PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES ...

PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL 

DIFFERENCES 

Intraindividual Stability in the Organization and Patterning of Behavior: 

Incorporating Psychological Situations Into the Idiographic 

Analysis of Personality 

Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Jack C. Wright 

In nomothetic analyses, the cross-situational consistency of individual differences in social behavior, 

assessed in vivo in a camp setting, depended on the similarity in the psychological features of situations. 

As predicted by the social-cognitive theory of personality, idiographic analyses revealed that 

individuals were characterized by stable profiles of;/. . . then . . . , situation-behavior relationships 

that formed "behavioral signatures" of personality (e.g., he aggresses when warned by adults 

but complies when threatened by peers. Thus, the intraindividual organization of behavior variation 

across situations was enduring but discriminatively patterned, visible as distinctive profiles of situation-behavior 

relationships. Implications were examined for an idiographic reconceptualization of 

personality coherence and its behavioral expressions in relation to the psychological ingredients of 

situations. 

Allport (1937) introduced the concept of idiographic analyses 

half a century ago, urging personologists to understand each 

individual deeply in terms of how that person functions, instead 

of just studying "the operations of a hypothetical 'average' 

mind" (p. 61). Nonetheless, the idiographic focus has been bypassed 

by mainstream personality psychology. Probably this neglect 

reflects not a lack of interest but an absence of appropriate 

methods and theory for studying individual functioning in ways 

that are objective and scientific rather than intuitive and clinical. 

In our view, understanding individual functioning requires 

identifying first the psychological situations that engage a particular 

person's characteristic personality processes and the dis- 

Yuichi Shoda and Walter Mischel, Department of Psychology, Columbia 

University; Jack C. Wright, Department of Psychology, Brown 

University, and Wediko Children's Services, Boston, Massachusetts. 

Portions of the present results were presented in Yuichi Shoda's 1991 

Society of Experimental Social Psychology Dissertation Award address, 

Columbus, Ohio, October 1991. 

Preparation of this article and the research was supported in part by 

Grants MH39349 and MH45994 to Walter Mischel from the National 

Institute of Mental Health. 

We thank the administration, staff, and children of Wediko Children's 

Services, whose cooperation made this research possible. We are 

especially grateful to Hugh Leichtman and Harry Parad, Wediko's directors, 

for their support and Mary Powers, Philip Fisher, and Cynthia 

Scott for their assistance in data collection. We thank Niall Bolger, 

Nancy Cantor, Daniel Cervone, Chi Yue Chiu, Ying Yi Hong, Kristi 

Lemm, and Monica Larrea Rodriguez for their valuable comments on 

drafts of this article. 

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yuichi 

Shoda or Walter Mischel, Department of Psychology, Columbia 

University, New York, New York 10027. 

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1994, Vol. 67, No. 4, 674-687 

Copyright 1994 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. OO22-3514/94/S3.0O 

674 

tinctive cognitions and affects that are experienced in them. 

Then, an individual's functioning should become visible in the 

distinctive or unique ways the person's behavior changes across 

situations, not just in its overall level or mean frequency. For 

example, a person may often behave in a warm and empathic 

way with her colleagues at work but almost always in a very 

critical manner with her family. Another person may show the 

opposite pattern, so that he is warm and empathic with his family 

but critical with his professional colleagues. If two people are 

similar in their behaviors averaged across situations but differ in 

the situations in which they display those behaviors, are these 

differences merely a reflection of momentary situational influences? 

Or do such differences reflect differences in enduring and 

meaningful aspects of their personality? These are the main 

questions addressed in this article. 

In social-cognitive theory, 1 individual differences in patterns 

of behavior across situations reflect such underlying person 

variables as the individuals' encoding or construals of their experiences, 

and their expectations, values, goals and self-regulatory 

strategies (Mischel, 1973, 1990). These relatively enduring 

person variables within the individual interact with situational 

characteristics to generate stable but discriminative patterns of 

behavior. It is these "unique bundles or sets of temporally stable 

prototypic behaviors" (Mischel & Peake, 1982, p. 754), contextualized 

in relevant psychological situations, that constitute a 

locus in which personality coherence may be revealed (Mischel 

1990, 1991; Shoda, 1990; Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1993a, 

1993b; Wright & Mischel, 1987). A major goal of the present 

1 In current usage, the terms social cognitive and cognitive social appear 

increasingly as essentially interchangeable descriptions of this general 

approach to personality and social behavior (e.g., Mischel, 1993).

esearch was to obtain empirical evidence relevant to the validity 

of this conception of intraindividual personality coherence. 

Our analysis of the organization of the individual's behavior 

is conditional or contextual in the sense that the fundamental 

unit of observation is not the unconditional probability of traitrelevant 

behavior (e.g., the tendency to be extraverted), but 

rather the conditional probability of a given type of behavior in 

given types of psychological conditions or situations (e.g., Patterson, 

1982; Patterson & Reid, 1984; Shoda, Mischel, & 

Wright, 1989; Wright & Mischel, 1987, 1988). The traditional 

use of the unconditional probability of trait-relevant behavior 

is appropriate and useful for many purposes, such as selecting 

persons on the basis of their predicted future behaviors on average 

in unspecified situations. However, beyond identifying individual 

differences in average levels of behavior, we view the intraindividual 

variability of behavior itself as the behavioral phenomenon 

of interest. These patterns of if ... then . . . 

relations link psychological situations to the person's relevant 

behaviors (e.g., Mischel, 1973). 

Responsive to the many calls for a shift from a variable-centered 

approach in personality research to one that is more person-centered 

(e.g., Carlson, 1971; John, 1990), our analysis is 

indeed person-centered and focuses on the within-person (intraindividual) 

organization of behavior and on personality coherence. 

However, in the search for intraindividual stability, we 

do not pursue the traditional configuration of global dispositions 

or behavioral tendencies that characterize a person (e.g., 

high in extraversion and low in conscientiousness). Instead, our 

approach is unique in focusing on how a given type of behavior 

(e.g., aggression) by an individual varies distinctively but predictably 

across different types of psychological situations (e.g., 

ifAheX,butifBheY). 

Stability in these patterns of if. . . then . . ., situation-behavior 

relations is predicted to the degree that there is stability 

in the underlying person variables, such as the individual's ways 

of construing the situation and his or her relevant goals, values, 

expectancies, and the like, as they are activated in the particular 

situation (Mischel, 1973, 1990). Suppose for example that one 

person encodes events like being teased or provoked by his peer 

as an offense that requires a response in kind, whereas he sees 

being warned by his supervisor as a situation in which he has 

to comply to avoid negative consequences. For another person, 

however, being teased or provoked by a peer is encoded as normal 

and acceptable bids for interaction, whereas warning by a 

supervisor is construed as a personal violation by an unaccepted 

authority. Such differences in the subjective meaning of different 

situations, reflecting stable differences in encoding (e.g., 

Dodge, 1986), may result in activation of different expectancies, 

goals, values, and other person variables. Behaviorally, the 

effects should be visible as distinctively patterned if. . . then 

. . . , situation-behavior configurations, expressed as stable 

profiles of behavior variability across situations that differ in 

their psychological meaning for the individual. In the present 

article, we examine empirical data on the stability of such intraindividual 

situation-behavior configurations to test this 

hypothesis. 

Direct evidence that such patterns of variability in behavior 

are stable and distinctive within individuals would allow one 

STABILITY OF INTRAINDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR PATTERNING 675 

to conceptualize them as behavioral signatures of personality, 

rather than as measurement error or as data contradictory to 

personality coherence. This calls for an idiographic analysis of 

behavioral coherence, using an extensive observation system to 

assess people's behaviors in natural social interactions over 

many occasions. Unlike many earlier studies of person-situation 

links that relied exclusively on self-reports, we required behavioral 

data that would allow us to examine individual differences 

in people's distinctive patterns of relating to these naturally 

occurring social situations. In our long-term research 

program, these patterns were obtained by systematic behavior 

observations in vivo over the course of a summer in a children's 

residential camp setting, Wediko Children's Services' summer 

program in Hillsboro, New Hampshire. The results yielded an 

extensive archival database that allows systematic analyses to 

identify personality coherence in behavior as it unfolds across 

naturalistic situations and over many occasions (e.g., Shoda, 

1990; Shoda etal., 1989,1993a, 1993b). 

Within a given ecological setting, such as the Wediko camp, 

situations may be conceptualized at different levels and with 

alternative units (Mischel, 1991; Shoda, 1990; Shoda et al., 

1993b). At one level are the nominal situations that have been 

operationalized in studies of behavioral consistency traditionally 

(e.g., Hartshorne& May, 1928;Newcomb, 1929; Mischel & 

Peake, 1982). Typically they were dictated by the structure of 

the particular ecology (the setting), rather than by their potential 

psychological impact on, and meaning for, the person or by 

the generalizability of the observations obtained within them. 

Usually these nominal situations are highly complex and contain 

a wide array of different psychological features (Shoda et 

al., 1993a). In a summer camp, such as Newcomb's (1929) 

Camp Wawokiye or the present site, Wediko, woodworking, for 

example, may be a nominal situation that contains such diverse 

interpersonal psychological events as being praised, frustrated, 

teased, and punished. Nominal situations such as woodworking 

in the camp also tend to limit generalizability to other life settings. 

Thus, individual differences in relation to a specific nominal 

situation, even if highly stable, necessarily would be of 

modest psychological interest beyond the setting. On the other 

hand, at a deeper level, situations may be defined to capture 

basic psychological features or ingredients that occur in many 

different nominal situations and settings. In that case, information 

about an individual's behavior tendencies in relation to 

them is potentially generalizable to other situations that also 

contain these features. The utility of analyzing behaviors in 

terms of their stable relations to particular psychological features, 

hinges mostly on how widely the features occur in diverse 

nominal situations and different ecological settings. 

Table 1 summarizes and illustrates the distinctions among 

ecological settings, nominal situations, psychological features, 

and the interpersonal situations used as units of situations in the 

present study. As the table indicates, such events as being teased, 

provoked, or threatened are embedded within different nominal 

situations and contain the salient psychological features that 

are encoded by individuals and that affect their behaviors dynamically 

in the stream of social interactions. Just as individuals' 

responses to particular medications can be understood 

more fundamentally by considering the specific active ingredi-

676 Y. SHODA, W. MISCHEL, AND J. WRIGHT 

Table 1 

Examples of Ecological Settings, Nominal Situations, Interpersonal Situations, 

and Psychological Features 

Setting 

Nominal 

situations Interpersonal situations 

Psychological 

features 

Camp Woodworking When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive 

When peer teased, provoked, or threatened peer, negative 

When praised by an adult adult, positive 

When warned by an adult adult, negative 

When punished by an adult adult, negative 

Cabin meeting When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive 





School Playground When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive 





Classroom When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive 





Home Mealtime When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive 





ents rather than the brand names, the social-cognitive analysis 

of situations focuses on the psychologically active features of 

situations. Whereas nominal situations (such as woodworking) 

tend to contain heterogeneous sets of psychological features, in 

the present study we focused on interpersonal situations, each 

of which contains a relatively more homogeneous, distinct set 

of psychological features (Shoda et al., 1993b), as the units of 

analysis. 

The challenge in this type of analysis is to capture those features 

that are encoded distinctively by perceivers and that activate other 

relevant cognitive social person variables (e.g., expectancies and 

values) in the mediating process. Individual differences in response 

to nominal situations, such as the daily activities within a camp, 

then, may be analyzed in terms of the person's stable cognitive, 

affective, and behavioral responses to the encoded "active," psychological 

features within the nominal situations (e.g., Mischel, 

1973). These psychological features, in turn, may consist of combinations 

of even more specific features and may be analyzed in 

terms of their overlap and similarity. 

Focusing on interpersonal situations as the situation units of 

analysis embedded in their nominal situations within the eco- 

Watching TV When peer initiated positive contact peer, positive 





logical setting of the research site, in this article we examine 

the consistency and stability of situation-behavior relations that 

characterize individuals. Guided by the social-cognitive approach 

to personality (e.g., Mischel, 1973, 1990; Shoda & Mischel, 

1993), we pursued an idiographic strategy. Specifically, 

we focused on the intraindividual organization of behavior in 

terms of the specific patterns in which that behavior varied 

across interpersonal situations, examining the stability of this 

pattern over time within each individual. We hypothesized that 

there would be significant intraindividual stability in the distinctive 

pattern by which the person's behavior varied predictably 

across particular types of these situations, visible as intraindividually 

stable "profiles" of if. . . then . . . , situationbehavior 

relations. 

Second, we examined the implications of these hypothesized 

intraindividually stable profiles of situation-behavior relations 

for the nomothetic analysis of cross-situational consistency. 

Namely, we hypothesized that the same underlying processes 

that generate stable and distinctive intraindividual profiles of 

behavior variation across these interpersonal situations also 

should generate cross-situational consistency in behavior to the

extent that the situations are similar in their psychologically active 

features. Then the degree of consistency in individual 

differences in behavior across different situations should be a 

function of the similarity in the psychological features that they 

shared. To test this hypothesis, we also examined a more traditional 

nomothetic aspect of behavior organization, focusing on 

the cross-situational consistency of individual differences examined 

separately for each type of behavior observed in each 

type of psychological situation. 

Method 

Research Program and Design 

The present article reports aspects of a large-scale field research program 

conducted at Wediko Children's Services, a summer camp residential 

program in New Hampshire (Shoda, 1990). The general population 

and setting have been described previously (e.g., Rodriguez, Mischel, 

& Shoda, 1989; Wright & Mischel, 1987, 1988). In the research 

program on which this article draws, a total of 84 children (60 boys and 

24 girls, mean age 10 years and 2 months) were observed for the entire 

duration of one summer session (6 weeks) in the camp. 

The exceptionally rich database that we collected in this research program 

yielded a unique data archive for the systematic analysis of social 

behavior as it unfolds over time and across settings. These data range 

from highly molecular (e.g., coding of videotaped social interactions in 

10-s units), to more molar (e.g., hourly ratings of behavior), to relatively 

global (e.g., dispositional judgments by counselors at the end of the summer). 

The data were collected by a team of 77 adult observers (a total of 

14 to 28 observers per child), with an average total of 167 hr of behavior 

observations for each child over the 6-week summer. Our design enabled 

studies of diverse facets of the organization and nature of the individual's 

distinctive and stable behavior patterns at various levels of specificity 

and depth. Specifically, at the level of nominal situations, we analyzed 

individual differences in the organization of social behavior, focusing 

on the role of competencies as the characteristic of the 

individuals and as a demand characteristic of the situations (Shoda et 

al., 1993a). At the level of interpersonal situations, we addressed the 

relationships between judgments of global dispositions and the behaviors 

of individuals who were good exemplars of dispositional categories 

(Shoda etal., 1993b). 

We designed the research program to include assessments of interpersonal 

situations with distinct sets of salient psychological features that 

are relevant, important, and consensually encoded by people in the population 

sampled. Five interpersonal situations were selected representing 

two of the most salient and observable psychological features identified 

in earlier research (Wright & Mischel, 1988), namely valence (positive 

vs. negative) of the interaction and type of person (adult counselor 

vs. child peer) involved in the interaction. The five situations selected to 

represent each combination of the two psychological features are summarized 

in the third column of Table 1. 

Specifically, throughout the 6-week summer, within each hour of 

camp activity, observers recorded the frequency with which each of 

these five types of situations occurred and whether the child responded 

with any of the five behavior categories of interest, namely, verbal aggression 

(teased, provoked, or threatened); physical aggression (hit, 

pushed, physically harmed); whined or displayed babyish behavior; 

complied or gave in; and talked prosocially (Shoda, 1990; Shoda et al., 

1989, 1993b). In the present research we tested the hypotheses concerning 

the nature and stability of the intraindividual organization of social 

behavior in relationship to these situations from both the idiographic 

and nomothetic perspectives. 

STABILITY OF INTRAINDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR PATTERNING 

Subjects 

677 

The subjects were the 84 children (60 boys and 24 girls) from the 

research program described above, who resided for 6 weeks in a summer 

camp residential setting (Wediko Children's Services) in New Hampshire. 

They ranged in age from 6 years 5 months to 13 years 2 months, 

with a mean of 10 years 2 months, and they resided in cabin groups of 

6-10 same-sex peers similar in age. This population is characterized 

by significant social adjustment problems, particularly with inadequate 

prosocial behavior and aggressive behavior in the home or school environment, 

and most of the youngsters are from low-income families in 

the Boston area. Data dealing with other questions and results from the 

same children assessed in the same setting and summer in the field study 

are reported in Shoda et al. (1989, 1993a, 1993b) and Rodriguez et al. 

(1989). 

Conditional Probabilities of Behaviors Within Each 

Interpersonal Situation 

The conditional probabilities of behaviors were based on the five types 

of behaviors described above, observed within each of the five types of 

interpersonal situations shown in Table 1. We use the term situationbehavior 

relation to refer to each of the 25 i/[or when]. . . then . . . 

conditional probabilities of the five behaviors in response to the five 

psychological situations recorded (e.g., prosocial talk when teased; prosocial 

talk when faced with a positive peer contact). The conditional 

probability of physical aggression when praised by an adult, however, 

was 0 for all except one child and therefore had little variation across 

individuals. Thus, this condition-behavior relation was excluded from 

further analyses. 

To compute conditional probability of subjects' behavioral responses 

in each psychological situation reliably, it was necessary that the subjects 

encounter each situation repeatedly. To ensure adequate reliability 

and resolution in the conditional probabilities in the analyses reported 

below, we therefore required that the subject encounter each type of 

situation at least a total of six times. Individuals differed in the number 

of times they encountered each of the five situations we observed. Specifically, 

the mean frequencies of encountering each type of situation 

were as follows (SD shown in parentheses): Peer teased, provoked, or 

threatened, 10.3 (6.5); Adult warned the child, 42.9 (19.5); Adult gave 

the child time out, 22.8 (16.0); Peer initiated positive social contact, 

39.8 (10.5); Adult praised the child verbally, 66.5 (14.6). We also used 

this subset to compute cross-situational consistency of conditional 

probabilities of behavioral responses so that all correlations reported in 

Table 3 are based on the same set of subjects regardless of the situation 

pairs involved. 

Intraindividual Situation-Behavior Profiles 

The if. . . then . . . pattern with which a given type of behavior 

displayed by an individual varied across the situations constituted an 

intraindividual situation-behavior profile. For example, Figure 1 shows 

a situation-behavior profile for verbal aggression for one individual and 

depicts how the person's verbal aggressiveness varied over the five interpersonal 

events shown along the horizontal axis. One may plot the absolute 

conditional probabilities of behavior across situations, but the 

variability of such a profile would reflect the differences among the situations 

in how people behave in them in general, constituting the normative 

level for each situation. For example, most people are more likely 

to display aggression when teased by peers than when praised by an 

adult. To plot the aspect of behavior variation that is distinctive for each 

person, therefore, we subtracted the normative (mean) profile observed 

in this sample of subjects from the individual's "raw" profiles, and the 

results were rescaled using as units the standard deviations of the behav-


Child # 17 profile stability: r = 0.96 Child # 9 profile stability: r = 0.89 

PEER TEASE ADULT WARN 

PEER APPROACH ADULT PRAISE ADULT PUNISH 



Child # 28 profile stability: r = 0.49 Child #48 profile stability: r = 0.11 





Figure 1. Illustrative intraindividual profiles of verbal aggression across five types of psychological situations. 

The two lines indicate the profiles based on two different, nonoverlapping samples of occasions in 

which the child encountered each type of psychological situation, shown as Time 1 (solid) and Time 2 

(broken). 

ior within each situation. In short, the distinctive profile of behavior 

variability across situations was identified for each individual by the 

pattern of standardized deviations from the normative pattern in terms 

of standard scores computed in each situation. Figure 1 illustrates such 

a profile. In the present analyses, we assessed the stability of these situation-behavior 

profiles within individuals to test the hypothesis that the 

distinctive ways in which an individual's behavior varies across situations 

constitutes an enduring aspect of personality, rather than merely 

reflecting fluctuations due to uncontrolled, random factors. 

Indexing Profile Similarities to Determine Their 

Stability 

To index and statistically test the stability of the intraindividual, situation-behavior 

profiles, the total available observations of each type of 

situation were randomly divided to form two sets of observations. 

Within each set, for each subject, conditional probabilities of each type 

of behavior in each type of situation were computed. This procedure 

yielded for each person two intraindividual situation-behavior profiles 

observed on two different sets of occasions. The similarity of the 

"shapes" of the two profiles was then indexed by an ipsative correlation 

coefficient, computed within each individual separately, using the interpersonal 

situations as the units of analysis. 

For example, if a person's behavior profile for the five situations from 

one set of nominal situations (camp activities) was [ 1.0,0.5,-1.0, —0.5, 

0.0], and the one from the other was [0.5, 0.0, -1.5, -1.0, -0.5], the 

correlation between the two would be +1.0. Note that the correlation 

essentially reflects the stability of the rank order among the interpersonal 

situations within the same individual in how the individual's behavior 

in each situation deviates from the respective norm in each situation. 

In this example, both profiles indicate that the standardized (i.e., 

relative to the situation norm) behavior probability was highest in the 

first situation, followed by the second, fifth, fourth, and then the third. 

The stability coefficient of +1.0 indicates that the intraindividual rank 

order of situations was preserved perfectly over time. If the profile from 

the second set was [-1.0, -0.5, 1.0, 0.5, 0.0], it would indicate a complete 

reversal of the intraindividual rank ordering of the five situations, 

and the profile stability correlation would be — 1.0. 

Computing Mean Consistency Coefficients Within 

Versus Across Interpersonal Situations 

As noted in the introduction, in addition to the idiographic analysis 

of intraindividual profile stability we also pursued a more nomothetic 

route to test the cross-situational consistency of if. . .then. . .relationships 

separately for each type of behavior in relation to each type of 

interpersonal situation. Therefore, to test the hypothesis that the degree 

of cross-situational consistency in individual differences in behavior 

should be a function of the similarity in the psychological features that

they shared, we examined traditional, nomothetic, cross-situational 

consistency coefficients of individual differences in each behavior, computed 

for each distinct pair of interpersonal situations. To ensure sufficient 

samples of observations for each type of interpersonal situation, 

observations from different camp activities were pooled. Specifically, 

the 14 camp activities were randomly grouped to form two sets of 7 

activities, and within each set, conditional probabilities of each type of 

behavior in each type of interpersonal situation were computed. The 

consistency of individual differences in these conditional probabilities 

was computed across the two sets. Different counselors led different activities, 

and behavior observations were made at the end of each activity 

on a computer-scored behavior tracking sheet by the counselor who led 

that activity. Because observations of behaviors in different activities 

were made by different counselors, consistency coefficients computed 

across them do not reflect possible links due to overlap in observers. 

To minimize chance associations present in any specific random 

grouping of the camp activities, this procedure was repeated 100 times, 

and the results were averaged using Fisher's r-to-z transformation. These 

average correlations should be more stable with a smaller standard error 

than is usually expected for a single correlation, because such averages 

are less subject to the sampling error associated with the specific random 

grouping of the 14 camp activities into two sets of 7. If the 100 

iterations had been conducted in independent samples, then one should 

be able to compute the expected standard error of the mean coefficient 

following the central limit theorem. However, the 100 iterations do not 

constitute independent samples, and therefore one cannot compute estimates 

of the standard error by simply applying the theorem, which 

assumes independence of sampling. Therefore, we used the bootstrapping 

procedure, whose method and theoretical rationale are described 

elsewhere in detail (Diaconis & Efron, 1983; Efron, 1981, 1985; Efron 

ATibshirani, 1986). 

Briefly, this computation-intensive, nonparametric method of estimating 

standard errors involves drawing random samples from the obtained 

data pool and computing the statistics of interest in each random 

sample. The bootstrapping procedure calls for sampling with replacement; 

that is, after a subject is drawn from the pool, the chosen subject 

is replaced back to the pool so that she or he can be chosen again. Therefore, 

even though it requires forming random samples of the same size 

as the size of the obtained data pool from which they are drawn, the 

exact composition of the random sample varies, due to the fact Liat in 

each random sample some subjects are represented multiple times while 

some others are not chosen. The distribution across the random samples 

of the statistic of interest computed in each sample (which in the case 

of the present analysis is the mean consistency coefficient) provides an 

estimate of the sampling distribution. Specifically, the standard errors 

reported in Table 2 are based on 500 such random samples. Within each 

sample, 10, rather than 100, random groupings of camp activities were 

made because of the limitation of computer resources; thus, we obtained 

conservative overestimates of standard errors and p values. 

Results 

Idiographic Analyses oflntraindividual Profile Stability 

Figure 1 presents examples of idiographic situation-behavior 

profiles for individuals, illustrating varying levels of profile stability 

for all five situations. The first profile in Figure 1 indicates 

that the pattern by which verbal aggression of Child 17 varied 

across the five situations was stable and distinctive. Specifically, 

this individual was more verbally aggressive than others when 

punished by an adult (standard score of over 2.0), but his level 

of aggression was lower than the average level when teased, provoked, 

or threatened by a peer (standard score of about 0.5); 

while in the other three situations his level of verbal aggression 


679 

was near average in each respective situation. The two lines indicate 

the profiles based on two different, nonoverlapping samples 

of occasions in which the child encountered each type of 

psychological situation, shown as Time 1 and Time 2. At both 

Time 1 and Time 2, his profile was characterized by the fact 

that his level of verbal aggression, relative to the level of the 

peers in each situation (i.e., the "norm"), was the highest when 

adults punished him and lowest when another child teased. 

Child 9, whose profile of verbal aggression is shown in the second 

panel of Figure 1, was most distinctively verbally aggressive 

when warned by adults and his overall profile indicated substantial 

stability. Child 28 (the third panel of Figure 1), on the other 

hand, was most distinctively verbally aggressive when peers approached 

him. The profile stability was relatively modest, however, 

because his profile with regard to the remaining psychological 

situations changed over time. 

The last panel of Figure 1, for Child 48, illustrates a case of 

low profile stability. His profile of verbal aggression was distinctive 

at Time 1 in that he was most verbally aggressive, relative to 

others, when praised by an adult, but this was no longer the case 

at Time 2. 

As these examples illustrate, children differed widely in the 

stability and nature of their intraindividual profiles for each 

type of behavior. To test the hypothesis that on the whole these 

patterns of behavior variation across situations constitute intraindividually 

stable profiles, rather than "error variance," the 

mean profile stabilities for each behavior were computed by averaging 

each subject's profile stability using Fisher's r-to-z transformation. 

Because the profile stability is computed ipsatively, 

we considered each child's observed stability coefficient as independently 

sampled from a distribution of profile stabilities 

and tested the statistical significance of the group mean stabilities 

by t tests as estimates of the sampling error using the standard 

deviations of the stability coefficients across individuals. 

The first section of Table 2 shows the mean stability coefficients 

of intraindividual situation-behavior profiles over all five 

interpersonal situations listed in Table 1. To provide a reliable 

assessment of the conditional probabilities of behavioral responses 

in relation to each situation, yet to retain a maximum 

number of subjects, we included all subjects as long as'they experienced 

each psychological situation included in a profile at 

least six times in the course of the 6-week summer, as indicated 

in the Method section. Of the total of 84 individuals in the sample, 

53 encountered all five situations sufficiently to meet this 

criterion and thus were included in this analysis. On average, 

they had mean stability coefficients of. 19 (p < .05) for prosocial 

talk, .28 (p < .001) for whining, .41 (p < .001) for compliance, 

and .47 (p < .001) for verbal aggression in their intraindividua! 

profiles of behavior variability across all five situations. 

It was possible to include more individuals in the analysis by 

excluding from the profiles the less frequently encountered 

types of situations. Specifically, excluding the least frequent situation 

(when teased, provoked, or threatened by a peer), 73 

people encountered each of the remaining four types of situations 

at least six times, and we used that subset of subjects to 

compute the stabilities of profiles of behavior variability over 

the four situations. As shown in the second section of Table 2, 

the average stability coefficients for these profiles were .28 (p


Table 2 

Mean Stability oflntraindividual, Situation-Behavior Profiles of Varying Compositions 

Situations 

All 5 

Mean r 

t 

df 

P 

4 situations'" 

Meanr 

t 

df 

P 

3 situations' 

Meanr 

t 

df 

P 

3 negative situations' 1 

Meanr 

t 

df 

P 

Prosocial 

talk 

.19 

2.28 

52 

situations sampled, namely, being teased, provoked, or threatened 

by peers; being warned by an adult; and being punished by 

an adult. 

The stability of intraindividual pattern of behavior variability 

over the three negative situations was computed for each subject 

who encountered them sufficiently in terms of the minimum 

frequency criterion. As shown in the bottom section of Table 2, 

for a significant portion of this subsample of 53 subjects, intraindividual 

patterns of behavior variability were stable for compliance 

(.45, p < .001), physical aggression, (.32, p < .05), and 

verbal aggression (.48, p < .001). Thus, the way in which verbal 

aggression, physical aggression, and compliance varied over the 

three types of negative situations stably characterized many individuals 

in the present sample, and the mean intraindividual 

stability for the sample was significantly above 0. This suggests 

that for a significant portion of the people in the present sample, 

these three types of negative situations were psychologically distinct 

and that their aggressive and compliant responses to each 

situation were discriminative in ways that stably characterized 

them. These results go beyond the findings obtained in the profiles 

for all five situations, because they show that the shape of 

the profiles even just among the three negative situations also 

reflected significant and personologically meaningful intraindividual 

variance. 


Nomothetic Analyses ofCross-Situational Consistency: 

Cross-Situational Consistency in Behavior as a Function 

of Similarity of Psychological Situations 

In the social-cognitive theory of personality, the basic underlying 

psychological processes that generate the distinctive 

and stable intraindividual profiles of behavior variation across 

psychological situations also have implications for the type of 

cross-situational consistency in behavior one should expect. 

Namely, the degree of consistency in individual differences in 

behavior across different situations should be a function of the 

similarity in the psychological features that they share (Mischel, 

1973). We tested this hypothesis by computing the traditional 

nomothetic cross-situational consistency coefficients, assessing 

the stability of individual differences in each type of behavior, 

computed separately in each type of psychological situation, as 

summarized in Table 3. Recall that for different psychological 

situations, different numbers of subjects passed the inclusion 

criterion for computing reliable conditional probabilities (encountering 

a psychological situation at least six times during the 

summer). Therefore, as shown in Table 3, so that all correlations 

are based on the same set of subjects regardless of the 

situation pairs involved, we used the subset of the sample (N - 

53) that met the reliability criterion for all five psychological 

situations to compute consistency of conditional probabilities 

of behavioral responses within and across situations. 

The coefficients in the Within column report the consistency 

of individual differences in a behavior in response to a specific 

psychological situation observed in one set of nominal situations 

(camp activities) and those in the same behavior in response 

to the same psychological situation observed in another 

set of camp activities. For example, the first entry in the table in 

the Within column, .40 ± . 16** indicates that the correlation 

between the conditional probability of verbal aggression in re- 

681 

sponse to "peer tease" across two independent sets of camp activities 

was .40, with an estimated standard error of. 16, and was 

statistically significant at p < .01. The coefficients in the Across 

column of Table 3 indicate the consistency obtained across 

different types of interpersonal situations. As expected theoretically, 

and consistent with the finding of stable intraindividual 

profiles of behavior variability across situations, individual 

differences in behaviors across different psychological situations 

were substantially less consistent than they were within the 

same psychological situation. 

In addition to the dichotomous "same versus different" distinction, 

the pairs of different situations can be further divided 

in terms of the degree to which the members of the pair are 

different, and the average consistency reported in the Across column 

of Table 3 can be grouped in terms of the degrees of similarity 

between each pair. Using the number of shared features 

as an index of similarity, we tested the hypothesis that consistency 

of behavior across psychological situations will be a function 

of the similarity of those situations in their psychological, 

active, ingredients. 

Specifically, the psychological situations in this research program 

had been selected to vary in the two most salient features 

of interpersonal situations at the camp (Wright & Mischel, 

1988): the valence and the type of interactant. Thus, different 

pairs of psychological situations can be grouped into those that 

share neither of the two features, one feature, and both features 

to test the effect of similarity. For example, being teased, provoked, 

or threatened by a peer (negative valence child interactant) 

and being praised by an adult (positive valence adult interactant) 

share neither the valence nor the type of interactant. 

Being teased, provoked, or threatened by a peer and being 

warned by an adult (negative-child vs. negative-adult) share 

valence but not the interactant. Finally, being warned by an 

adult and being punished by adult are examples of two psychological 

situations that are different but that share two features 

(both negative-adult). Figure 2 shows averages of the consistencies 

of individual differences in behavior for all combinations of 

different psychological situations reported in Table 3, grouped 

respectively for 0, 1, or 2 common features shared. The coefficients 

within psychological situations are shown in Figure 2 as 

sharing "2+" features because they share the two systematically 

varied features (valence and interactant) as well as any other 

feature associated with the particular situation (e.g., two instances 

of being "teased, provoked, or threatened by a peer" 

share more than the valence and interactant). The coefficients 

in the column labeled 2+ were obtained by averaging the consistency 

coefficients within the "same" psychological situation 

reported in Table 3, column 1. 

As predicted, as the number of shared features decreased, the 

consistency of individual differences in behaviors also decreased. 

Within the "same" psychological situations (which had 

at least two common features and may have shared many more), 

mean consistency in individual differences in verbal aggression 

was .28, and between two different situations that shared two 

features (i.e., when warned by an adult and when punished by 

an adult), mean consistency in individual differences in verbal 

aggression was .25. When two psychological situations shared 

just one feature the mean consistency was .15, and when the


Table 3 

Mean Consistency Correlations Across Nominal Situations: Within the Same Versus 

Across Different Interpersonal Situations 

Behavior and 

interpersonal situation 

Verbal aggression 

Peer teased, provoked 

Adult warned 

Adult punished 

Peer positive contact 

Adult praised 

Physical aggression 


Adult warned 



Adult praised 

Whining 


Adult warned 



Adult praised 

Compliance 


Adult warned 



Adult praised 

Prosocial talk 


Adult warned 



Adult praised 

Within the same 

interpersonal situation 

.40 ±.16** 

.33 ±.10*** 

.36 ±.10*** 

.25+ .16 

.03 ±.10 

.16 + .15 

.22 ± .20 

.3O±.12* 

.03 ±.13 

NA 

.45 ± .20*** 

.27 ±.12* 

.25 ±.13* 

.25 ±.10* 

.23 ±.10* 

.39 ±.17* 

.26 ±.11** 

.37 ±.13** 

.09 ±.11 

.07 ± .09 

.02 ±.13 

.21 ±.10* 

.11 ±.10 

.35 ± .18* 

.14 ±.09 

Across different 

interpersonal situations 

.17 + . 13 

.16 ± .12 

.15 ± .16 

.07 ±.10 

.09 ±.10 

.12 ± .16 

.11 ±.16 

.16 ± .16 

.01 ±.10 

NA 

.15 ± .14 

.19±.1O* 

.14±.13 

.12 ± .12 

.09+ .11 

.10 ± .13 

.08 ±.10 

.04 ±.12 

.07 ±.15 

.05 ±.10 

.16 ± .10 

.11 ±.12 

.12 ± .12 

.18 ±.09* 

.16 ± .10 

Note. N = 53. The numbers following the ± symbols are bootstrapping estimates of the standard error of 

sampling distribution for each correlation. Entries show mean correlations of the same behavior (e.g., verbal 

aggression) across nominal situations in response to either the same or different interpersonal situations. 

Correlation coefficients reported in the Across column indicate the mean correlations between a behavior 

observed in one type of psychological situation and the same behavior in each of the four other types of 

psychological situations. For example, the first entry in the Across column, .17 ± .13, indicates that the 

mean of the correlations between verbal aggression when teased, threatened, or provoked in one set of camp 

activities and the same type of behavior in the other four interpersonal situations (i.e., verbal aggression 

when warned; verbal aggression when punished; verbal aggression when peer approached positively; verbal 

aggression when praised) was. 17 with an estimated error of. 13. NA = not available. 

*p

STABILITY OF INTRAINDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR PATTERNING 683 

Number of shared features 

Figure 2. Consistency of individual differences in behavior across situations 

as a function of the number of shared psychological features, 

agg. = aggression. 

the present sample were characterized by distinctive and predictable 

patterns of behavior variation across the particular psychological 

situations. As predicted, the individual's distinctive 

profiles of behavior variability observed at different times were 

significantly similar to each other within a given person and thus 

relatively stable. In contrast, such profiles from different individuals 

on average would be expected to have a similarity coefficient 

of 0, which also was verified empirically by computing 

profile similarity correlations among all pairs of individuals and 

calculating their means over many iterations. 

Thus, the obtained intraindividual stable profiles reflected 

distinctive and personologically meaningful, nonrandom variance 

not shared normatively by others in the sample as a whole. 

Moreover, the patterns of variation across just the three negatively 

valenced types of psychological situations proved to be 

significantly stable within individuals over repeated occasions. 

The latter results indicated that the individuals' discriminations 

among situations went beyond their overall valence and that 

they encompassed subtler differences among situations of the 

same (negative) valence. 

In the social-cognitive view, these intraindividually stable 

patterns of behavior variation across situations reflect underlying 

person variables, such as beliefs and values, and the way 

different social situations are encoded by the person (e.g., Forgas, 

1983). For example, when personality is conceptualized in 

terms of the goals pursued by the individuals (e.g., Pervin, 1989; 

Pervin & Furnham, 1987; Read, Jones, & Miller, 1990), or by 

the cognitive strategies used (e.g., Miller, 1987; Miller & Mangan, 

1983; Norem, 1989; Showers, 1992), it is the patterns of 

stable //. . . then. . . relations, rather than the average behavior 

tendency, that are expected to reflect more directly the underlying 

personality differences that distinguish individuals. Regardless 

of specific theoretical orientation, it is this type of intraindividual 

stability in the pattern and organization of 

behavior that seems especially central for a psychology of personality 

ultimately devoted to understanding and capturing the 

uniqueness of individual functioning (e.g., Allport, 1937; Mischel, 

1973). It is these patterns that also are the basis for inferring 

underlying motivations and generating explanations about 

the individual's behaviors (e.g., Shoda & Mischel, 1993; Weiner, 

1991). By incorporating such distinctive, stable patterns of interaction 

into the conception, assessment, and explanations of 

behavioral coherence, it may be possible to understand in 

greater depth how and why an individual's behavior varies 

across specific situations (Mischel & Shoda, in press). 

It should be noted that the present findings do not speak to 

variations in behaviors across situations in their absolute levels, 

for example, in the differences in the number of times people 

smile at a party and at a funeral. Although confusion on this 

topic has been frequent, no personologists really expect people's 

behaviors to be "constant" across diverse situations in their absolute 

levels. Instead, they have always focused on how an individual's 

behavior deviates from the respective situation norms 

(e.g., Joe is more sociable than most people at parties) and tried 

to demonstrate that this will be consistent from situation to situation 

(e.g., Joe is also more sociable than most people at the 

office). Similarly, the present research also focused on how a 

particular individual's behavior deviated distinctively from the 

normative levels observed for the group as a whole. However, 

we did not seek behavioral coherence in the form of consistent 

individual differences in behavior (relative to situation norms) 

from one situation to another. Instead, we sought—and 

found—behavioral coherence in the stable intraindividual patterns 

of behavior variation across situations that distinguish the 

individual from others (i.e., from the normative patterns) and 

that form a part of the person's characteristic behavioral signature—he 

A when X, but B when Y, and does A most when Z. 

Analyses of characteristic intraindividual variation of behavior 

across psychological situations need not be limited to idiographic 

analyses that identify the signature patterns in behavior 

that uniquely characterizes a single individual (Nesselroade, 

1990). The same type of analyses can be used in nomothetic 

research to identify groups or "types" of individuals that share 

certain key psychological processes (e.g., Contrada, 1991). For 

example, as Kazdin (1990) noted, it has proved surprisingly 

difficult to characterize disturbed children with such broad labels 

as "conduct problems," "impulsive," and "socially withdrawn" 

by identifying common maladaptive behaviors in general. 

By focusing on the characteristic patterns by which their 

behaviors vary across psychological situations, it may be possible 

to identify individuals who share common types of maladaptive, 

or adaptive, processes that are manifested in a common 

if. . . then . . . pattern of behavior variation. Thus, 

focusing on intraindividual, situation-behavior, patterns of 

variation could address a clinical as well as a theoretical need. 

Stable, Distinctive Intraindividual Patterns of Variability 

Limit the Level ofCross-Situational Consistency 

The obtained intraindividually stable profiles of //. . . then 

. . . relations between psychological features of situations and 

the person's behavior also have important implications for the 

pursuit of cross-situational consistency in nomothetic research 

that seeks behavioral consistency across situations. Namely, as 

predicted from social-cognitive theory (e.g., Mischel, 1973; 

Shoda & Mischel, 1993), and as shown formally elsewhere 

(Shoda, 1990), to the extent that individuals are characterized 

by stable and distinctive patterns of variations in behavior 

across situations, there is an intrinsic limit to the levels of cross-


situational consistency across situations that can be expected. 

This may be illustrated by considering an individual whose behavior 

in one situation was at the group mean. To the extent 

that the individual is characterized by a stable and distinctive 

intraindividual profile of variability, the individual's behavior 

in a second situation, relative to its normative level, should be 

stably higher, or lower, than in the first situation. Thus, stable 

intraindividual variability in behavior implies changes in the 

individual's rank ordering with regard to a behavior across the 

situations and necessarily reduces the observable level of crosssituational 

consistency, as traditionally defined, that should be 

expected theoretically. 

In the long "person-situation" debate, the relatively high behavior 

variation, and consequently low cross-situational consistency 

of individual differences in behavior across different situations 

(e.g., Mischel, 1968, 1973; Mischel & Peake, 1982; Ross 

& Nisbett, 1991), have been misread for many years as if they 

undermined the utility of the personality construct (e.g., Goldberg, 

1993; Wiggins, 1992). In our view, however, this interpretation 

is valid only if one considers the variability of behaviors 

within individuals across situations either as "error" or as 

due to "situation," rather than as a meaningful reflection of enduring 

personality processes. The present findings provide further 

evidence that situation specificity and low cross-situational 

consistency actually are aspects of the intraindividual stability 

and organization of personality that can be seen at the idiographic 

level. They suggest that the expression of personality 

coherence becomes visible not in the higher cross-situational 

consistency of individual differences in behavior that has been 

sought by the field for so many years, but rather in the individual's 

stable patterns of variability in behavior across situations, 

which have been viewed as "error" by global trait theory but 

which may constitute essence for the personologist. 

Meaningful Personological Variance Is Not "Error" 

Typically in nomothetic personality research and assessment, 

intraindividual variability in behavior across situations is 

treated as error and one aggregates observations from multiple 

situations to focus on the individual differences in the mean 

level of the behavior (e.g., Epstein, 1979). However, while aggregation 

is useful for demonstrating individual differences in average 

behavior trends, it unfortunately obscures any meaningful 

patterning of behavior variation across situations and treats 

it as error variance. Thus, the behavioral signatures of personality 

seen in the intraindividual, stable ;/. . . then. . . profiles 

found in this research program would become lost in the 

process. 

The stable intraindividual patterns of behavior variability 

that characterize individuals across situations also presumably 

are generated by the same underlying mediating processes 

within individuals that produce the findings of significant Person 

X Situation interaction variance (Endler & Hunt, 1969; Endler, 

Hunt, & Rosenstein, 1962; Magnusson & Endler, 1977). In 

fact, the stability of intraindividual profiles is mathematically 

related to the Person X Situation interaction variance (see 

Shoda, 1990, for formal derivations). Thus, the characteristic 

way in which the person's behavior varies predictably and systematically 

across different situations is exactly the type of be- 

havior variation that has been labeled the Person X Situation 

interaction variance. 

Traditionally, the behavioral expressions of personality have 

been seen in stable differences between individuals in their typical 

levels of behavior averaged across different situations and 

over time. Consequently, the findings of significant Person X 

Situation interaction variance were seen as another source of 

variance, different both from the person component of variance 

and from the situation component. Viewed from the social-cognitive 

reconceptualization of personality (Mischel, 1973; Mischel 

& Shoda, in press; Shoda & Mischel, 1993), however, stable 

patterns of behavior variation across situations, which make 

up the Person X Situation variance, are the primary behavioral 

expression of the individual's distinctive personality and reflect 

its nature at least as much as the mean differences in behavior 

between persons (the person component of variance). Indeed, 

in the social-cognitive conception of personality, the patterns of 

Person X Situation interactions that constitute intraindividual, 

stable if. . . then . . . profiles provide an essential route to 

capturing the distinctiveness of the individual. These if. . . 

then. . ., situation-behavior profiles constitute basic phenomena 

of personality that cannot even be defined without reference 

to the relevant situations—the ife—to which they refer. 

Effects of Similarity Among Psychological Situations 

We predicted that individual differences in behavior should 

be relatively consistent across the same types of psychological 

situations (within situation-behavior combinations), but less 

consistent across different types of psychological situations. In 

contrast, to the degree that behaviors primarily reflect individual 

differences in overall, situation-wnspecific behavior tendencies, 

consistency between behaviors observed within the same 

types of psychological situation (within consistency coefficients) 

should not be different from consistency observed in different 

types of psychological situations (across consistency coefficients). 

As predicted, the data showed that individual differences 

in behaviors were much more consistent within the same 

types of psychological situations, even when they were sampled 

from diverse nominal situations, than were individual differences 

in behavior in different psychological situations also sampled 

across diverse nominal situations. 

This general relationship has been hypothesized often (e.g., 

Krahe, 1990; Lord, 1982; Magnusson, 1991; Magnusson & 

Ekehammar, 1973; Magnusson, Gerzen, & Nyman, 1968; Pervin, 

1977; Price & Bouffard, 1974). In a typical study, for example, 

it has been shown that individual differences in behavior 

in a laboratory situation with unstructured social interactions 

were more consistent with those in a similar unstructured laboratory 

social interaction than they were with behavior in a laboratory 

debate on capital punishment (Funder & Colvin, 1991). 

The present analyses attempted to move beyond demonstrating 

greater consistency in essentially the same situations compared 

with very different situations by analyzing situations in terms of 

the psychological features that are important in determining the 

behavior of interest in the ecology of the setting. The results 

indicated, as expected, that as the number of the psychological 

features that are shared between situations increased, the con-

sistency of individual differences across those situations also 

increased. 

From Nominal Situations to Psychological Features 

In spite of much discussion about the importance of situations 

(e.g., Bern & Funder, 1978; Funder & Colvin, 1991; Lord, 

1982), research into their role in behavior organization has 

identified them in terms of what we consider nominal situations 

specific to the particular setting: the activities and places of daily 

life routine. In such field study sites as Wediko, or in Newcomb's 

classic summer camp Wawokiye (Newcomb, 1929), 

these nominal situations have involved such regularly scheduled 

events as fishing and trampoline and eating in the dining 

hall, or in the Carleton College study (Mischel & Peake, 1982), 

events in classrooms, a library reserve room, or dormitory 

rooms. Personality psychologists traditionally have dismissed 

situation-specific individual differences in behavior as not very 

informative or generalizable in part because they operationalized 

situations in terms of the traditional, nominal units. In 

fact, if such behavior tendencies are specific to a particular nominal 

situation, there is little generalizability because each nominal 

situation contains its own configuration of features of unspecified 

psychological ingredients. In contrast, in the present 

approach, we conceptualized situations in terms of their psychological, 

"active" ingredients or features. These psychologically 

active features of situations constitute a main part of the 

individual's personal experience and "life space." Individuals 

are not just fishing or doing athletics: They are being provoked, 

teased, threatened, warned, praised, sought out, or shunned. 

These encounters and events, embedded in diverse nominal situations, 

contain psychological features—or active ingredients—that 

interact with the individual's unique configuration 

of social-cognitive person variables to generate a distinctive behavioral 

signature. 

To the extent that such features are found widely in various 

nominal situations and settings, the stable configuration of // 

. . . then . . . relationships will constitute a coherent pattern 

that "stays" with a person across diverse nominal situations and 

settings. Then it should be possible to incorporate into the analysis 

of personality coherence people's specific interactions with 

particular situational features without sacrificing generalizability. 

For example, a child who at a summer camp may be characterized 

by the profile of compliant behavior when warned, 

but very aggressive behaviors when punished, may be characterized 

by the same profile at home or at school in relation to psychological 

features of situations. If the psychological meaning 

of relatively molar nominal situations can be analyzed in terms 

of more basic psychological micro features of situations, it 

should become possible to understand and predict people's interactions 

with them with increasing precision. 

In idiographic assessment it is useful to identify for each person 

a characteristic set of "activating psychological features." 

For example, for Child 17 in Figure 1, the "activating feature" 

for aggressive behaviors is being punished by an adult. For Child 

28, on the other hand, peer positive contact constitutes a single 

most prominent activating psychological feature for this behavior. 

If one knows the psychological ingredients of a given nominal 

situation (e.g., frequencies of each type of psychological fea- 


685 

ture contained), then one may be able to predict the nominal 

situations in which a given person will be likely to display this 

behavior. The pattern by which a person's behavior varies across 

the nominal situations will depend on the frequency or salience 

of the psychological features that activate the relevant behavior 

for that individual within the particular nominal situations encountered. 

Because individuals are characterized by distinctive 

sets of activating features, the pattern by which a given person's 

behavior varies across the situations also is expected to be distinctive 

but potentially predictable. 

Our approach to identifying the psychologically active ingredients 

of situations is of course not the only route. The units 

of situations used need not necessarily be at the level of single 

interpersonal interaction, and interpersonal interactions are not 

the only psychologically significant aspects of situations (e.g., 

Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990). For example, in a related study 

also conducted at the same field site and with the same subjects, 

units of nominal situations such as camp activities were characterized 

in terms of the types of competencies they demanded. 

As predicted, cross-situational consistency in behavior was 

found to increase as a function of the similarity in these types 

of demands (Shoda et al., 1993a). Likewise, an earlier study in 

the same setting but with a different sample was focused on the 

overall levels of cognitive, social, and self-regulatory competencies 

demanded by nominal situations and found that individual 

differences in aggressive behaviors in situations that were more 

demanding were more strongly related to the global dispositional 

ratings of aggressiveness than were aggressive behaviors in 

less demanding situations (Wright & Mischel, 1987). Moreover, 

many important psychological features of situations involve internal 

states, such as "when stressed" (Bolger & Schilling, 

1991), "when angry," and "when frustrated," that must be included 

in a comprehensive analysis of the individual's if. . . 

then . . . , situation-behavior profiles (Wright & Mischel, 

1988). 

Although not all psychological features are part of everyone's 

personality signature, social-cognitive theory proposes that all 

persons have such characteristic patterns with regard to particular 

sets of them that activate their distinctive configuration of 

person variables (Mischel, 1973, 1990). Consequently, the individuals' 

characteristic ways of processing social information become 

revealed in the patterning of their behavior in relationship 

to those features of situations. The continuing challenge then is 

to identify for each individual, or group or type of individuals, 

the critical psychological features, to assess distinctive and stable 

patterns of behavior variation across them, and to understand 

the psychological processes that generate them. 

Toward Idiographic Personality Psychology 

The social-cognitive reconceptualization of personality of 

course recognizes the existence of broad overall average individual 

differences at the aggregate level with regard to which most 

people can be compared on most dimensions (Mischel, 1973). 

Whereas such overall average differences are highly informative, 

our basic thesis is that essential aspects of personality coherence 

become visible in the intraindividual pattern of variability, 

rather than in the traditional cross-situational consistency coefficient 

(Mischel, 1973, 1990). The present research, we hope,


has demonstrated that rather than threatening the existence of 

the personality construct, an explicit focus on the relationships 

between psychologically relevant contexts and the individual's 

behaviors in them are vital for the conception of personality and 

expand its domain (also see Mischel & Shoda, in press). 

Although intraindividual coherence has long been a central 

concern for personologists, it has proved difficult to find objective, 

systematic methods for assessing and identifying its behavioral 

manifestations. The intraindividual patterns of behavior 

variability, the configuration of if. . . then . . . , situationbehavior 

relations illustrated here, far from undermining the 

concept of personality actually enable idiographic studies of 

personality and thus provide a systematic method for personality 

psychology's most enduring basic goal (e.g., Allport, 1937; 

Bern & Allen, 1974; Magnusson & Torestad, 1993; Mischel, 

1968). By addressing not only the average level of behavior (e.g., 

overall agreeableness) but also when, where, and with whom it 

occurs, one can see the individual's distinctive, coherent, and 

systematic patterns of behavior variation and glimpse the psychological 

processes and person variables that underlie them. 

Most earlier work within an idiographic framework has been 

restricted to the individual case, and most nomothetic research 

has tended to be focused on the hypothetical "average mind" 

that Allport (1937) hoped the psychology of personality would 

transcend. In contrast, the present study suggests a new route 

that is not limited to a single individual and allows potentially 

generalizable findings of broad relevance while still retaining an 

essentially idiographic, person-centered focus. First one analyzes 

the intraindividual organization and regularities of individual 

functioning, as seen in the stable, intraindividual patterns 

of behavior variability. Then one seeks features of such 

patterns that are common to groups and types and other categories 

of persons who share similar underlying personality processes. 

Finally, one identifies the mediating personality processes 

that underlie and generate these patterns. 

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Received July 1,1993 

Revision received April 1, 1994 

Accepted April 21, 1994 •

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