Initial Impressions of Others

“Initial impressions” bring together personality and social psychology like no other field of study—“personality” because (1) impressions are about personalities, and (2) perceivers’ personalities affect these impressions; and “social” because (3) social cognitive processes of impression formation, and (4) sociocultural contexts have major effects on impressions. To make these points, we first review how people explicitly describe others: the terms we use, how these descriptions reveal our theories about others, the important roles of traits and types (including stereotypes) in these descriptions, and other prominent frameworks (e.g., narratives and social roles). Then we highlight recent research on the social cognitive processes underlying these descriptions: automatic and controlled attention, the many effects of primes (semantic and affective) and their dependence on contexts, the acquisition of valence, spontaneous inferences about others, and the interplay of automatic and control processes. Third, we examine how accurate initial impressions are, and what accuracy means, as well as deception and motivated biases and distortions. Fourth, we review recent research on effects of target features, perceiver features, and relations between targets and perceivers. Finally, we look at frameworks for understanding explanations, as distinct from descriptions: attribution theory, theory of mind, and simulation theory.

Conceptual and Methodological Issues in the Analysis of Data from Dyads and Groups

This chapter provides a detailed introduction to the analysis of nonindependent data from dyads and groups. We begin the chapter by examining current practices regarding dyadic and group research in social and personality psychology. We then present a set of basic definitions, as well as a brief introduction to multilevel modeling (MLM). Throughout the chapter we present SPSS syntax that can be used to specify the models we describe using variants of MLM. The remainder of the chapter is broken into two sections—the first focuses on dyadic contexts, and the second focuses on group contexts. For dyads we discuss both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, and we provide a detailed discussion of the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM), dyadic growth models, and lagged models. For groups we limit our presentation to methods for cross-sectional research; we describe the APIM for groups, the one-with-many design, and we provide a brief introduction to the social relations model. Examples of how these methods have been used to advance social and personality psychological science are given throughout.

Leadership

Leadership research has a long history from both personality psychological and social psychological perspectives, but integrated treatment of these person-situation influences is surprisingly scarce. To sketch the contours of such an integrated approach, I first outline the personality approach to leadership effectiveness and then move on to an alternative to straightforward conceptualizations of leader personality-leadership effectiveness linkages: a person-in-situation perspective that sees leadership effectiveness as a function of the interaction between leader personality and situation (task, follower, and context characteristics) and that incorporates insights form social psychological, behavior-in-situation research in leadership. Although the person-in-situation perspective is far less developed than probably it should be, there are indicators that it holds more promise for our understanding of leadership effectiveness than more one-sided approaches. I aim to capture what can be concluded on the basis of the evidence so far as well as present an associated research agenda for the further development of this perspective on the interface of the personality and social psychology of leadership.

Five New Ideas About Emotion and Their Implications for Social-Personality Psychology

Emotions are important to personality and social psychology and to the relationship between them. In this chapter, we contrast traditional views of emotion with more recent social-personality views and then contrast these with emerging new perspectives. We consider five questions and conclude that: (1) the components of emotion are not sufficiently correlated to implicate underlying affective programs for specific emotions in the brain; (2) an iterative processing view of emotion elicitation can accommodate both subcortical, unconscious affect and cognitively rich, conscious emotion; (3) emotions influence perceptions in a manner consistent with a resource-based view of both; (4) rather than triggering behavior directly, emotional experience appears to serve a self-teaching function; (5) positive and negative emotions affect thinking styles by promoting or inhibiting the cognitive orientations that are dominant in particular situations. The chapter is thus both historical and modern, emphasizing new developments and their implications for social and personality psychology.

The Intertwined Histories of Personality and Social Psychology

The histories of personality and social psychology have been closely intertwined for more than a century. But there have been several critical differences that have at times acted to separate the two fields. One such divergence involved their models of humans—whether largely irrational (the personality emphasis) or largely rational (the social emphasis). This difference has now subsided with their joint acceptance of a “bounded rationality.” More important has been their difference in focus—the microlevel of the person versus the mesolevel of the group and situation. But now both fields largely agree on interaction models that include both the person and the situation. We trace these tensions between the two fields across six diverse eras: (1) Origins through World War I (1890–1919); (2) Early Developments (1920–1935); (3) War Influences (1936–1950); (4) Structural Differentiation and Slow Acceptance (1951–1965); (5) Dual Crises (1966–1985); and (6) Coming Back Together Again (1986–present).

Self and IdentityDynamics of Persons and Their Situations

In this chapter, we examine how the self both creates and results from experience—both its high points and low points. At a metatheoretical level, we consider how social and personality psychologists typically conceive of and study the self, drawing on the topic of self-esteem to illustrate typical views of the self as dispositional characteristics of persons, the product of situations, or the interaction between them. This person × situation framework has stimulated a great deal of research and had considerable heuristic value for social and personality psychologists who study the self and identity. However, because it views both the person and the situation as static rather than the result of dynamic processes, it fails to account for how people and situations mutually create each other in a process that unfolds over time. Through dynamic processes of reciprocal influence between persons and situations, self and identity can change surprisingly rapidly—change sustained by the situations people create for themselves over time. We consider methodological approaches in personality and social psychology to test these dynamic models of self and identity.

Attitudes and Persuasion

This chapter begins by discussing personality traits and attitudes, two broad internal dispositions, and their relations to behavior. Such dispositions influence general patterns of behavior, and their ability to predict individual behaviors is moderated by their strength or accessibility. This discussion is followed by a distinction between explicit and implicit attitudes and the implications of this distinction for behavioral prediction. Like their explicit counterparts, implicit measures of broad attitudes show only modest correlations with specific behaviors; however, the prediction tends to be somewhat better for automatic than for controlled behaviors. Turning to attitude change, it is shown that implicit and explicit attitudes can be modified by both automatic and deliberative processes. Lasting attitude change depends on central processing of strong arguments contained in a persuasive communication, which is facilitated by such motivating factors as the personal relevance of the message, the need for cognition, and the match between the functions served by the attitude and the content of the message. Finally, theory and research is reviewed showing that individual behaviors can be predicted and changed best by considering internal dispositions that focus directly on the behavior of interest, such as self-efficacy beliefs and intentions.

Personality and Social Psychology

Building on Lewin’s fundamental proposition that “Every psychological event depends upon the state of the person and at the same time on the environment, although their relative importance is different in different cases” (B = f [P, E]; Lewin, 1936, p. 12), this Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology develops the bridges between personality and social psychology. In this opening chapter of the Handbook, we lay out the rationale for and the benefits of interactionist perspectives that span the perspectives of personality and social psychology. In addition, we preview the ways in which the contributors to this Handbook explore the historical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundations for such bridges across a broad range of domains of individual and social functioning. From these explorations, we gain new and rich understandings that promise to advance the state of personality, social psychology, and their integration.

Personality, Social Psychology, and Psychopathology

In this chapter, we first consider the historical and conceptual roots of the tripartite, but at times rocky, marriage of the fields of personality, social, and abnormal psychology. After briefly describing the hopes of early 20th-century scholars to array the study of normal and abnormal behavior, thought, and feeling on the same conceptual continua, we call for the rekindling of these conjunctive hopes. Indeed, we argue that with the advent of current cross-cutting developments in cognitive, socioemotional, and biological perspectives in the broader domain of the behavioral sciences, that the time is ripe for rearranging the marriage among these fields. In order to provide a conceptual frame for such a conjunctive effort, we return to Lewinian field theory and its definition of forces of locomotion in the life space as a particularly notable way to put the examination of normal and abnormal psychology in the same theoretical space. By addressing some critical ideational themes in the domains of personality and social psychology, we attempt to illustrate the overlap of these themes with the ideas and questions of scholars of abnormal behavior. Of course, in deploying a Lewinian model our analyses turn to the dynamics of person x environment interactions in the regions of the life space. In doing so we define the phenomena of meaning-making and the multiple “worldview” existential models in social and personality psychology as the forces constituting the primary dynamics defining the permeability of adaptive regions of the “life space” or phenomenal field. We illustrate these dynamics by detailed consideration of human adaptation in two critical regions or domains of life experience in the behavioral field: the domain of regulatory transactions and the domain of acceptance, social affection, and relationships. While these domains certainly do not exhaust all regions of the life space, we argue that they are particularly pertinent for parsing continua of normal-to-abnormal adaptation and conjoining the nature of psychopathology with the everyday struggles of personal and social significance to all humans. We conclude our analysis by rather unabashed advocacy, not specifically for the model we explore, but for scholarship that is aimed at developing models that link the normal to what we refer to as the abnormal or psychopathological. As humans, the cloths of our selves and our environments are made from common as well as individually unique fibers. We conclude that to disambiguate how such fibers are woven together to frame the forces driving our travels from blissful adaptation to painful maladjustment should be a primary agenda for our interconnected sciences of human behavior.

Person-by-Situation Perspectives on Close Relationships

In this chapter, we review theories and research that have adopted interactional (person-by-situation) approaches to the study of relationships. We first discuss interactional thinking within social and personality psychology, highlighting the fundamental ways in which individuals and situations intersect. We then review three major theoretical models that are exemplars of person-by-situation frameworks and have important implications for interpersonal processes: the cognitive-affective processing system (CAPS) model (Mischel & Shoda, 1995), interdependence theory (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978), and attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980). Following this, we explain how and why different person-by-situation approaches have expanded our understanding of individuals within relationships, focusing on romantic relationships. We spotlight programs of research on self-esteem and dependency/risk regulation, promotion versus prevention orientations, and diathesis-stress models based in attachment theory. These lines of inquiry have documented that certain types of situations elicit unique reactions in people who have specific dispositional strengths (e.g., high self-esteem, greater attachment security) or vulnerabilities (e.g., low self-esteem, greater attachment insecurity). Collectively, this research confirms that one cannot predict or understand how individuals think, feel, or behave in relationships without knowing the relational context in which they are embedded. We conclude by identifying new directions in which interactional-based thinking might head, focusing on how functional strategies can further our understanding of person-by-situation effects.