Theories of Personality
Rotter & Mischel
Chapter 17
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© 2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved
Outline
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Overview of Cognitive Social Learning Theory
Biography of Julian Rotter
Introduction to Rotter’s Social Learning Theory
Predicting Specific Behaviors
Predicting General Behaviors
Maladaptive Behavior
Psychotherapy
Cont’d
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Outline
• Introduction to Mischel’s Personality System
• Biography of Walter Mischel
• Background of the Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
• Cognitive-Affective Personality System
• Related Research
• Critique of Cognitive Social Learning Theory
• Concept of Humanity
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Overview of Cognitive Social
Learning Theory
• Assumes Cognitive Factors Help Shape How
People Will React to Environmental Forces
• Expectations of Future Events are Prime
Determinants of Performance
• Focus on Interaction of People with Meaningful
Environments
• Examination of Consistency or Inconsistency of
Personality
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Biography of Rotter
• Born in Brooklyn in 1916
• In high school, he became familiar with the
writings of Freud and Adler
• In 1941, received a PhD in clinical psychology
from Indiana University
• Published Social Learning and Clinical
Psychology in 1954
• Moved to the University of Connecticut in 1963
and has remained there since his retirement
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Introduction to Rotter’s Social
Learning Theory
• Rests on Five Hypotheses
– Humans interact with their meaningful
environments
– Human personality is learned
– Personality has a basic unity
– Motivation is goal directed
– People are capable of anticipating events
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Predicting Specific Behaviors
• Behavior Potential
• Expectancy
• Reinforcement Value
– Internal and external reinforcement
– Reinforcement-reinforcement sequences
• Psychological Situation
• Basic Predicting Formula
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Predicting General Behaviors
• Generalized Expectancies
• Needs
– Categories of needs
• Recognition-Status
• Dominance
• Independence
• Protection-Dependency
• Love and Affection
• Physical Comfort
– Need components
• Need Potential
• Freedom of Movement
• Need Value
• General Prediction Formula
• Internal and External Control of Reinforcement
• Interpersonal Trust Scale
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Maladaptive Behavior
• Rotter defined maladaptive behavior as any
persistent behavior that fails to move a person
closer to a desired goal
• Combination of high need value and low freedom
of movement
– That is, unrealistically high goals in combination with
low ability to achieve them
– Characterized by unrealistic goals, inappropriate
behaviors, inadequate skills or unreasonably low
expectancies of executing behavior
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Psychotherapy
• Bring Freedom of Movement and Need Value
into Harmony
• Changing Goals
– The role of the therapist
• Help patients understand the faulty nature of their goals
• Teach them ways to strive toward realistic goals
• Eliminating Low Expectancies
– The role of the therapist
• Teach effective problem solving
• Help client to make distinction between past and
present and teach assertiveness
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Introduction to Mischel’s
Personality Theory
• Early Work Objected to Trait Theory Explanation
of Behavior
• Cognitive Activities and Specific Situations Play
Role in Determining Behavior
• Recently Have Advocated Reconciliation between
Processing Dynamics and Personal Dispositions
Approaches
• Holds that Behavior Stems from Relatively Stable
Personal Dispositions and Cognitive-Affective
Processes Interacting with a Particular Situation
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Biography of Mischel
• Born in Vienna in 1930
• Second son of upper-middle-class parents
• When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, his
family left for the U.S.
• Received his PhD from Ohio State University in
1956, where he worked under Rotter
• Published Personality and Assessment in 1968
• Has taught at Colorado, Harvard, Stanford, and
Columbia, where he remains as an active
researcher
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Background of the CognitiveAffective Personality System
• Consistency Paradox
– Although both laypeople and professionals tend
to believe that behavior is quite consistent,
research suggests that it is not
• Person-Situation Interaction
– Mischel believes that behavior is best predicted
from an understanding of the person, the
situation, and the interaction between person
and situation
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Cognitive-Affective Personality System
• Behavior Prediction
– Individuals should behave differently as situations vary
• Situation Variables
– All those stimuli that people attend to in a given situation
• Cognitive-Affective Units
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Encoding strategies
Competencies and self-regulatory strategies
Expectancies and beliefs
Goals and values
Affective responses
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Related Research
• Locus of Control and Holocaust Heroes
– Midlarsky et al. (2005)
• Heroes had a higher internal locus of control
• Person-Situation Interaction
– Kammrath et al. (2005)
• The average person understands that, depending on their personality,
people adjust their behavior to match the situation
– Mendoza-Denton et al. (2001)
• Conditional and interactionist self-evaluations buffer negative
reactions to failure
• The social-cognitive interactionist conceptualization is more
appropriate than traditional “decontextualized” views of personality
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Critique of Social
Learning Theory
• High on Generating Research, Internal
Consistency, Parsimony, and Ability to
Organize Knowledge
• Average on Its Ability to Guide Action
and to Be Falsified
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Concept of Humanity
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Free Choice over Determinism
Teleology over Causality
Conscious over Unconscious
Social Factors over Biology
Uniqueness over Similarity
Rotter's view is slightly more optimistic
whereas Mischel's is about in the middle
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