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.

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.

Personality and Social InteractionInterpenetrating Processes

A central tenet of social constructivist approaches to personality is that people’s social relationships determine the development, structure, and expression of personality. This view has been difficult to reconcile with a widely accepted view among researchers and lay perceivers alike that personality consists of internal, characteristic dispositions that supersede particular relationships. Research within the social cognitive tradition provides an opportunity to integrate these ideas by suggesting that (1) behavioral variability across situations is stable, and is an important expression of the personality system; and (2) the stability and predictability of behavioral variability is readily discovered when situations are categorized in interpersonal terms. We describe a recent theoretical framework proposing a culturally and interpersonally bound personality system (Mendoza-Denton & Mischel, 2007) that accounts for the ways in which people’s behavior is attuned to the interpersonal context, and review several lines of research that are consistent with the principles of this general framework.

Context in Person, Person in Context

This chapter applies a cultural psychology framework to provide a macrosocial account of social-personality psychology. Extending the standard social-psychological emphasis on the importance of context, the first section considers the cultural constitution of personal experience. A history of engagement with particular cultural affordances shapes a person with an associated set of residual tendencies such that what appear to be “personal” dispositions are instead a form of context in person: embodied traces of a person’s engagement with ecological structures of mind that continually reconstitute the person’s habitual ways of being. Extending an emphasis on importance of subjective construal, the second section considers the psychological constitution of cultural worlds. As people act on subjective interpretations, their behavior leaves traces on objective realities to create a form of person in context: everyday constructions of reality that bear the influence of personal activity. In this way, a cultural psychology analysis balances the traditional social psychological emphasis on “the power of the situation” with a restored emphasis on the power of the culturally grounded person as (re)constructor of intentional worlds.

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.