0.6 Social cognition, personality, and emotion  (Page 15/18)

So that would be looking at the behaviors of an individual in order to asses their attitudes and values, instead of looking at their thoughts (which would be their beliefs, feelings and intentions). You could look at both at the same time, the question, "what were the beliefs, feelings and intentions you had when you choose to do this or that thing related to your value or attitude" would be the one that links a persons thoughts with their actions.

Even with personal attributes as simple as preferences there may exist considerable benefits of examining the situations within which individuals live their lives. Consider the influence of musical preferences on the situations within which individuals spend their leisure time: individuals who like rock music go to one type of place to listen to their favorite music; individuals who like disco go to another type of place; individuals who like country music go to yet another type of place; individuals who like classical music go to still another type of place; and so on. Clearly each of these settings both indulges and perpetuates particular tastes in music. In addition, the choice to spend one's leisure time in one setting or another may have consequences far beyond the domain of leisure time activities. One may acquire whole "personalities" as consequences of these choices of settings.

Consider the hypothetical case of two individuals who are identical in all respects save their tastes in music. One individual regularly attends the symphony to satisfy his interests in classical music. The other individual becomes a habitue of discos to indulge in craving for that type of music. The individual who likes classical music is going to meet, interact with, form relationships with, and be influenced by the type of people to be found in the "symphony situation." The individual who likes disco music is going to meet, interact with, form relationships with, and be influenced by the type of people to be found in the "disco situation." As a consequence of choosing to spend their leisure time in either the "symphony situation" or the "disco situation," these two individuals eventually may live in drastically different social worlds - worlds populated by very different people with very different beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. As a consequence of their choices of situations, these two formerly similar individuals may develop into very different individuals: one may come to resemble the prototypical disco-person; the other may come to resemble the prototypical symphony-person.

Personality psychology and social interaction

The task of personality theory and research is perhaps the most daunting in psychology, since it is in this area that we face most directly the need to predict the behavior of individuals, with all the complexity that this implies. The earliest attempts to give a personological explanation of behavior were based on typologies. Typologies of individual go back to antiquity, and Hippocrates; four basic types of temperament (choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic) have shown an extraordinary staying power, if not in psychology, then at least is popular usage. No less popular are Kretchmer's (1926) attempts to relate psychological disorders to body build (e.g. "pyknic" and "asthenic" types), and the later extension of this typology to normals. His theory was developed by Sheldon (1949), who proposed three body-build based types (endormorphic, mesomorphic, ectomorphic). These biologically based typologies of personality, although manifestly speculative in their origins, have profoundly affected popular thinking. Perhaps only one typology was more successful in this respect, Jung's (1923) introverted and extroverted categories. These attempts to acount for the rich variety of individual behavior in terms of typologies proves largely unsuccessful. It in arguable, however, that the failure of the typological approach was attributable to the naivete of the methods used for defining types, rather than to the inherent falsity of the underlying principle of the existence of "human types". The continuing use of typological terms in everyday, commonsense situations suggests that typological approaches to personality may have some role to play, if only to explain everyday "naive" psychology.