Situation Debate Research Articles

Debate and well-being in self-managed groups: the moderating role of divergent status perceptions

Research suggests that debate, that is, open discussion behavior in work groups, can affect group-level outcomes. Yet, little is known about how debate may affect group member well-being. Drawing from the literature on debate and open conflict norms, we hypothesize that debate and well-being are positively associated because differing views can be shared and discussed openly. Additionally, based on theories on status conflicts and diversity, we expect that this relationship is moderated by the divergence of status perceptions within the group. Specifically, we propose that the positive relationship between group-level debate and well-being is stronger when group members’ perceptions of the hierarchical social status distribution in their group diverge strongly (rather than little) because in this situation debate can help resolve differing status construals. Data for this study came from 163 members of 29 self-organized activist groups that pursued social and/or ecological goals. Group members reported the level of debate within their group, perceived status distribution, and their individual well-being. Results of multilevel modeling showed that debate and well-being were positively related and that divergence of status perceptions moderated this relationship. With our study, we expand research on debate by investigating its relationship with well-being. Our study adds to the literature on status dynamics by showing that not only the distribution of social status, but also the divergent perception of its distribution is an important feature of status dynamics. Finally, we advance the literature by applying constructs from work and organizational psychology to activist well-being.

When subordinates do not follow: A typology of subordinate resistance as perceived by leaders

Whereas a plethora of research investigated subordinates who accept their leaders’ influence attempts (i.e., those who follow), we focus here on the reversed perspective, namely subordinates who decide not to follow their leaders’ requests. For example, a subordinate may intentionally lower their effort, regularly pass-off work tasks to colleagues, or take the leader for a fool. The purpose of the present study was to develop a conceptual account of this phenomenon. More specifically, we aimed to develop a classification of subordinate resistance as perceived by leaders that can guide future research on this multifaceted phenomenon. To achieve this goal, we conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with organizational leaders. We utilized topic modeling to map out five categories of subordinate resistance (i.e., entitlement, contact seeking/avoiding, effort minimization, emotionally fluctuating communication, and undermining team cohesion). In a second study (N = 1,229), we investigated the frequency with which leaders experienced each category of resistance, and explored leader-related antecedents (demographics, cognitive ability, personality) we well as situational antecedents (industry). We discuss a proposed nomological net of subordinate resistance, consequences that subordinates (and leaders) might face when engaging in (experiencing) subordinate resistance, and how the person–situation debate may contribute to understanding when subordinate resistance occurs.

Assertiveness and curiosity: our next steps towards the NHS of the future.

In Rachel Handscombe’s previous article for the British Journal of General Practice she reflected on what training for a marathon can tell us about achieving and sustaining peak performance as a GP. Her prescription was ‘more rest, variety, encouragement, and acknowledgement that we are doing our best’ .1 This article is about the other side of the story, and it revolves around the person–situation debate (which has been raging since Sigmund Freud 130 years ago), that being: do we possess stable traits that can reliably predict the action we will take, or are we for the most part slaves to the situation? We struggle with the latter possibility because a sense of control is an important part of effective psychological functioning. However, an increasing number of psychologists are coming around to the view that we have far less agency than we think: ‘so decisions are being made, not by a conscious rational agent, but by the underlying [unconscious] processes. The rational self only notices the decisions being made and thinks that it is the author of these decisions.’ 2 The debate is highly relevant to the future of general …

On the concepts of character and personality: Correctly interpreting the statistical evidence putatively relevant to the disposition–situation debate

Complementing Banicki’s (2017) recent discussion of the conceptual and historical aspects of the distinction between theoretical notions of “character” and “personality,” the present commentary is intended as a corrective to the long-standing misinterpretation of empirical findings generated by research psychologists putatively bearing on the theoretical assumption of temporal and trans-situational stability in individuals’ behavioral manifestations of their personal attributes, whether conceived as features of character or as traits of personality. It is hoped that this corrective can facilitate more fruitful future discussions of the issues that Banicki has raised.

Person-Situation Debate Revisited: Phase Transitions with Quenched and Annealed Disorders

We study the q-voter model driven by stochastic noise arising from one out of two types of nonconformity: anticonformity or independence. We compare two approaches that were inspired by the famous psychological controversy known as the person–situation debate. We relate the person approach with the quenched disorder and the situation approach with the annealed disorder, and investigate how these two approaches influence order–disorder phase transitions observed in the q-voter model with noise. We show that under a quenched disorder, differences between models with independence and anticonformity are weaker and only quantitative. In contrast, annealing has a much more profound impact on the system and leads to qualitative differences between models on a macroscopic level. Furthermore, only under an annealed disorder may the discontinuous phase transitions appear. It seems that freezing the agents’ behavior at the beginning of simulation—introducing quenched disorder—supports second-order phase transitions, whereas allowing agents to reverse their attitude in time—incorporating annealed disorder—supports discontinuous ones. We show that anticonformity is insensitive to the type of disorder, and in all cases it gives the same result. We precede our study with a short insight from statistical physics into annealed vs. quenched disorder and a brief review of these two approaches in models of opinion dynamics.

Safeness and Treatment Mitigate the Effect of Loneliness on Satisfaction With Elderly Care.

Maximizing satisfaction among the older persons is the goal of modern individualized elderly care and how to best achieve this is of relevance for people involved in planning and providing elderly care services.Purpose of the Study:What predicts satisfaction with care among older persons can be conceived as a function of process (how care is performed) and the older person. Inspired by the long-standing person versus situation debate, the present research investigated the interplay between person- and process-related factors in predicting satisfaction with elderly care.Design and Methods:A nationwide sample was analyzed, based on a questionnaire with 95,000 individuals using elderly care services.Results:The results showed that person-related factors (i.e., anxiety, health, and loneliness) were significant predictors of satisfaction with care, although less strongly than process-related factors (i.e., treatment, safeness, and perceived staff and time availability). Among the person-related factors, loneliness was the strongest predictor of satisfaction among older persons in nursing homes. Interestingly, a path analysis revealed that safeness and treatment function as mediators in linking loneliness to satisfaction.Implications:The results based on a large national sample demonstrate that the individual aging condition to a significant degree can be countered by a well-functioning care process, resulting in higher satisfaction with care among older persons.

The Person–Situation Debate Revisited: Effect of Situation Strength and Trait Activation on the Validity of the Big Five Personality Traits in Predicting Job Performance

Derived from two theoretical concepts--situation strength and trait activation--we develop and test an interactionistmodel governing the degree to which five-factormodel personality traits are related to job performance. One concept--situation strength--was hypothesized to predict the validities of all of the Big Five traits, while the effects of the other--trait activation--were hypothesized to be specific to each trait. Based on this interactionist model, personality--performance correlations were located in the literature, and occupationally homogeneous jobs were coded according to their theoretically relevant contextual properties. Results revealed that all five traits were more predictive of performance for jobs in which the process by which the work was done represented weak situations (e.g., work was unstructured, employee had discretion to make decisions). Many of the traits also predicted performance in job contexts that activated specific traits (e.g., extraversion better predicted performance in jobs requiring social skills, agreeableness was less positively related to performance in competitive contexts, openness was more strongly related to performance in jobs with strong innovation/ creativity requirements). Overall, the study's findings supported our interactionist model in which the situation exerts both general and specific effects on the degree to which personality predicts job performance

Débat d’idées et mise en oeuvre des projets d’actions en jeu de Football: cas des garçons de troisième année secondaire en Tunisie

The purpose of this article is to identify action projects developed by boys at a time of debate ideas then see how to implement these projects in game situations The method used is to choose for descriptive analysis, exploratory discursive practices of a group of boys (8 lessons, 14 boys 14 years: T = 6 hours of actual practice. In this research it was decided to: 1) study qualitative discourse analysis of the boys situation debate of ideas and identification of projects of action set, 2) a quantitative study: verification of the achievement of these common decisions. Validation action projects for both teams appear from the 6th session and allow progression for the second position played. The boys at the end of cycle better interpreting the relations of opposition and opt for more action projects feasible.

Situationism and the Concept of a Situation

Abstract: The concept of a situation underlying the debate between moral situationists and dispositionists conceals various underexplored complexities. Some of those issues have been engaged recently in the so‐called psychology of situations, but they have been slow to receive attention in mainstream philosophy. I invoke various distinctions among situations, and show how situationists have selectively chosen certain types of situations that, for conceptual reasons, skew the argument in their favour. I introduce the concept of a ‘virtue‐calibrated situation’, and argue that if the person–situation debate is to move forward in philosophy as it has in psychology, it must focus on such situations. I bring to bear evidence from analytic and continental philosophy, as well as from social and personality psychology.

THE PERSON–SITUATION DEBATE: IMPLICATIONS FOR MILITARY LEADERSHIP AND CIVILIAN–MILITARY RELATIONS

The so-called person–situation debate in psychology, which pits internal, personality-based explanations of behavior against external, environment or situation-based explanations seems headed for a resolution that will somehow include elements of both perspectives. These two alternative views of human behavior have also been applied to that subset of human behavior thought of as leadership, and in this domain a rapprochement also seems well underway. In the domain of ethical leadership, however, especially as applied to military misconduct, public discussion of such events is dominated by strictly situation-based explanations, while institutional developments within the military are showing signs of integration, paralleling developments in the broader academic domain. The public discussion of such events thus lags behind the approach to ethical conduct in war taken by the military, which increasingly integrates personal and situational factors in the moral and ethical development of soldiers and leaders. Potential consequences of overreliance on situationist approaches to military ethics are discussed.

In favor of the synthetic resolution to the person–situation debate

This article has two aims. First, we review the person–situation debate and what we believe to be its central issues. We propose that one of the most central issues in the debate was consistency, and argue that recognizing different conceptions of consistency is essential for a resolution to the debate. Second, we describe a synthesis resolution that incorporates different types of consistency and takes into account the important contributions of both the trait and social–cognitive approaches to personality. We note several current lines of research following from the synthesis, several of which are represented in the current special issue.

Much ado about nothing: The person–situation debate

The person–situation debate is an empty exercise because the perpetrators cannot define or measure situations.

Personality, personal expression, and the situation

The person–situation debate often characterized personality as equivalent to a few modestly stable behaviors: for example, the stability of sociability, or honesty, or helping across situations. Does a small group of social behaviors, however, really translate into an adequate vision of personality? Personality is really much more than its expressed behaviors.

The person–situation interaction is increasingly outpacing the person–situation debate in the scientific literature: A 30-year analysis of publication trends, 1978–2007

The person–situation interaction is increasingly outpacing the person–situation debate in the scientific literature: A 30-year analysis of publication trends, 1978–2007

Personality and personal control

2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This much is beyond contention: in 1968, an extraordinary psychologist, Walter Mischel, published an extraordinary book, Personality and Assessment, the 40th anniversary of which we celebrate here. Of course, the book itself engendered decades of ebullient dispute; one factor elevating the stakes in the ‘‘person–situation debate” is that capitulation to the ‘‘situationist” perspective (Ross & Nisbett, 1991) appears to compel us ‘‘beyond freedom and dignity.” Kihlstrom (2008) laments a ‘‘dark side” of social psychology, clouded by a ‘‘long-standing” alliance with behaviorism, an impression that social psychologists have not always discouraged: Bargh and Ferguson (2000) contend that social and cognitive psychologists have produced ‘‘rather obvious evidence that even controlled mental processes are themselves controlled and determined” (p. 939). As a result, the person–situation debate sometimes seems a proxy war for another even more ancient conflict: philosophy’s free will and determinism controversy (Doris, 2002, in preparation). Many participants in the person–situation debate appear to assume, more or less explicitly, that personality influences entail freedom and responsibility, and situational influences entail determinism and exculpation (Mischel, 1997; Zimbardo, 2004). This dichotomy is misleading; we should be wary of equating dispositional influences on behavior with personal control of behavior. As research on implicit personality shows, many important aspects of personality are only imperfectly captured by explicit self-reports (e.g., Back, Schmukle, & Egloff, submitted for publication), suggesting that their influence on behavior may proceed outside of conscious awareness (e.g., Vazire & Funder, 2006). Indeed, recent research has shown that some facets of personality may be more accessible to others than to the self. In particular, informant ratings of how a person typically behaves are at about as accurate as self-ratings (Kolar, Funder, & Colvin, 1996) and, more importantly, informants’ ratings capture some of the variance in behavior that is not captured by self-ratings (Vazire, 2006; Vazire & Mehl, 2008). Thus, one factor that is frequently cited as an impediment to personal control, lack of conscious awareness (e.g., Wegner, 2005), may obtain as much for personal variables as for situational variables. Failures of self-awareness may accrue to personality as much as to situations, and either sort of ignorance may be implicated in breakdowns of self-control. In short, personality may pose no less of a threat to free will than do situations. Therefore, understanding personal control requires that we eschew diametric opposition of person and situation; indeed, if personal control is possible, it is made possible only by recruiting both personal and situational resources. As Mischel (1997) remarked of his classic delay-of-gratification studies, ‘‘The fact that these distinctively human efforts also require the strategic utilization and support of situations undermines neither the role of the person nor of the situation, but requires attention to their interplay [. . .].” (p. 184). How exactly person and situation combine to effect the sort of personal control that comprises the ethical singularity of the human organism is not yet completely understood, but it is clear that the past 40 years of research and debate have brought us closer to understanding it. 0092-6566/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2008.12.033 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: svazire@artsci.wustl.edu (S. Vazire). Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009) 274–275

Virtue ethics and the social psychology of character: Philosophical lessons from the person–situation debate

(I'm assuming that no abstracts are requested for such short [500 word] submissions, but please let me know if you would like one anyway.)

The legacy of the person–situation debate for understanding variability in emotional experience

abstract 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. People can experience a vast range of different emotionalexperiences, ranging from joy and love to anger, sadness andfear. Where the person situation debate revolved around thequestion how we can explain why people behave the way theydoŽ, a tantalizing question that has occupied emotion research-ers over the past decades is how we can account for the vari-ability in emotional experiences across different persons andcontexts, or„stated differently„how we can understand whypeople feel the way they feelŽ. As it turns out, there is remark-able similarity between the answers that have been formulatedto this question and the insights that emerged from the person situation debate.Appraisal theories of emotions are widely regarded as one ofthe most compelling accounts of the elicitation and differentia-tion of different emotions (Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001).They posit that an individual evaluates (orappraises) his or hercircumstances as a function of his or her own concerns, goals,and competencies (e.g., as positive or negative, as fair or unfair,controllable or not) and that the outcome of this appraisal pro-cess is associated with speci“c emotional experiences. For in-stance, when publically insulted, a person may appraise thisevent as negative and unfair, and he or she may experience an-ger in response to the event. As such, appraisal theories stronglyresonate with one of the key insights from the person situationdebate by assuming that the emotion-eliciting process rests onthe interaction between person and environmental characteris-tics (Griner & Smith, 2000; Kuppens & Van Mechelen, 2007).Moreover, contemporary appraisal research has shown that notonly how people appraise their circumstances, but also how spe-ci“c appraisals are associated with emotional experience is sub-ject to individual differences. In other words, the same appraisedmeaning may not be associated with the same emotion for allindividuals (Kuppens, Van Mechelen, Smits, De Boeck, & Ceule-mans, 2007). Taken together, appraisal theories can thus be con-sidered to re”ect a speci“c realization of the CAPS theoryformulated by Mischel (Mischel & Shoda, 1998). In this theoryit is likewise posited that a situation elicits particular cogni-tive-affective units (in the emotion context: appraisals), thatthe excitatory and inhibitatory in”uences of these units (apprais-als) combine to determine the persons behavior (emotion), andthat individual differences in behavior (emotion) result fromhow people differ in the accessibility of the CAPS units (apprais-als) and in the ways these units give rise to behavioral outcomes(emotions).It is no mere coincidence that our current knowledge about howemotions come about strongly re”ects and corroborates what wehave learned from the person situation debate. If there is anythingto learn from this fundamental convergence reached between thepersonality and emotion domain, it is that for both the key taskahead lies in studying the regularities and consistencies in peoplescontextualized behavioral and emotional signatures„how peoplebehave and feel in response to speci“c contexts„if we truly wantto capture the richness, and both stability and variability in howpeople behave and feel the way they do.AcknowledgmentsPeter Kuppens is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Fundfor Scienti“c Research, Flanders (FWO) and an Honorary Re-search Fellow at the University of Melbourne. The work for this

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

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.

Applying lessons from the person–situation debate to attachment theory and research

2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. The person–situation debate was fundamentally concerned with the issue of consistency (Fleeson & Noftle, 2008). According to the traditional trait perspective, people are consistent across time, situations, and behavioral content. Conversely, the social cognitive perspective argues for inconsistency, proposing that one’s momentary thoughts, feelings, and interpretations of events have a fundamental influence on behavior. In general, attachment theory has a strong bias toward consistency, viewing people as having stable attachment styles. At the same time, from its very beginning, it was clear that attachment also has a dynamic, situationally-responsive quality. The first method developed to assess attachment style, Ainsworth’s strange situation procedure, used reactions to a set of situations, to classify infants into categories, launching a tradition of attachment-related typology. Hazan and Shaver (1987), who extended Bowlby’s theory, transferred this typology to adult relationships. Following traditional trait approaches, attachment researchers have studied coherence in attachment from infancy to adulthood, stability across adulthood, and prediction of various outcomes from attachment styles. After years of research into the correlates of attachment types or styles, however, recently more attention has been given to state-based attachment processes, generating a parallel line of research. In this line, social cognitive approaches have guided researchers to study the accessibility of association networks and attachment schemas, relationship-specific attachments, and the effects of life events on attachment. Despite the theoretical commonll rights reserved. alities of these literatures, the two lines have yet to be systematically integrated, and this is where lessons from the person–situation debate are useful. Personality trait research has begun to connect the trait level of analysis to the state level, by aggregating personality-relevant behavior across states within daily life, revealing simultaneously high stability and high variability (Fleeson, 2007). Attachment research is beginning to empirically address similar questions of consistency, taking into account situational influences and relationship contexts (Gillath & Shaver, 2007; Fraley, 2007; La Guardia, Ryan, Couchman, & Deci, 2000); however, still little is known about attachment fluctuation and functioning in the moment, and their links to attachment style. These gaps in the literature partly stem from the lack of a state attachment measure. To deal with this issue, we (Gillath, Hart, Noftle, & Stockdale, 2009) have developed and validated a new state measure that will be useful for connecting the trait and state levels of analysis in attachment research. Answering how much fluctuation exists in attachment-related beliefs, feelings, and attitudes will reveal the relative consistency of attachment styles. Such findings will also contribute to a broader grasp of consistency, contrasting the narrower, theoretically-derived attachment constructs with the broader, empirically-derived Big Five. It is already clear that attachment styles, much like personality traits, are consistent in some respects and inconsistent in others. Looking to the future, attachment research will benefit by applying the lessons of the person–situation debate to answer how and why attachment fluctuates in everyday life. Shoda, Mischel, and Wright (1994) conceptualized the situation–behavior profile to demonstrate and explain behavior variability in E.E. Noftle, O. Gillath / Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009) 260–261 261 personality. This concept, and others like it (see Fleeson, 2007), could be profitably introduced in to attachment research to investigate both nomothetic and idiographic situational contingencies of attachment behaviors.

The End of the Person–Situation Debate: An Emerging Synthesis in the Answer to the Consistency Question

AbstractWe review the history and current status of the person–situation debate. We propose that the person–situation debate (1) is over and (2) that it ended in a ‘Hegelian’ synthesis. Specifically, we propose the following synthesis resolution: There are multiple types of consistency; behavior is consistent for some of those types and not for others; and personality and traits exist in the forms that produce the consistent behaviors. Incorporating both personality processes and trait structures in research will move personality research forward. In this article, we summarize the advances that the two perspectives have generated by working in opposition; we explain why both sides will suffer from continuing to work independently; and we anticipate several future directions that synthesis‐informed personality research can and should take.