Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [213]
FIGURE 17
Three personality profiles, according to Cattell’s sixteen-factor system
Cattell’s 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire was in wide use for some time; in recent years it has largely been supplanted by less complex analyses, many of which are its intellectual offspring.
Learned Personality
No, not “learnéd” but “learned.” Behaviorist theory, quite unlike either psychodynamic theory or trait theory, sees personality as nothing but a set of learned (conditioned) responses to stimuli. Psychodynamic and trait theories, in their different ways, see personality as inherent qualities of the individual that determine behavior; behaviorists have dismissed such talk as “mysticism,” which deserves no place in scientific psychology. Skinner, in his characteristically immoderate way, called personality or the self merely “an explanatory fiction…a device for representing a functionally unified system of responses.” A trait, he said, is only a group of similar responses that lead to similar reinforcements in various situations; it does not cause behavior but is a label for a set of similarly conditioned responses.46
But the strict behaviorist view proved to be an inadequate explanation of much human behavior—and even of some animal behavior. Tolman, though a behaviorist, saw his rats acting at right-left choice points in a maze as if they were remembering, weighing information, and making decisions; and even before midcentury he and other behaviorists were trying to include internal mental processes in the stimulus-response paradigm.
An important effort of this kind was made by two Yale scientists, the sociologist John Dollard and the psychologist Neal Miller, who in the 1940s jointly worked out a theory of “social learning” as an expansion of behaviorism. Under certain conditions, they noted, rats—contrary to Thorndike’s experience with cats—will imitate each other, evidently learning not by means of S-R conditioning but by means of cognitive processes. In human beings, said Dollard and Miller, much learning is social and takes place through high-level cognitive processes as well as drives and needs that underlie motivation.47
From the 1950s on, a number of other behaviorists further developed social learning theory, particularly its cognitive aspects. Central to all versions of the theory is the concept that human personality and behavior are shaped not only by rewarded actions but by the individuals’ predictions or expectations, based on what they have observed, that specific ways of behaving will yield certain rewards. Although this view is much more cognitive than strictly behaviorist, it differs from both trait theory and psychoanalytic theory in that it still sees experiences and situations—external influences—as the major determinants of personality and behavior.
But in the 1950s, a trait-like modification of the social learning view of personality was made by Julian Rotter (1916–1987), then a professor in his mid-thirties at Ohio State University. Rotter was both a psychotherapist and an experimentalist, and although a behaviorist in the laboratory, his experience as a therapist gave him a respect for cognitive processes and emotions that researchers who are best acquainted with mice and rats often lack. Like most other clinicians, Rotter had found that often his patients’ basic attitudes toward life had been formed by critical experiences, some good and others bad. Recasting this in behavioral terms, he theorized that when particular acts are either rewarded or not rewarded, people develop “generalized expectancies” about which kinds of circumstances and behaviors will or will not be rewarding.48 A student who studies diligently and gets good grades, wins praise, and feels good about himself may come to expect that hard work in other situations will be similarly rewarding; a student who studies hard but fails to get good grades and their associated benefits may come to expect that in