4. Because the actions of another person are such a salient feature of any scene, we tend to overestimate the extent to which behaviour is caused by personality characteristics and underestimate the importance of situational forces that may cause the person to act as he or she does. If we observe someone behaving aggressively, we assume that the person has an aggressive disposition and will behave similarly in other settings, even though the situational factors may be quite different. This tendency to underestimate situational influences on behaviour has been called the fundamental attribution error.

5. The set of situations in which we observe most individuals is usually more limited than we realize. For example, we are so familiar with the warm, sincere personalities of the network news anchors on the national nightly newscasts that we would be shocked if we learned that one of the cheated on a spouse or kicked the family poodle. Because we see them so often, we mistakenly assume that we also see them in a variety of situations. As a result we feel we know them well and readily generalize about their behavior, assuming a consistency that is unwarranted. This example is particularly telling, because the behavior of news anchors is so severely constrained and so situationally determined that it could not possibly convey very much about their personalities. If they deviated even slightly from their prescribed role -- if they uttered an obscenity or stood up to stretch for example -- they would soon be off the air.

6. Our language entices us to think about human behavior in trait terms. There are about 18 000 trait terms in the English language, nearly 5 percent of the entire lexicon. In contrast, we have an impoverished and awkward vocabulary for labelling situations. But language is not only a cause of how we think, it is also the result of how we think. The fact that the English language is so unbalanced in this way probably indicates that we have always found it more important to classify persons rather than situations.

Therefore, it is possible that people's behavior may not be as consistent and stable as we instinctively believe it to be. Some theorists have responded that some correlations are higher when individual observations of behavior are combined in the same way that responses to items on a personality test are added together. Theorists have argued that the low correlations show only that individuals are not consistent in the same way, no that they are inconsistent with themselves. There is another third response that states that because people in everyday life select and shape the situations which they will be in, they will be more consistent than they would be in an experimental study, which randomly assigns persons to conditions.

To conclude, different professionals have different views and theories towards consistency in personality traits. Psychologists have recently argued traits in behavior only exist in the eye of the beholder and that an individual's behavior changes when the situation changes. Nonetheless, individuals do have a fairly stable pattern of tendencies to act, think or feel in certain ways.

Produced for Thinkquest Internet Challenge 2000.

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