Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [204]
(He was equally disenchanted with behaviorism, which, he said, portrayed the human being as a purely “reactive” organism—acting only in response to external prodding—when in fact human beings are “proactive” and driven largely by their own goals, purposes, intentions, plans, and moral values.12)
During his graduate years Allport began devising his own paper-and-pencil tests of personality traits. He and his older brother, Floyd, a psychologist, created a test that was more objective than the Bernreuter and other early efforts. In order to measure what they called “ascendance-submission,” they asked respondents not how ascendant or submissive they were but how they would behave in specific situations involving that trait dimension. An example:13
Someone tries to push ahead of you in line. You have been waiting for some time, and can’t wait much longer. Suppose the intruder is the same sex as yourself, do you usually
—remonstrate with the intruder ….
—“look daggers” at the intruder or make clearly audible comments to your neighbor ….
—decide not to wait, and go away ….
—do nothing ….
After trying the test on a number of volunteers, the Allports concluded that people who gave either an ascendant or a submissive answer to any one challenging situation were very likely to give the same kind of answer to other such situations. “People by and large,” they wrote, “do tend consistently to occupy a given spot on the continuum from high ascendance to low submission.” This seemed to them to establish the reality of traits and of the similarity of a person’s behavior in similar situations. As Allport later put it:
If it can be proved that one kind of activity is usually associated with another kind of activity, there is evidence that something underlies the two activities, viz., a trait… [i.e.,] a neuropsychic structure having the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide equivalent (meaningfully consistent) forms of adaptive and expressive behavior. 14
Then why did the children tested by Hartshorne and May behave inconsistently? Allport found an answer in Gestalt theory. Each individual’s traits are assembled in a unique configuration with a hierarchical structure: at the top is the person’s master quality or cardinal trait; below it are a handful of central traits, the ordinary foci of the individual’s life (the kind of qualities, said Allport, that we are likely to mention when writing a letter of recommendation); and finally below these are a large number of secondary traits, each aroused by a few specific stimuli.15 So a person’s behavior could be inconsistent in specific ways but consistent—Allport preferred “congruent”—in larger ones.
For example, he said, if you observe a man strolling and see him later hurrying to take a book back to the library, you might judge him inconsistent because in one situation he ambles, in the other hurries. But that is trait behavior at the secondary level. A more central trait is flexibility. If you asked him to write large on a blackboard and small on a paper and he did so, you could judge him flexible—as he is, too, in his walking. His behavior in both activities exhibits flexibility and thus is congruent, though not consistent.16
This was also Allport’s solution to the question: Why is it so common for a person to exhibit traits that seem incompatible or to behave in different situations in ways that seem inconsistent? Transient moods or “states” often make for what looks like inconsistency;