Developmental psychology.pdf

414 Integration of Behavior
When we examine Jenny, Ross, and their friends at a dinner party, we know
that the situation is not the sole determiner of behavior. Each person behaves somewhat
differently from the others, based on personal factors, as well as the present situation.
This view, that behavior is a function of personal traits and also the situation, is known
as interactionism. The idea is that both factors are important, but they combine differently
in different people.
Consider situations that might provoke an aggressive reaction: someone interrupts
Ross's conversation; a subway rider intentionally pushes him aside; people
move ahead of him in a waiting line; and he purchases fruit that is spoiled. To the
extent that Ross responds the same way in all of these situations, it seems appropriate
to speak of traits. He is generally aggressive, passive, or whatever.
But most people show a variety of responses. One person may become incensed
by the physical contact, yet he may be unaware of rudeness in conversation. Another
may become verbally aggressive when interrupted yet fearful on the subway. Still another
may blame himself for buying the spoiled fruit and blame the subway rider for
bumping into him. In other words, some people become aggressive in certain ways in
certain situations; others become aggressive in different ways. For many people it may
be overgeneralizing to speak of aggressiveness as a trait. We might speak instead of
"physical aggressiveness," "aggressiveness in interpersonal relations," "verbal aggression,"
"retaliatory aggressiveness," and so forth. In this sense, behavior is a function
of specific situations and people with specific characteristics (Mischel, 1981).
Situational Tests With this emphasis on the environment, learning theorists are
not inclined to use projective tests or even personality inventories. The former reveal
inner states, presumably of little interest to traditional learning theorists, and the latter
indicate only what subjects say about themselves, not what they actually do. No one
method is used exclusively, but many learning theorists, to decide how an individual
will behave, try to observe that person in a situational test, which is as similar as possible
to the context in which the subject must perform later.
Years ago a situational test was used to select young men for difficult wartime
missions. They were taken in small groups to a brook regarded as a raging torrent, so
fast and deep that nothing could be rested on the bottom, and their task was to transport
heavy equipment across it. To solve this problem, leadership and cooperation were
required in building a bridge, an overhead cable, or some other device, and the examiners
looked for signs of these behaviors.
Another situational test occurred when adolescent boys were living together
for six weeks in a residential cottage for juvenile offenders. Gradually, different boys
claimed different portions of the cottage as their domain. Later it was confirmed that
the most desirable areas of the cottage were controlled by the strongest and most aggressive
individuals. In other words, in this natural setting the dominant and submissive
boys could be identified simply by their use of the more and less desirable areas,
respectively (Sundstrom & Altman, 1974).
A disadvantage of situational tests is that sometimes they are time-consuming
to construct and to administer, since the subjects must be observed continuously. However,
they are potentially quite useful in making predictions about human behavior
(Van Schoyck & Grasha, 1981).
HUMANISTIC VIEWPOINT
We have seen Jenny Masterson from a psychoanalytic viewpoint as a prisoner of her
past, smothering her son in perhaps an unconscious attempt to gain or replace her own
thwarted childhood affection. We have seen her in the trait approach as a unique constellation
of relatively consistent traits, especially suspicion, self-centeredness, independence,
and perhaps morbid sentimentality. From the learning viewpoint, her behavior