Walter Mischel - theories of personalities. PDF

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Walter Mischel Walter Mischel, the second son of upper-middle-class parents, was born on February 22, 1930, in Vienna. He and his brother Theodore, who later became a philosopher of science, grew up in a pleasant environment only a short distance from Freud’s home. The tranquility of childhood, however, was shattered when the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938. That same year, the Mischel family fled Austria and moved to the United States. After living in various parts of the country, they eventually settled in Brooklyn, where Walter attended primary and secondary schools. Before he could accept a college scholarship, his father suddenly became ill, and Walter was forced to take a series of odd jobs. Eventually, he was able to attend New York University, where he became passionately interested in art (painting and sculpture) and divided his time among art, psychology, and life in Greenwich Village. In college, Mischel was appalled by the rat-centered introductory psychology classes that seemed to him far removed from the everyday lives of humans. His humanistic inclinations were solidified by reading Freud, the existential thinkers, and the great poets. After graduation, he entered the MA program in clinical psychology at City College of New York. While working on his degree, he was employed as a social worker in the Lower East Side slums, work that led him to doubt the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory and to see the necessity of using empirical evidence to evaluate all claims of psychology. Mischel’s development as a cognitive social psychologist was further enhanced by his doctoral studies at Ohio State University from 1953 to 1956. At that time, the psychology department at Ohio State was informally divided into the supporters of its two most influential faculty members—Julian Rotter and George Kelly. Unlike most students, who strongly supported one or the other position, Mischel admired both Rotter and Kelly and learned from each of them. As a consequence, Mischel’s cognitive social theory shows the influence of Rotter’s social learning theory as well as Kelly’s cognitively based theory of personal constructs. Rotter taught Mischel the importance of research design for improving assessment techniques and for measuring the effectiveness of therapeutic treatment; Kelly taught him that participants in psychology experiments are like the psychologists who study them in that they are thinking, feeling human beings. From 1956 to 1958, Mischel lived much of the time in the Caribbean, studying religious cults that practiced spirit possession and investigating delay of gratification in a cross-cultural setting. He became determined to learn more about why people prefer future valuable rewards over immediate less valuable ones. Much of his later research has revolved around this issue. Next, Mischel taught for 2 years at the University of Colorado. He then joined the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, where his interest in personality theory and assessment was further stimulated by discussions with Gordon Allport, Henry Murray, David McClelland, and others. In 1962, Mischel moved to Stanford and became a colleague of Albert Bandura. After more than 20 years at Stanford, Mischel returned to New York, joining the faculty at Columbia University, where he remains as an active researcher and continues to hone his cognitive social learning theory. While at Harvard, Mischel met and married Harriet Nerlove, another graduate student in cognitive psychology. Before their divorce, the Mischels collaborated to produce three daughters and several scientific projects (H. N. Mischel & W. Mischel, 1973; W. Mischel & H. N. Mischel, 1976, 1983). Mischel’s most important early work was Personality and Assessment (1968), an outgrowth of his efforts

to identify successful Peace Corps volunteers. His experiences as consultant to the Peace Corps taught him that under the right conditions, people are at least as capable as standardized tests at predicting their own behavior. In Personality and Assessment, Mischel argued that traits are weak predictors of performance in a variety of situations and that the situation is more important than traits in influencing behavior. This book upset many clinical psychologists, who argued that the inability of personal dispositions to predict behavior across situations was due to the unreliability and imprecision of the instruments that measure traits. Some believed that Mischel was trying to undo the concept of stable personality traits and even deny the existence of personality. Later, Mischel (1979) answered his critics, saying that he was not opposed to traits as such, but only to generalized traits that negate the individuality and uniqueness of each person. Much of Mischel’s research has been a cooperative effort with a number of his graduate students. In recent years, many of his publications have been collaborations with Yuichi Shoda, who received his PhD from Columbia in 1990 and is presently at the University of Washington. Mischel’s most popular book, Introduction to Personality, was published originally in 1971 and underwent a 7th revision in 2004, with Yuichi Shoda and Ronald D. Smith as coauthors. Mischel has won several awards, including the Distinguished Scientist award from the clinical division of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1978 and the APA’s award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution in 1982. In general, personality theories are of two types—those who see personality as a dynamic entity motivated by drives, perceptions, needs, goals, and expectancies and those who view personality as a function of relatively stable traits or personal dispositions. The first category includes the theories of Adler, Maslow, and Bandura. This approach emphasizes cognitive and affective dynamics that interact with the environment to produce behavior. The second category emphasizes the importance of relatively stable traits of personal dispositions. The theories of Allport, Eysenck, and McCrae and Costa are in this category. This approach sees people as being motivated by a limited number of drives or personal traits that tend to render a person’s behavior somewhat consistent. Walter Mischel (1973) originally objected to this trait theory explanation of behavior. Instead, he supported the idea that cognitive activities and specific situations play a major role in determining behavior. However, more recently, Mischel and his colleagues have advocated a reconciliation between the processing dynamics approach and the personal dispositions approach.

Walter Mischel 1. What is cognitive-affective personality system? • a contribution to the psychology of personality proposed by Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda in 1995. It best predicted from a comprehensive understanding of the person, the situation, and the interaction between person and situation. 2. Expound what behavior specificity is? • the fact that certain behavior is elicited only by particular stimuli and therefore does not generalize beyond specific situations. 3. Expound what is the biological basis of self-regulation? • requires self-awareness and monitoring of one's own emotional state and responses to stimuli. Being conscious of your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. 4. Explain the concept of delay of gratification? • the act of resisting an impulse to take an immediately available reward in the hope of obtaining a more-valued reward in the future. 5. What are behavioral signatures? • defined by the trend indicating how supportive behavior of a given coach changes as a function of score difference, significantly and reliably differ from one coach to another. 6. Explain the behavior of Robin Padilla using the theoretical framework of Mischel. • He's named after an outlaw. He was convicted of illegal possession of firearms. He comes from a large family. His position as the seventh offspring is also believed to be lucky. He loves to be in love. He himself is all for grand gestures. He's become spiritual. While he was in jail, Padilla converted to islam. 7. Do a profile on VP Robredo using the framework of Mischel. • Vice President Leni Robredo is the second-highest elected official in the Philippines, a country where the president and vice president are elected separately. The vice president takes over should the president die or become incapacitated. Robredo is probably the most contested politician in the Southeast Asian nation as she is a critic of the incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte and his policies, particularly his brutal anti-drug mission that has cost thousands of lives. 8. What is the main difference between Mischel and Fromm. • Mischel clearly places more emphasis on uniqueness than on similarities. Fromm placed moderate emphasis on similarities among people, he also allowed room for some individuality....