Response to krupat

Abstract

To the Editor:—I thank Dr. Krupat for his letter in response to my commentary regarding the role of context in determining behavior. In particular, I appreciate his warning about starting a “situation/personality” debate that would parallel the “nature/nurture” debate. I fully agree that such a debate would be unproductive (and worse, boring). Of course, I cannot help but be struck by the fact that his examples appear to be an effort to demonstrate at least one case where stable personal styles triumph across situations. But I recognize that such is the consequence of trying to make a strong point in a short document. Thus, I will take at face value, applaud, and support his call for more sophisticated understandings of when, where, and how context delimits expression of the variety of personal styles that any given individual will likely exhibit. In fact, this is my goal as well, as I tried to indicate in my commentary when I suggested that we not end our study of the person, but nonetheless recognize that exclusive focus on the person will only take us so far. In the spirit of moving away from an unproductive dichotomous debate and toward a useful program of research in this area, therefore, I would like to suggest that the examples Dr. Krupat provides are not a contradiction of my/our point, but rather are support for it. That is, in all his examples, Dr. Krupat demonstrates quite effectively that individuals' behavior within a particular context (e.g., communicating with patients) quite reasonably predicts their future behavior in that context (i.e., communicating with other patients). This is, I believe, in no way inconsistent with my point that individuals' behavior in different contexts (such as filling out paper-and-pencil personality measures or learning style questionnaires in a classroom) is unlikely to predict their behavior in that context. Perhaps, a better motto would be “Predictability within context, variance across contexts.” But if so, the point still remains that no discussion of behavior is sensible without including a rich description of the context in which that behavior has been enacted.