JournalofPersonalityandSocialPsychology
Copyright1988bytheAmericanPsychologicalAssociation,Inc.
1988, Vol. 55. No. 3, 454--469
0022-3514/88/$00.75
Conditional Hedges and the Intuitive Psychology of Traits J a c k C. W r i g h t Brown University and Wediko Children's Services
Walter Mischel Columbia University
The view that the intuitive psychologist exaggerates the consistency of personality implies that dispositional constructs are condition-free summary statements about generalized behavioral tendencies. This article considers the alternative view that dispositional constructs summarize specific condition-behavior contingencies. Despite their condition-free appearance, the dispositional constructs used by child and adult observers in their personality descriptions were hedged by modifiers that reflected knowledge of the variability of behavior. Children's descriptions of their aggressive and withdrawn peers included probabilistic hedges that indicated uncertainty about the occurrence of behaviors (person sometimes does x). Adults made dispositional attributions with greater certainty, but more often modified them with conditional statements which identified when dispositionally relevant behaviors might be observed (person does x when y). Content analyses of these conditional statements revealed that adults systematically linked specific categories of conditions (e.g., aversive interpersonal events) to specific categories of social behavior (e.g., aggressive acts). The results help to clarify how people may hedge dispositional terms in ways that reflect their sensitivity to covariation between situations and behaviors.
Old problems concerning the accuracy of person perception and the utility of trait constructs persist (Block, 1977; Cronbach, 1955; McArthur & Baron, 1983; Meehl, 1954; Shweder, 1977; Swann, 1984). In personality psychology, attention continues to focus on the usefulness of trait constructs in predicting and explaining behavior (Buss & Craik, 1983; Mischel, 1968; Wright & Mischel, 1987). In social psychology, attention has concentrated on the nature of people's intuitive trait theories and the process by which people make inferences about dispositions (Jones, 1979; Nisbett, 1980; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). In both fields, a bifurcation continues between positions that emphasize the utility of context-free trait constructs--either lay or formal ones--and those that emphasize their limitations. In this article we propose that discussions of the utility of dispositional constructs in both fields have missed a key feature
of everyday dispositional constructs, namely, that dispositional constructs include, at least implicitly, references to the variability of dispositionally relevant behaviors and to the conditions in which they occur (Wright & Mischel, 1987). We begin with a brief review of the major conceptions of dispositions, describe an alternative conditional view, and then present empirical evidence from a study of children's and adults' personality descriptions of individuals they know well. Unconditional Views o f Dispositions Recent work proposes that dispositional constructs are summary statements about behavioral tendencies, as illustrated in both act frequency (Buss & Craik, 1983) and aggregationist approaches to personality (Epstein & O'Brien, 1985; Rushton, Brainerd, & Pressley, 1983). In this general framework, the accuracy of dispositional claims (e.g., "that child is honest") is assessed using measures of targets' overall behavioral tendencies (e.g., the relative frequency ofdispositionally relevant acts) over multiple occasions and situations (Rushton et al., 1983). In contrast, what might be termed the attributionist view questions the predictive utility of broad, context-free dispositional constructs, emphasizing instead the variability of social behavior across situations (Nisbett, 1980; Ross, 1977). From this perspective, the low cross-situational consistency of behavior (Hartshorne & May, 1928; Mischel, 1968; Newcomb, 1929) demonstrates the limitations of context-free trait constructs, as used by either formal trait theorists or by the layperson. Although the attributionist framework challenges the utility of such broad dispositional constructs, it nevertheless implies that people use such constructs as if they had high predictive utility, thus revealing that they underestimate the variability of behavior. For example, people prefer dispositional explanations of behavior, even in situations that provide little information about others' actual dispositions or attitudes (Jones, 1979). People
This research was supported in part by Grants MH39349 and 39263 from the National Institutes of Health to Walter Mischel, and by Biomedical Research Support Grant BS603342 from Brown University to Jack C. Wright. We would like to thank the staff and children of Wediko Children's Services, whose cooperation made this work possible. We are especially grateful to Hugh Leichtman and Harry Parad, Wediko's directors, for their support. We also wish to thank Leslie Gavin for serving as the interviewer, Jean Pappas for helping to developthe coding system, training the coders, and for supervising much oftbe coding process. Earlier drafts of this article benefited from comments by Mary Giammarino and Yuichi Shoda. An early version of this article was presented at the Eastern PsychologicalAssociation conference, New York, April 1986. 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, Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027. 454
