Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [226]
FIGURE 18
Cumulative d scores for each trait domain across the life course (adapted from Brent W. Roberts et al., “Patterns of Mean-Level Change in Personality,” Psychol. Bull. 132, Jan. 2006: 15, by permission)
Still another late development of the field is the winding down of the old quarrel between situationists and dispositionists. Most psychologists are now inclined toward the interactionist view that any given piece of behavior results from the interaction of the situation with the individual’s personality. Similarly, the ancient debate as to whether personality is innate or learned is yielding to the interactionist view. Some psychologists still talk as if parents, peers, social class, and other environmental influences are the only significant determinants of personality; some as if our behavior, like that of most other animals, is largely programmed by our genes. But increasingly, psychologists see the personality and behavior of the individual at every point in life as the outcome of the interaction between his or her innate temperament and all the experiences he or she has had up to that point.
This is a complex concept. Hereditary influences and environmental influences do not merely add up in personality but, like chemicals joining in a compound, interact to form something different from either, which then interacts differently with subsequent experiences. This is the core concept of development, the field of psychological studies to which we turn next.
* It is now called the Institute of Personality and Social Research, and its goals have become much broader.
† In a still later version, the CPI has twenty-eight scales. They measure dominance, capacity for status, sociability, social presence, self-acceptance, independence, empathy, responsibility, socialization, self-control, good impression, communality, well-being, tolerance, achievement via conformance, achievement via independence, intellectual efficiency, psychological-mindedness, flexibility, detachment, norm favoring, realization, managerial potential, work orientation, anxiety, and three measures of masculinity-femininity.
* If these were actual Rorschach blots, each would be on a separate card.
* The original goal of the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research at Berkeley was to further develop and test the OSS assessment method. That goal was abandoned after a time.
TWELVE
The
Developmentalists
“Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”
—English proverb
Many people, when they think of a scientist at work, picture a stereotype: the aproned chemist pouring a fuming liquid into a flask, the cell biologist peering through a microscope, the khaki-clad paleontologist brushing away earth to reveal an ancient bone. But no such image exists of the psychologist at work; psychology is an aggregation of sciences, each with its own mise-en-scène. Even the specific fields within psychology are highly diversified, and none more so than developmental psychology. For instance:1
—A white-coated technician holds the head of an unhappy laboratory rat while an assistant deftly pries apart the lids of its left eye and inserts a tiny opaque contact lens.
—A young woman, very pregnant, lies on a table; a few inches above her abdomen is a loudspeaker through which her own voice, previously recorded, recites a two-minute poem.
—A four-month-old baby is propped up and facing a flashing light; a researcher covertly watches the baby’s face. The light flashes regularly for a while, then flashes less often.
—An eight-month-old boy sits before a miniature stage; a researcher, hidden behind it, pushes a toy dog into view and just as the baby is about to reach for it draws a curtain, hiding the dog.
—A man kneels down next to a five-year-old boy playing with marbles