Journal of Pmsonality and Social Psychology 1987, Vol. 53, No. 6, 1159-1177
Copyright 1987 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/87/$00.75
A Conditional Approach to Dispositional Constructs: The Local Predictability of Social Behavior Jack C. Wright
Walter Mischel
Brown University and Wediko Children's Services
Columbia University
A conditional approach to dispositions is developed in which dispositional constructs are viewed as clusters of if-then propositions. These propositions summarize contingencies between categories of conditions and categories of behavior rather than generalized response tendencies. A fundamental unit for investigatingdispositions is therefore the conditional frequency of acts that are central to a given behavior category in circumscribed situations, not the overall frequency of behaviors. In an empirical application of the model, we examine how people's dispositional judgments are linked to extensiveobservations of targets' behavior in a range of natural social situations. We identify categories of these social situations in which targets' behavior may be best predicted from observers' dispositional judgments, focusing on the domains of aggression and withdrawal. One such category consists of subjectivelydemanding or stressful situations that tax people's performance competencies. As expected, children judged to be aggressiveor withdrawn were variable across situations in dispositionally relevant behaviors, but they diverged into relatively predictable aggressive and withdrawn actions in situations that required the social, self-regulatory,and cognitivecompetencies they lacked. Implications of the conditional approach for personality assessment and person perception research are considered.
Dispositional constructs occupy a central position in personality and social psychology. In the personality literature, considerable debate has focused on the utility of formal dispositional constructs as operationally defined in personality assessment techniques (Buss & Craik, 1983; Epstein & O'Brien, 1985; Miscbel, 1968; Vernon, 1964). In the social psychological literature, a parallel controversy has focused on the way social observers use and abuse dispositional terms when they form personality impressions, make causal attributions, and try to predict behavior (Funder, 1987; Jones, 1979; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Swann, 1984; Wright & Mischel, 1987). Unfortunately, these controver-
This research was supported by Grants MH39349 and 39263 from the National Institute of Health to Walter Mischel and by Biomedical Research Support Grant BS603342 from Brown University to Jack C. Wright. Wewould like to thank the administration, staff, and children of Wediko Children's Services, whose cooperation made this research possible. We are especiallygrateful to Hugh Leichtman and Harry Parad, Wediko's directors, for their support. We would also like to thank Yuichi Shoda for his invaluable assistance at several stages of the research, Jan Eisenman for her help in preparing the article, Michael Susi for making his analyses available to us, and several colleagues, including Nancy Cantor, Monica Rodriguez, and Henri Zukier, for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jack C. Wright, Hunter Laboratory of Psychology, Brown University,Providence, Rhode Island 02912 or to Walter Mischel, Department of Psychology, 309 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University,New York, New York 10027.
sies in both areas of psychology have been concerned more with attacking or defending the utility of dispositional constructs than with clarifying their structure and function. It is this latter, more constructive goal that we pursue in this article. We begin with a brief survey of the classic, relatively contextfree conceptualizations of dispositional constructs that have dominated the literature on personality assessment and person perception. We then examine alternative views of dispositional constructs, which are termed conditional because they focus on the conditional if-then contingencies between situations and behavior, in contrast to models that give little explicit treatment to contexts. In our proposed conditional or contextual model, dispositional constructs are represented as concepts that link categories of acts with categories of conditions in which those acts are expected to occur. The model posits that the structure and function of dispositional constructs are best revealed by identifying the clusters of specific if-then, condition-behavior contingencies people display. In the empirical core of this article, we apply our conditional model to identify how observers' dispositional judgments in two dispositional domains--aggression and withdrawal--are linked to specific condition-behavior contingencies in the lives of children with adjustment problems, children we observed extensively during a summer in a camp setting. In this context we identify one category or equivalence class of naturally occurring social situations in which we hypothesized that targets' behavior may be predicted relatively well from observers' dispositional judgments. This equivalence class consists of subjectively demanding or stressful situations that require the social, self-regulatory, and cognitive compe1159
