If people's behaviors reflect their personalities, and if their personalities
remain relatively unchanged across situations, then it should be possible to
predict what a person is like in one situation from knowing what she or he is
like in another. But research shows this is often very difficult to do, despite
the concerted effort by many social and personality psychologists. Does
personality exist? Is it not stable?
Research in my lab to date suggests that hidden in the seemingly random
variation of individuals’ behavior across situations is a pattern that is
stable and distinctive for each individual. The behavior itself varies, but
there is stability in how each individual’s behavior varies from one situation
to another. These stable and distinctive patterns, which we call the behavioral
signatures of individuals, suggest the existence of a higher order consistency
and that an intuitive belief in personality may in fact be based on consistency
of such a kind.
To account for such higher-order consistency (i.e., consistency in the pattern
of variatons), we have been conceptualizing personality as a distinctive and
stable network of automatic associations of thoughts and feelings. The thoughts
and feelings that are activated at any given moment may change. But the
associative network that guides and constrains their activation itself may be
stable and distinctive for each individual. Computer simulations have confirmed
this prediction. Our research now focuses on developing empirical methodologies
for the assessment of automatic (i.e., not consciously controlled) associations
among specific cognitions and affects, as well as a method for analyzing
situations in terms of a set of psychological features that activate these
cognitions and affects.
--Yuichi's description from UW's Department of Psychology
website