situated identities that are comparable (i.e., similarly evaluated along the same dimensions) to those created by previously observed activity. Using the Machiavellian scale, observers are able to formulate equivalent expectations about appropriate responses to one subset of items on a psychological scale from observations of responses to another subset or from situated-identity information. Different scale formats yield differential degrees of accuracy in response prediction, and the differences that result from behavioral observations parallel those produced by situated-identity ratings. The implications of these findings for bias and disguise in psychological scales are briefly discussed. It is a fundamental axiom of attribution and symbolic interactionist theories that people perceptually constitute their social worlds in order to anticipate subsequent events and to guide their behaviors in accord with these expectations. Attribution theory suggests that they do so in terms of schemata based on inferences about the causes of events. Interactionists have not specified the terms in which behavior is represented as meaningful, since these are seen as arbitrary symbols that emerge from interaction. The implication is that their form and content may vary almost infinitely, depending on the course of activity, the purposes of participants, and both past events and future anticipations (Stryker and Gottlieb, 1976:441). Situated-identity theory was developed from these two orientations in an attempt to deal with three basic problems they create: First, the causal language of attribution theory and the indeterminate concepts of interactionism are awkward and complicated ways of representing social events and actors. They potentially involve varying levels of conceptualization. Second, strict causality seems too narrow a focus to account for the range of social action, while the vagueness of the interactionist