From thought to behavior: "Having" and "doing" in the study of personality and cognition.

In recent years, much progress has been made by those advocating the trait perspective in personality in explicating an underlying dispositional structure to individual differences, to the attributes individuals "have. "' A cognitive perspective on personality can complement this description, providing a view of what Allport called the "'doing" side of personality, by focusing on how these dispositions are cognitively expressed and maintained in social interaction. This perspective shows how individuals interpret life tasks of work, play, intimacy, power, and health, in light of their most accessible schemas, envisaging alternative future selves, and devising cognitive strategies to guide behavior in relevant situations. Strategic problem solving typically has its benefits and its costs because an effective solution to one life problem often creates other new problems. Therefore, a central question about the adaptiveness of personality is raised by this approach. To what extent, under what circumstances, and through what channels do individuals work to modify their schemas, tasks, and strategies in light of experience? A structural approach to personality can indicate much about basic stabilities, and an emphasis on the "doing" side can contribute knowledge of the mutability of personality. Personality is something and personality does something . The adjustments of men contain a great amount of spontaneous, creative behavior toward the environment. Adjustment to the physical world as well as to the imagined or ideal world--both being factors in the "behavioral environment"--involves mastery as well as passive adaptation. --Allport, 1937, pp. 48-50 Our great advantage over all other social animals is that we possess the kind of brain that permits us to change our minds. We are not obliged, as ants are, to follow genetic blueprints for every last detail of our behavior. Our genes are more cryptic and ambiguous in their instructions: Get along, says our DNA, talk to each other, figure out the world, be useful, and above all keep an eye out for affection. --Thomas, 1984, pp. 7 For quite some time now the dominant force in personality psychology, trait psychology, has been concerned with the structural basis of individual differences, that is, with Allport's (1937) "having" side of personality. There have been substantial and important advances in the taxonomic efforts to chart the major and stable dimensioas on which people can be said to differ (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 1987; Norman, 1963). We are also much closer than ever before to explicating genetic and biological bases for important differences in temperament, sociability, and the other "big five" personality factors (e.g., Tellegen et al., 1988). These advances are encouraging also because they pave the way for increasing attention to questions about how these individual differences are expressed and maintained in social interaction across the life course (Caspi, Bern, & Elder, 1989). Accordingly, there has been lately more and more emphasis in personality research on process (Larsen, 1989). In this trend, theorists are taking three complementary tacks to elucidating both the "having" and the "doing" sides of personality. First, such theorists have proposed "middle level" units of analysis--units that take an individual's standing on abstract dispositions of sociability or openness to experience and the like and give concrete form to their diverse expressions (Briggs, 1989). These middle level units of personality description are explicitly contextualized, with dispositional categories like impulsivity or sociability defined in terms of the if-then contingencies of specific situations (e.g., Wright & Mischel, 1987). Second, theorists have proposed mechanisms that selectively maintain and bolster these individual differences; mechanisms, for example, of "selection, evocation, and manipulation" that underlie person × environment transactions (Buss, 1987). Finally, theorists have paid increased attention to processes of change in dysfunctional behavior and in "normal" personality during life transitions (e.g., Stewart & Healy, 1985). I propose that a cognitive approach to personality has the potential to be especially useful at this juncture. It provides useful constructs and methods in the analysis of personality differences as they are diversely expressed and maintained in situ. It brings to this enterprise a central concern with cognitive mechanisms that can mediate the mapping of abstract dispositions onto specific outcomes; with processes that selectively give form to the blueprint of individuals' personalities. By explicating these processes of translation (and of construction) a cognitive June 1990 • American Psychologist Cop/right 1990 by the American Psychological Assoctation, Inc. 0003-066X/90/$00.75 Vol. 45, No. 6, 735-750 735 approach underscores the dynamic, transactional development of personality. By recognizing the power of intelligent beings to think in novel ways about themselves and others, it acknowledges a potential for creative adjustment that Allport and Thomas both claimed as central human virtues. In short, this perspective complements the trait approach and fits well with an ever-increasing attention to the "doing" side of personality expression and maintenance, and of personality growth. "Having" and "Doing" in Personality Julian Rotter (1954), in his seminal book Social Learning and Clinical Psychology, set the stage for current cognitive approaches to personality. He conceptualized outcomes as behavioral choices that individuals make in the light of their interpretations of situations and of likely reinforcements. For instance, in arguing against simple forms of reductionism in personality, he used examples of the following sort: Consider three individuals' different responses to the problem of low blood sugar, differences that follow from the individual meanings they give to the event. One person perceives the situation as under his or her control and directly confronts the problem by eating granola and running a mile several times a week; another decides that the problem is here to stay but that he or she can "make the best of it" by getting more rest and boosting energy with chocolate; and yet a third refuses to see it as a problem at all, pushing until all his or her reserves are depleted. Whereas one might reasonably contrast the adaptive responding of the first two persons with the destructive denial of the third, Rotter would be more likely to emphasize the differences between the first two, even though they both take an active response to the situation. He implored personality psychologists to pay less attention to where people begin and end and to accord at least equal weight to the differing ways in which they get there, that is, the strategies that move people from some interpretation of the situation toward their goals. Rotter did not intend to present a model of conscious choice, but he did say that people made choices, however automatically, by construing situations, tasks, or problems in particular ways, and he thought that those construals formed the basis for important behavioral differences that should not be ignored. Rotter's Ohio State colleague, George Kelly (1955), Preparation of this article was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (BNS 8718467 to Nancy Cantor and Julie K. Norem, and BNS 8411778 to Nancy Cantor and Harold Korn). I wish to thank several of my colleagues and students for their many helpful comments: David Buss, William Fleeson, James Hilton, John E Kihlstrom, Christopher A. Langston, Hazel Markus, Michael Morris, Julie K. Norem, Richard Nisbe~t, Christopher Peterson, Claude Steele, Abigail J. Stewart, Lynne Sutherland, and Sabrina Zirkel, as well as the editor and anonymous reviewers. Nancy G. Exelby provided invaluable technical assistance. Portions of these analyses and ideas were presented recently at the August 1989 meeting of the American Psychological Association in New Orleans. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nancy Cantor, Institute for Social Research, 426 Thompson St., Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248. provided a powerful and complementary analysis of the individual as a naive scientist, busy anticipating events in the light of personal constructs about the self and the social world. Kelly articulated two fundamental and enduring cognitive assumptions. First, he placed the interpretive process at the very center of his account of individual differences: People differ because they anticipate events in unique ways which, in turn, channel their behavioral responses. Feelings, thoughts, actions, and reactions in a situation follow from those initial anticipations, those meanings with which an event is infused. Second, and equally important, Kelly posited constructive alternativism, the potential for alternative interpretations of similar events, either by two people in one situation or even by the same person in repeated encounters with an event or task. Individuals' constructs firmly channel their behavioral responses; however, the rich diversity of those constructs preserve considerable flexibility in personality functioning. The Rotter-Kelly analysis has all of the central features of a cognitive approach. The challenge for current cognitive-personality psychology is to increasingly reveal and specify those processes that represent an individual's active attempts to understand the world, to take control, and to reach personal goals. At the heart of this approach is a strong respect for the power of cognition to generate choice or create freedom. Individuals overcome stimulus control at least in part by giving their own meanings to events, by cognitively transforming situations. In this sense, the work of Walter Mischel, one of Kelly's proteges, on children's strategies for delay of gratification provides a prototypic illustration: Y