Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1987, Vol. 53, No.

6, 1159-1177

Copyright 1987 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/87/J00.75

A Conditional Approach to Dispositional Constructs: The Local Predictability of Social Behavior

Jack C.Wright Brown University and Wediko Children's Services Walter Mischel
Columbia University

A conditional approach to dispositions is developed in which dispositional constructs are viewed as clusters of if-then propositions. These propositions summarize contingencies between categories of conditions and categories of behavior rather than generalized response tendencies. A fundamental unit for investigating dispositions is therefore the conditional frequency of acts that are central to a given behavior category in circumscribed situations, not the overall frequency of behaviors. In an empirical application of the model, we examine how people's dispositional judgments are linked to extensive observations of targets' behavior in a range of natural social situations. We identify categories of these social situations in which targets' behavior may be best predicted from observers' dispositional judgments, focusing on the domains of aggression and withdrawal. One such category consists of subjectively demanding or stressful situations that tax people's performance competencies. As expected, children judged to be aggressive or withdrawn were variable across situations in dispositionally relevant behaviors, but they diverged into relatively predictable aggressive and withdrawn actions in situations that required the social, self-regulatory, and cognitive competencies they lacked. Implications of the conditional approach for personality assessment and person perception research are considered.

Dispositional constructs occupy a central position in personality and social psychology. In the personality literature, considerable debate has focused on the utility of formal dispositional constructs as operationally defined in personality assessment techniques (Buss &Craik, 1983; Epstein & O'Brien, 1985; Mischel, 1968; Vernon, 1964). In the social psychological literature, a parallel controversy has focused on the way social observers use and abuse dispositional terms when they form personality impressions, make causal attributions, and try to predict behavior (Funder, 1987; Jones, 1979; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Swann, 1984; Wright & Mischel, 1987). Unfortunately, these controver-

This research was supported by Grants MH39349 and 39263 from the National Institute of Health to Walter Mischel and by Biomedical Research Support Grant BS603342 from Brown University to Jack C. Wright. We would like to thank the administration, staff, and children of Wediko Children's Services, whose cooperation made this research possible. We are especially grateful to Hugh Leichtman and Harry Parad, Wediko's directors, for their support. We would also like to thank Yuichi Shoda for his invaluable assistance at several stages of the research, Jan Eisenman for her help in preparing the article, Michael Susi for making his analyses available to us, and several colleagues, including Nancy Cantor, Monica Rodriguez, and Henri Zukier, for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jack C. Wright, Hunter Laboratory of Psychology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912 or to Walter Mischel, Department of Psychology, 309 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027.

sies in both areas of psychology have been concerned more with attacking or defending the utility of dispositional constructs than with clarifying their structure and function. It is this latter, more constructive goal that we pursue in this article. We begin with a brief survey of the classic, relatively contextfree conceptualizations of dispositional constructs that have dominated the literature on personality assessment and person perception. We then examine alternative views of dispositional constructs, which are termed conditional because they focus on the conditional if-then contingencies between situations and behavior, in contrast to models that give little explicit treatment to contexts. In our proposed conditional or contextual model, dispositional constructs are represented as concepts that link categories of acts with categories of conditions in which those acts are expected to occur. The model posits that the structure and function of dispositional constructs are best revealed by identifying the clusters of specific if-then, condition-behavior contingencies people display. In the empirical core of this article, we apply our conditional model to identify how observers' dispositional judgments in two dispositional domainsaggression and withdrawalare linked to specific condition-behavior contingencies in the lives of children with adjustment problems, children we observed extensively during a summer in a camp setting. In this context we identify one category or equivalence class of naturally occurring social situations in which we hypothesized that targets' behavior may be predicted relatively well from observers' dispositional judgments. This equivalence class consists of subjectively demanding or stressful situations that require the social, self-regulatory, and cognitive compe1159

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Table 1

JACK C. WRIGHT AND WALTER MISCHEL row in the sense that the underlying mental structures render relatively few situations equivalent and give rise to a relatively small class of responses. Nevertheless, practitioners of trait paradigms who were inspired by the causal view posited that many traits would produce rather broad consistencies in social behavior across situations whose range and limits remained unclear (Hartshorne & May, 1928; Newcomb, 1929). Trait-relevant behavior was expected in each of the many situations that were in some way relevant to that domain, leading the cross-situational consistency coefficient (i.e., the average of correlations over pairs of situations sampled from the domain) to become a primary measure of personality coherence (Bern & Allen, 1974; Mischel, 1968). One principal difficulty with this approach was that the observed cross-situational consistency of behavior was lower than expected (Hartshorne & May, 1928; Mischel, 1968; Mischel & Peake, 1982; Peterson, 1968), which suggested that the "mental structures" had less breadth than was assumed.

Alternative Views of Dispositional Constructs Causal status yes Typical operational definition Cross-situational consistency of behavior (average of pairwise correlations) Multiple-act aggregate over a specified period of observation Conditional probability of a category of behaviors given a category of contexts

Position Causal

Extension Behavioral consistency

Summary

no

Act trend

Conditional

no

Conditionbehavior contingency

tencies that are especially difficult for the aggressive and withdrawn children who were observed. Before turning to our empirical efforts to test this hypothesis, however, we consider the conceptualization of dispositional constructs themselves, as the clarification of those constructs and their potential utility is a principal goal of this article.

Another was that the causal status attributed to trait terms seemed specious, as many trait attributions were little more than restatements of observed regularities of behavior (Bandura, 1969). A second view of dispositional constructs, what might be termed the summary or act-frequency position, attributes no causal status to traits but rather conceptualizes them as descriptive summaries of observed behavior (Buss & Craik, 1983; Hampshire, 1953). In this view, dispositional statements constitute claims about the relative incidence of acts (act frequency), over a specified period of observation; they are statements of what tends to happen on the whole (Hampshire, 1953), a general trend or tendency in a person's conduct. The extension of a dispositional term is therefore a high base-rate probability (relative to other people) that a behavior or category of behaviors will occur over some period of observation (see Table 1). On purely actuarial grounds, such attributions carry the implication that similar behavioral frequencies will be observed in the future, but they remain causally neutral and do not refer to underlying psychic properties of the person. The summary view does not require cross-situational consistencies in social behavior (Hampshire, 1953) and is therefore not embarrassed by the evidence of low consistency coefficients (Epstein & O'Brien, 1985; Buss & Craik, 1983). It also avoids the reification problem by insisting that dispositional statements are powerless and do not serve an explanatory function (Buss & Craik, 1983). Nevertheless, there is a key problem any context-free conception of dispositions, whether causal or summary, must face (Brandt, 1970): Many dispositional statements about objects as well as people do not seem to be claims about generalized response tendencies; rather, they imply a tendency to display particular behaviors under relatively well-defined conditions. For example, the dispositional construct soluble appears not to summarize a general act trend over a specified period of observation but rather a specific set of condition-action contingencies (e.g., dissolving when submerged).

Unconditional Conceptualizations of Dispositional Constructs

Confusion often occurs in theoretical discussions of dispositions, in part because the original statements of the major theories of personality dispositions were hedged with regard to the degree of stability and consistency that traits imply (Allport, 1937; Cartel!, 1957; Guilford, 1959). Adding to the confusion was the fact that this hedging often did not translate into research paradigms and clinical applications. A split developed between theoretical views of traits, which acknowledged that of course trait constructs did not imply behavioral consistency over functionally different situations, and research and clinical practice, which often proceeded as if they did (as reviewed, e.g., by Mischel, 1968; Peterson, 1968; Wiggins, 1973). In many respects, it is not the theoretical positions as stated but rather the paradigms as practiced that have dominated work on personality assessment and person perception. It is these practices, not necessarily the theories underlying them, that our comments address. The oldest of these noncontextual paradigms is the causal view of traits seen in the early consistency literature (Hartshorne & May, 1928; Newcomb, 1929) and later criticized extensively (Mischel, 1968; Peterson, 1968; Vernon, 1964). This causal view conceptualizes dispositions as indicators of stable, underlying attributes within the person that have determinative effects on behavior (see Table 1). For instance, Allport (1937) argued that behind the confusion of trait terms, the disagreement of judges, and the errors of empirical observation, trait terms ultimately refer to "bona fide mental structures" (p. 289) that produce consistencies in behavior over time or across situations. The presence of such traits did not require that these consistencies in behavior always be pervasive; traits could also be nar-

Conditional Views of Dispositional Constructs

Despite the dominance of causal and summary views in the personality literature, there is a history of philosophical discus-

DISPOSITIONAL CONSTRUCTS sion of an alternative conceptualization of dispositional constructs that might be termed the conditional or subjunctive view (see Table 1). The essential common feature of these views (Alston, 1975; Hirschberg, 1978;Quine, 1960; Ryle, 1949) is that they represent dispositional statements as hypothetical propositions that express probable if-then relations between situations and behavior. For example, an attribution of brittleness is not a summary statement about a generalized tendency to shatter or break; rather, it expresses a set of subjunctive if-then propositions about how the object would respond to certain situations (e.g., cracking or shattering when physically stressed). Similarly, an attribution of a personality disposition (e.g., aggressive) is an implicit subjunctive statement about what a person would be likely to do under appropriate conditions (e.g., when frustrated, when aversively stimulated), not necessarily what he or she will do on average. The fundamental unit of a disposition is therefore not the unconditional probability of trait-relevant behaviors, p(B), as in a summary view; rather, it is the conditional probability of a certain behavior or category of behaviors given a certain condition or set of conditions has occurred, p(B \ C). Naturally, the base-rate frequency of dispositionally relevant behavior, p(B), may be correlated with the conditional frequency, p(B\C), most obviously when base-rate estimates are based on behaviors drawn in part from relevant conditions (C). Nevertheless, within a conditional framework, the extension of a dispositional construct is taken to be a set of context-behavior conditional probabilities, not the base-rate probabilities with which they may be correlated. The conditional view's focus on if-then linkages between contexts and behaviors has two general implications. In the study of personality, the conditional model shifts personality assessment from the use of average cross-situational consistency coefficients and cross-situational act trends to an assessment of the clusters of context-behavior regularities that people display under specified conditions (e.g., Mischel, 1973). Similarly, the conditional model shifts research on person perception from analyzing people's inferences about the co-occurrence of trait adjectives (Asch, 1946; Schneider, 1973) to analyzing the implicit contextual structure of dispositional statements and their linkages to specific, local predictability or consistency in behavior (Wright & Mischel, 1987). Our approach to dispositions extends the conditional view by integrating it with recent work on category structure (Cantor & Mischel, 1979; Cantor, Mischel, & Schwartz, 1982; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976) and by further specifying the nature of the condition-behavior linking rules. In general, a dispositional construct can be represented as a concept that consists of two category structures joined by an ifthen linking proposition (see Figure 1). The first component of a dispositional construct consists of a category of acts or behaviors (cf. Buss & Craik, 1983; Cantor & Mischel, 1979). For example, a category of aggressive acts might include physical (hit, push, object struggle) and verbal (threat, provoke, boss) acts as its members. The second component of a dispositional construct is the set of contexts or conditions that is correlated with the occurrence of behaviors falling within the behavior category. For example, conditions correlated with the occurrence of aggressive acts might include antecedent determinants (when

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frustrated, when aversively stimulated) and consequent determinants (when reinforced). The third component of a dispositional construct is the proposition that expresses the nature of the if-then link between the condition category and the behavior category (e.g., if frustrated, then aggressive). In sum, the exact nature of a dispositional construct will depend on the structure of the condition and behavior categories and the type of rule linking them. Structurally, both condition and behavior categories vary in the degree to which they are well denned or fuzzy (see Cantor, Smith, French, & Mezzich, 1980). Like many object categories (Rosch et al., 1976), many behavior categories (e.g., aggressive acts) appear to be fuzzythey lack necessary and sufficient criteria and instead have features that are merely correlated with membership in the category. The boundaries of such a behavior category are poorly defined and specific acts may vary in their centrality to it, from those that are highly typical (e.g., hit for the category of aggressive acts) to those that are peripheral (e.g., tease). Many condition categories (e.g., stressful events) appear to be similarly fuzzy or probabilistic. Specific contexts therefore could vary in their prototypicality to such categories, from those that are highly typical of stressful events (e.g., complete interference with task performance when the consequences for failure are severe) to those that are more peripheral (e.g., partial interference when the consequences for failure are mild). Finally, the if-then propositions that link members of the condition category (C) to members of the behavior category (B) also vary in the degree to which they are necessary and sufficient versus probabilistic (Magnusson, 1980). For example, necessary and sufficient linking rules would specify that if and only if C, then B (e.g., if and only if frustrated, then aggressive). In contrast, probabilistic linking propositions indicate that members of a condition category are neither necessary nor sufficient but rather have only an imperfect, probabilistic relation with a behavior, thus taking the form if C then B with probability p (e.g., if frustrated, then sometimes aggressive). A wide range of condition category/linking rule/behavior category combinations are possible, each leading to different operations for determining whether a person is a member of a dispositional category (e.g., an aggressive child, a withdrawn child). In this research, we pursue one variant of dispositional constructs that we believe to be particularly relevant to personality and social psychology. In this variant, a dispositional statement (e.g., "He is aggressive," "He is withdrawn") is a concept that consists of a fuzzy condition category linked to a fuzzy behavior category with probabilistic linking propositions. The behavior categories are taken to be only loosely defined, consisting of multiple acts that may vary in their centrality to the category. Likewise, the condition category is only loosely defined, consisting of events or contexts that vary from central or good examples of the condition category to peripheral or poor instances of the category. Also, the linking propositions are taken to be probabilistic, indicating only an imperfect correlation between contexts and behavior. This fuzzy-probabilistic variant implies that people who are members of a dispositional category differ from nonmembers in that they display a tendency to respond with one or more acts falling in a behavior category when one or more contexts falling

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JACK C WRK3HT AND WALTER MISCHEL {Condition Category} {Behavior Category}

{Internal States} Feels Angry Feels Frustrated Linking {Interpersonal Events) Threatened Criticized Rule

{Physical} Hits Impulsive {Verbal} Threats Yells

Figure 1. Illustration of a dispositional construct (aggressive) as an if-then linkage between a category of conditions and a category of behaviors.

in a condition category occur. For example, the dispositional attribution that child is aggressive refers to a cluster of condition-behavior contingencies such as //"(frustrated or threatened or punished) then sometimes (physically aggressive or verbally abusive or impulsive), or more generally //(C 1 or C2 or C3) then (Bl or B2 or B3) with probability p. Furthermore, we assume that the probabilistic condition-behavior links are not uniform over specific condition-behavior pairs; rather, some conditionbehavior finks are stronger than others. For example, for children judged to be aggressive, central aggressive acts (e.g., physical aggression) might be relatively likely in certain conditions (e.g., highly frustrating situations) but extremely unlikely to occur in other situations. Such acts are thus highly contingent on conditions. However, peripheral aggressive acts (e.g., impulsivity) might be less contingent on specific conditions, occurring with more uniform likelihood over contexts.

Identifying Psychologically Equivalent Conditions

Conditional models of dispositions complement interactionist approaches to personality that view person and situation variables as joint determinants of social behavior (e.g., Dworkin & Kihlstrom, 1978; Ekehammar, 1974; Endler & Magnusson, 1976; Magnusson, 1980; Magnusson & Endler, 1977). Nevertheless, the conditional approach to dispositions distinguishes itself from most versions of interactionism in an important way. Conceptually, rather than characterizing dispositions as person variables and evaluating their impact relative to situation variables, the conditional approach does not invite a partitioning of causes into dispositional versus situational. The conditional view instead posits that a disposition is itself a set of conditionbehavior relations, thus diffusing debate over the relative power of situations versus persons. Although interactionist and conditional approaches to dispositions diverge in the way they conceptualize dispositions, they share certain empirical challenges. For more thaji a decade, in-

teractionist approaches have emphasized that personality assessment requires a parallel assessment of situations (Bern & Allen, 1974) and have attempted to identify the relation between functional equivalence classes of situations and categories of behavior (e.g., Bern & Funder, 1978; Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Dodge, 1983; Magnusson, 1980; Magnusson & Ekehammar, 1978; Monson, Hesley, & Chemick, 1982; Moos, 1973; Patterson, 1982; Price & Bouffard, 1974). Indeed, one of the greatest challenges both for interactionist research and for the conditional approach is to identify the categories of conditions or equivalence classes of situations most relevant to a given behavioral domain. Historically, empirical studies of interactionism have often found it easier to categorize types of people to whom dispositional statements might apply (Bern & Allen, 1974; Chaplin & Goldberg, i 984; Mischei & Peake, ! 982) than to specify the categories of situations in which predictable individual differences are most likely to be observed. Unless such equivalence classes of situations are identified in advance, applications of conditional models run the same risk as certain previous applications of interactionism, namely the risk of producing very large numbers of specific condition-behavior contingencies or higher order interactions whose psychological significance is unknown and that are merely found post hoc rather than predicted (cf. Cronbach, 1975; Meehl, 1973). Thus, in a conditional approach, a key task is to identify the categories of conditions in which predictable behaviors relevant to some dispositional domain are most likely to be observed. One way to address this problem is to examine the conditions that social observers themselves consider relevant to the dispositional constructs they use. Consider, for example, the types of conditions people consider relevant to two dispositional domains we have studied in the past and on which we continue to focus in this research: aggression and withdrawal- When we asked adults to describe real children they had rated as relatively aggressive or withdrawn, adults spontaneously linked ag-

DISPOSITIONAL CONSTRUCTS gressive and withdrawn acts to specific contexts in which those acts might be observed (Wright & Mischel, 1987). Content analyses of these contingency statements revealed two major condition categories most often used in conjunction with aggressive and withdrawn acts. One category, comprising 21% of observers' conditional statements, consisted of aversive interpersonal events (e.g., when threatened, teased, warned, criticized, blamed, hit, punished, ordered). A second, comprising 20% of their conditional statements, consisted of aversive subjective experiences or lack of performance competence (e.g., when frustrated, feels angry, feels upset, lacks ability to perform, feels anxious). Most of the remaining conditional statements referred to particular persons, specific occasions, or physical locations in which the behaviors occur. People's theories about ideal examples of aggressive children also include condition-behavior contingencies similar to those we found in their descriptions of real children. For example, in research (Wright & Dawson, 1987), adults were asked to imagine hypothetical prototypic aggressive children, then to identify the contexts in which these ideally aggressive children would be most and least likely to display aggressive acts. The 10 contexts judged least likely to elicit aggression were those that involved physical quickness, gross motor coordination, physical strength, powerful rewards for positive behavior, tangible evidence of success, taking physical risks, speaking in public, talking about self, remembering information, and inventiveness. The 10 contexts judged most likely to elicit aggressive behavior in ideally aggressive children were those that involved frustration, anxiety, anger, tedium, sadness, controlling impulses, delaying gratification, peer conflicts, adult conflicts, and structuring time. Other investigators have also observed that the situations people identify as most problematic for aggressive children are those in which they are likely to lack the necessary social and self-regulatory competencies, such as when teacher expectations about performance are high or when threatened by peers (Dodge, 1986). A range of empirical evidence is consistent with observers' informal theory that difficult, demanding, or stressful situations are likely to elicit stable individual differences in these and other domains (Mischel, 1986). Although there is little support for the strong version of the frustration-aggression hypothesis or the hydraulic notions with which it is sometimes linked, there is evidence that individual differences in aggressive responses are particularly clear in situations that involve frustration (Mischel, 1986). More generally, research reveals related effects in other behavioral domains. Consider, for example, situations variously termed frustrating (Bandura & Walters, 1963), stressful (Lazarus, 1974), or subjectively demanding (McGrath, 1976), which are similar in that the behaviors they require tax or exceed people's actual or perceived competence. In general, such situations often increase the variability of responses by improving the performances of some individuals and interfering with the performance of others (Lazarus, 1974; Mandler & Sarason, 1952; Sarason, 1957). Furthermore, this variability may reflect meaningful individual differences in the availability of coping strategies, prior preferences, and biases (Eriksen & Wechsler, 1955; Spence, 1960). For instance, individual differences between repressers and sensitizers in attention deploy-

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ment (i.e., attending to information about their personal liabilities) are greatest following failure experiences and least following success (Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss, 1973). Individual differences between low-anxious and high-anxious people are enhanced on difficult tasks relative to easy ones (Korchin & Levine, 1957). Type A individuals display higher levels of hostile aggression than do Type Bs following frustration (i.e., when unable to complete a difficult puzzle), but the two groups are similar when not frustrated (Strube, Turner, Cerro, Stephens, & Hinchey, 1984). And individual differences between good and poor experienced parachutists in respiration rate are greatest at the moment of performing the demanding task, the jump (Fenz, 1964). Competency-Demand Hypothesis Observers' informal theories about context-behavior contingencies and relevant personality research seem to converge on what we term a competency-demand hypothesis (Mischel, 1985; Wright, 1983). According to this hypothesis, psychologically demanding situations constitute one category of conditions in which individual differences in certain domains (e.g., aggressiveness, withdrawal) may be observed with particular clarity (Mischel, 1985; Wright, 1983). When individuals are motivated to meet situation requirements, and have the requisite competencies available, their actions are likely to be appropriate to the situation and more predictable from knowledge of situation variables than from individual differences. In contrast, situations that involve high competency requirements and are demanding or stressful may be more informative of possible differences between individuals in their "preferred" or "available" coping styles. These preferred styles are coping patterns that have been well learned, that have previously been reinforced, and about which the person has relatively generalized performance and behavior-outcome expectancies (Mischel, 1973). To the degree that demanding situations require competencies not readily available, they may activate these more generalized or rigid coping styles and thus provide conditions under which individual differences in coping behavior may be more predictable from dispositional judgments. This competency-demand hypothesis represents one way of operationalizing a conditional model of dispositions: People judged to be aggressive as opposed to withdrawn are expected to display few dispositionally relevant behaviors (i.e., aggressive or withdrawn acts) in contexts that are poor instances of high competency-requirement situations (i.e., contexts that make relatively few competency demands). But they are expected to display higher rates of dispositionally relevant behavior in contexts that are good examples of high competency-requirement situations (i.e., contexts that make many competency demands). We further posit that the condition-behavior contingencies will be clearest for acts that are most central to the behavioral categories in question. For example, for aggressive children, highly central aggressive acts (e.g., physical aggression) should be highly contingent on the type of situation in which the child is observed (low vs. high demand). In contrast, more peripheral, less central aggressive acts (e.g., impulsivity) should be less contingent on the type of situation.

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Present Study

JACK C. WRIGHT AND WALTER MISCHEL these situations, children judged as aggressive rather than withdrawn should diverge into relatively stable aggressive rather than withdrawn coping patterns, but in nondemanding situations the children's behavior will be relatively difficult to predict from observers' dispositional judgments.

To examine the utility of the contextual approach, we required observers who were highly familiar with a sample of actors so that we could study well-formed impressions that were based on extensive interpersonal interactions. Second, we needed extensive observations of these actors' behavior over time and across a range of natural social situations. Third, we required a population that included actors who were good examples of some psychologically important dispositional categories. These requirements could be satisfied in Wediko Children's Services summer facility for troubled children, where we have conducted related research. The children are characterized as having significant behavior problems and are often described as aggressive and withdrawn (Horowitz, Wright, Lowenstein, & Parad, 1981; Murphy & Wright, 1984; Wright, Giammarino, & Parad, 1986; Wright & Mischel, 1987). In this setting, we were able to observe children repeatedly in a wide range of situations that varied in the degree to which they required cognitive and self-regulatory skills relevant to our competency-demand hypothesis. Our general procedure for forming condition categories is to assess the demand level of these nominal camp situations (e.g., art, music, canoeing, athletics, academic tutoring, crafts, swimming), then to group these nominal contexts into functional equivalence classes on the basis of their level of competency demand. Our procedure also carefully controls for the number of observations obtained in each category of situations, thus allowing us to partial out the effect of aggregation over occasions and to separate that from the effects of situation demand. Consistent with the competency-demand hypothesis, we expected that one class of conditions in which social behavior may be predicted from dispositional judgments of aggression and withdrawal consists of psychologically demanding situations. In such stressful situations, children characterized as aggressive should display relatively predictable levels of aggression; those characterized as withdrawn should display relatively predictable levels of withdrawal. Although we also assessed prosocial behaviors, because our population did not include good exemplars of socially competent children, we did not expect increased predictability as a function of situation-competency requirements in this domain.

Method Overview of Field Setting

At Wediko Children's Services summer facility in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, approximately 150 children live each summer in a camp setting. The children live in groups of 8 to 10 same-sex peers and can be observed in a wide range of situations: daily activities such as art, archery, canoeing, drama, music, trampoline, and woodworking. Because the children attend these activities regularly over a period of 6.5 weeks, it was possible to obtain repeated measures of each child in each situation. Each child lives in a group with 7 to 9 children and 4 to 5 adult staff who interact with them throughout most of each day, making it possible to obtain both adults' and children's dispositional judgments that were based on extensive interpersonal interactions.

Subjects
The children are referred to the summer program by school counselon, by their parents, and by other agencies for significant social adjustment problems they experience at school or in the home environment. All of the children (and many of their families) have had special counseling at school, have received some form of individual or group therapy, or both. The majority of the youths are from low-income families in the Boston area; they are of average or above-average intelligence and are not physically handicapped (for details, see Parad, 1983). The subjects in our study were the 89 children (aged 7-14 years) who resided fulltime in the setting and therefore could be observed fully. Two of these cases were subsequently dropped because of incomplete data, producing a sample of 65 boys (M = 9.43 years, SD = 2.73) and 22 girls (M = 10.25 years, SD = 2.86) in the sample.

Dispositional Judgments
Adults'dispositional judgments. Previous research had identified the 40 features adults commonly use in describing the typically aggressive, withdrawn, and well-adjusted child (Horowitz et al., 1981; Murphy & Wright, 1984; Wright, Giammarion,& Parad, 1986). Examples of these features include verbally abusive, distractible, impulsive, restless, interested and involved in activities, untalkative, hostile, angry, quiet, and fights. Using these features, adult observers rated target children by using scales ranging from 0 to 6, where 0 indicated the feature was not at all descriptive of Ms child and 6 indicated highly descriptive of this child. Each adult (4-6 per group) assessed only those children in the cabin group (of 8-10 children) to which that adult was assigned. These adults interacted with the children in their group throughout each day of the program and therefore could be considered as having very wellformed impressions of them. Dispositional judgments were obtained on four occasions: Days 12,26,38, and 48(2 days after the children had departed the setting). On each occasion, each adult assessed 3 to 4 of the children in his or her group that were randomly assigned to him or her. This generated a minimum of two independent sets of ratings for each child on each occasion. Reliability of dispositional judgments. Because two to three independent raters made dispositional judgments of each child on each occasion, it was possible to assess interrater reliabilities for each of the 40 items adults used in making their judgments. The raw interrater reli-

Summary
The conditional view of dispositions specifies that a fundamental unit of dispositional assessment is the conditional probability of a category of behaviors given that some set of conditions is satisfied. Dispositional judgments will therefore be most closely linked to the local predictability of key or prototypic social behaviors that occur in situations that are relevant to the disposition. Instead of searching for context-free dispositions or aggregating over acts or situations, this approach seeks to identify the specific condition-behavior contingencies that are most closely linked to observers' dispositional judgments. One class of conditions in which social behavior may be predicted relatively well from dispositional judgments of aggression and withdrawal consists of psychologically demanding situations. In

DISPOSIT1ONAL CONSTRUCTS abilities (alpha coefficients) ranged between .11 (.27) and .70 (.87), with a median of .47 (.73). Before proceeding with further analyses, all items with reliabilities below .38 (.62) were removed, producing a set of 30 items with median reliabilities of .53 (.77). Ratings of features' relevance to dispositional categories. To evaluate how central each of these 40 features was to the three dispositional categories, a separate group of staff (n = 30) not involved in the primary data collection for this study rated how well each of the 40 items characterized the ideally aggressive, withdrawn, or prosocial child. The ratings were made on scales of 0 to 6 on which 0 indicated not at all descriptive and 6 indicated highly descriptive. Each subject rated only one type of child, resulting in 10 sets of ratings for each type. To assess the degree to which subjects agreed in their prototvpicality judgments, the ratings within each group of raters (i.e., those who rated the ideally aggressive, withdrawn, and prosocial child) were correlated. The average interrater correlations and alpha coefficients were, for aggressive, 0.67 (0.96); for withdrawn, 0.81 (0.97); and for prosocial, 0.60 (0.93). Identifying centralfeatures. Oat analyses required features that were good criteria for determining whether a particular child was aggressive or withdrawn. A criterion is good in this respect if it is considered highly descriptive for one dispositional category (e.g., the ideally aggressive child) and nondescriptive with respect to contrast categories (e.g., the ideally withdrawn or ideally prosocial child). Therefore, each feature's centrality to a dispositional category was computed by taking the difference between the rating of how well it described one dispositional category (e.g., the aggressive child) and the ratings of how well it described the contrast categories (the ideally withdrawn and prosocia! child). Because we wanted features that were very good criteria for determining whether a child was aggressive, withdrawn, or prosocial, we used only the 4 (of 30, or 13%) criteria that were most central to each category: aggressive (verbally abusive, is hostile, fights, threatens others), withdrawn (untalkauve. low activity level, quiet, unassertive), and prasoa'a/Smakes friends, cooperative, communicates well, considerate). Reliability of dispositional constructs. Adults' dispositional judgments of the children were assessed by averaging over their judgments on those features that were the best indicators for each dispositional category. For example, adults' judgments of each real child's aggressiveness were computed by averaging over their ratings on the degree to which the four best criteria of aggressiveness described that child. To assess the reliability of these multiple-act constructs, a child's score on each of these categories was computed separately for each of the independent adult raters. The median raw interrater correlations and alpha coefficients (over all three raters) were, for aggressive, .83 (.94); for withdrawn, .70 (.88); and for prosocial, .68 (.86). Subsequent analyses averaged over all adults who provided dispositional judgments and over all occasions on which they provided them. We address issues concerning adults' initial judgments in a subsequent section. Assignment to dispositional categories. A real child was a good example of an aggressive child if the ratings he or she received for aggressive features were high and the ratings he or she received for withdrawal and prosocial were low. Therefore, each real child's judged aggressiveness was computed by taking the difference between his or her mean aggressiveness ratings and his or her mean withdrawal and prosocial ratings. With this measure, four groups (quartiles) of children were identified with respect to judged aggressiveness. The same procedure was used to identify quartiles of withdrawn children and quartiles of prosocial children.

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learning lime (academic exercises), adventure (hiking, ropes course), archery, art, athletics, canoeing, clay, crafts, drama, fishing, magic, movement, music, nature, photo, think city (academic tutoring), trampoline, waterfront, and woodworking. The first 3 of these activities were located in the cabin; for these activities, hourly observations were provided by cabin staff and own group activity staff on a rotating basis. The remaining 18 activities were located at activity sites throughout the setting; for these activities hourly observations were provided by other group activity staff. Hourly observers. Of the 110 counselors in the program, 72(31 men, 41 women) participated in assessing children's behavior in specific situations. These staff, all undergraduates or recent college graduates, knew that the research was designed to improve our understanding of children's behavior, but they were not informed of its specific goals. There were three categories of observers, best understood from the perspective of a single typical child. A given child interacted with his or her cabin staff(2-l adults) throughout the day, with the exception of the two afternoon activity periods during which such staff had time off, and in all of the 21 sampled activities (see later description). The child interacted with own group activity staff (2-3 adults) throughout the day, with the exception of the two morning and two afternoon activity periods during which such staff were running their activities, and in only 4 of the 21 sampled activities (that staff's own activity, bedtime, cabin meeting, and learning time). The child interacted with other group activity staff (42 adults) in only one of the morning or afternoon activity periods that that particular activity staff supervised and ran each day (e.g., art, music). Behavior observation system. The observational system included three behavior codes for each of three behavior categories of interest. These categories were derived from descriptions of children provided by staff in previous summers (see Horowitz et al., 1981; Murphy & Wright, 1984). The codes for each category were aggression ("was physically aggressive; hit, pushed, acted out against others physically"; "was verbally aggressive; threatened, bullied, teased; was verbally abusive"; and "acted impulsively, could not wait; could not stay put"), withdrawal ("was untalkative; verbally withholding, refused to talk"; "withdrew, isolated self; avoided contact with others"; and "was inactive, slow moving; had low activity level"), and prosocial ("was considerate and thoughtful of others; helpful and cooperative"; "was interested and involved in activity; self-motivated; effort was high"; and "performance was age appropriate; demonstrated competence at task"). The ratings were made on 7-point scales on which 0 represented not at all characteristic of the child's behavior during this period and 6 represented Highly characteristic. Observational procedure. All observers were instructed to evaluate children's behavior only during the particular activity itself. Separate tracking sheets were provided for each situation; on each sheet appeared the complete wording of each behavior code and the names of the children to be tracked. Immediately following a given period, the observer completed a behavior tracking sheet for that period. Typically, 8 to 10 children were assessed during each period. Completing a single tracking sheet required approximately 10 min. The behavior tracking sheets for all situations were collected daily.

Situation Assessments
Assessing situation-competency requirements. We selected items to assess situation-competency requirements guided by previous research and theorizing on person assessment (Block & Block, 1980; Mischel, 1973), by a consideration of the probable competence deficits of aggressive and withdrawn children (Coie, Dodge, & Coppotelli, 1982; Dodge, 1986; Spivack & Shure, 1974), and by a consideration of the structure of the situations in the activity program. In particular, the initial 60item pool was designed to evaluate cognitive, self-regulatory, and social

Hourly Behavioral Observations

Situation sampling. Children were observed in naturally occurring daily activity periods in which all children participated. Within the program, these situations were labeled as follows: bedtime, cabin meeting,

1166

JACK C. WRIGHT AND WALTER MISCHEL tions. This procedure took advantage of activity reports written by Wediko counselors at the end of the summer session at the request of Wediko's administration. These reports were not originally intended for research purposes; rather, they simply summarized each activity for the benefit of future activity counselors. Each report was approximately 2 to 4 pages in length. Reports for nine of the original situations (three each from the low-, medium-, and high-demand categories) were typed verbatim into a standard format. Fifteen Columbia undergraduates then read the reports for three specific situations (one each from the low-, medium-, and high-demand sets), then provided ratings on the 20 most reliable of the original items used to assess situation-competency requirements. This generated five independent sets of ratings for each of nine situations. The internal reliabilities (Cronbach's alpha) were computed for each of the 20 items used in their assessments. One item was unreliable (-.01), and the remaining items had reliabilities ranging from .47 to .95, with a median reliability of .86. Next, cognitive, self-regulatory, social, and physical demand scores were computed by using the same clusters of items described earlier. Scores were obtained for each of the nine situations on each of these categories by averaging over the items in that category. These mean scores were then correlated with the original ratings provided by Wediko's counselors. The correlations between the two independent groups of raters were, for cognitive, .98; for self-regulatory, .70; for social, .92; and for physical, .79. Finally, a composite cognitive, social, and self-regulatory measure was computed and correlated with the corresponding composite based on Wediko counselors' ratings. The correlation was .93. All of these correlations are significant (p < .02). Thus, the assessments of situations in this study are closely related to independent assessments of situation demand provided by undergraduates who had not observed the behavior of children in those situations. Independent child assessments of situations. Susi (1986) also obtained information concerning children's perceptions of the situations, using children who attended Wediko's program in a subsequent summer. During the fifth week of their residence at Wediko, children completed an activity nomination inventory. In individual sessions, each child was asked a series of questions designed to assess her or his preferences for the activities ("Which activities do you really like/not like?"), their performance abilities ("Which activities are you best/worst at?"), social support ("Which activities do people say the most/least nice things to you?"), negative outcome expectancies ("Which activities do you get into the most/least trouble in if you don't follow counselors' instructions?"), and personal control ("Which activities do you get to decide what you want to do?"). Children responded by selecting the five activities that best fit each question, using color photographs of each activity and its activity counselors). The mean number of times each activity was nominated for each of the questions was computed, then correlated with a composite cognitive, social, and self-regulatory measure based on adults' assessments of the activities (as described). The correlations between each of the children's items and adults' assessments of demand were as follows: for preference, -.70 (p < .002); for performance ability, -.44 (p < .08); for social support, -.55 (p < .03); for negative outcome expectancies, .47 (p < .06); and for personal control, -.61 (p < .02). Thus, children's perceptions of the activities were related to adults' assessments of situation demand.

competencies that are both central within a social learning framework (Mischel, 1973) and of the greatest relevance for our sample of children and situations (see Dodge, 1986). In addition to these competency areas, the inventory also included measures designed to assess physical competencies. Items in the inventory were phrased (see Block & Block, 1981) to assess the degree to which a given situation required a particular competency in order to perform well in that situation (e.g., "this situation requires the ability to " or "this situation requires "). Examples of the items designed to assess the competence areas are, for cognitive, think rationally, short-term memory, high intelligence, and extensive knowledge; for self-regulatory, tolerate frustration and delay gratification; for social, resolve conflict with peers and resolve conflict with adults; and for physical, physical strength and gross motor coordination. Adults rated the degree to which a given competence requirement described a situation by using a 7-point scale on which 0 represented not at all and 6 represented highly. Only cabin staff who had participated in each of the situations over the course of the summer provided assessments of the situations. Each of the raters was assigned 4 of the 21 situations in the sample, generating three independent assessments of each situation. All assessments were provided after the children had departed at the end of the summer session. Determining reliability. Interrater reliabilities of the competency assessments were obtained by computing the correlations over the three pairs of independent raters. These individual item reliabilities and corresponding alpha coefficients ranged between . 12 (.52) and .90 (.95), with a median of .35 (.62). Before proceeding with further analyses, items with reliabilities lower than .32 (.58) were removed, producing a set of 32 items with a median of .57 (.80). Next, the ratings on these reliable items were submitted to a hierarchical cluster analysis (diameter method; Johnson, 1974). The solution was pruned by cutting all branches except those whose weakest association was in the upper third of associations for the entire solution (i.e., this removed items that were not closely related to one another, such as "must be orderly"). This procedure produced four clusters of items, which we label as follows; cognitive (think rationally, short-term memory, high intelligence, knowledge, deal with intellectual challenges, attend to detail), self-regulatory (tolerate frustration, focus in the face of distraction, delay gratification), social (communicate with words, deal with peer conflict, speak in front of others, deal with adult conflict, express personal feelings to others, try new situations, introspect), and physical (physical strength, gross motor control, physical quickness, physical toughness). A situation's score on each of these competence categories was computed by averaging over the items within a category separately for each of the independent adult raters. These mean (category) ratings were correlated over the pairs of raters to assess interrater reliabilities. The median raw interrater correlations and alpha coefficients were as follows: cognitive, .82 (.90); self-regulatory, .73 (.86); social, .70 (.85); and physical, .95 (.97). These category scores were intercorrelated as follows: cognitive-regulatory, .61; cognitive-social, .53; cognitive-physical, .28; regulatory-social, .50; regulatory-physical, -.12; and social-physical, .35. Because the cognitive, self-regulatory, and social categories were positively correlated with one another and because each was negatively correlated with physical competencies, the cognitive, self-regulatory, and social competency-requirement categories were summed to form a single measure, our basic index of situations-competency requirements.

Situation-Equivalence Classes and Behavior Sampling Validation of Situation Assessments

Independent adult assessments of situations. As part of a larger investigation, Susi (1986) obtained independent assessments of the situaSituation-equivalence classes. Situation-equivalence classes were identified by using the aggregate index of cognitive, self-regulatory, and social competency requirementscompetencies we expected behaviorproblem children such as Wediko's most likely to lack (Dodge, 1986).

DISPOSIT1ONAL CONSTRUCTS This procedure was based on Wediko counselors' assessments (not peer assessments). From the total sample of 21 nominal situations in which hourly observations were obtained, three equivalence classes of situations were formed. These were the five situations lowest, five highest, and five nearest the median of the situation-competency-requirement scores. The situations were low competency (art, fishing, movement, trampoline, and waterfront), medium competency (adventure, drama, magic, music, and nature), and high competency (academic tutoring, cabin meeting, crafts, learning time, and wood-working). Behavioral criteria. To assess children's behavior in the three categories of situations, we drew a random sample (without replacement) of 15 observations from each of the categories of situations (low, medium, and high competency requirements). (Although the total number of observations available for many children was greater than 45, this procedure was used to ensure that equal numbers of observations were drawn for each child from each of the situation categories.) We computed each child's mean over these samples of observations for each of the behavior codes (see earlier description). Hourly behavioral observations. To simplify certain analyses, summary measures were formed by aggregating each of the three behavior codes within a given category. For example, aggression is the aggregate of a child's score on physical agpession, verbal aggression, and impulsivity. Children's mean scores on these measures (over all of the hourly observations) were highly correlated; for example, the correlation between physical aggression and verbal aggression was .86, the correlation between physical aggression and impulsivity was .80, and the correlation between verbal aggression and impulsivity was .74. For each of the behavior categories, intracategory correlations were high, whereas intercategory correlations were low. The mean intracategory correlations (over the three behaviors within each category) were, for prosocial, .76; for aggression, .80; and for withdrawal, .84. (Average correlations reported here and in all subsequent analyses were computed by using Fisher's r-to-r transformations.) The mean intercategory correlations (between measures within one category and those within another) were, for prosocial-aggression, -.45; for prosocial-withdrawal, -.45; and for aggression-withdrawal, -.22.

1167

indeed functionally different. If they were not different (e.g., if children behaved similarly in each category of situations), then one would conclude that we simply failed to assess important situation properties. For this purpose we compared the consistency of children's behavior within categories of situations (e.g., within high-demand situations) with the consistency of their behavior between those situations (e.g., between low and high demand). To assess the consistency of behavior within the three categories of situations (low, medium, and high demand), we correlated the mean behavior over five randomly sampled occasions from a given situation category (e.g., low demand) with the mean behavior over the five other occasions from that situation category. The mean within-situation coefficients were as follows: for prosocial, .56; for aggression, .60; and for withdrawal, .65. (We also examined the within-situational consistency of behavior within each category of situation demand separately. There were no significant differences between the coefficients from the low-, medium-, and high-demand situations for any of the behavior categories.) Next, we computed the mean consistency between the three situation categories by correlating mean behavior (over five randomly sampled occasions) in one category of situations (e.g., low demand) with the mean behavior (over another random sample of five occasions) in the other categories of situations (e.g., medium and high demand). This was repeated for each pair of situation categories and each specific behavior. The results indicated that the mean consistency coefficients between situations were lower than the within-situation coefficients even at the same levels of aggregation. The mean consistency coefficients between situations were, for prosocial, .31; for aggression, .35; and for withdrawal, .33. Each of these between-situation coefficients was lower than its within-situation counterpart (zs>2.00,/*<.05). In sum, as expected, the predictability of behavior was higher among nominal situations at a similar level of competence demand than between nominal situations at a different level of competence demand. Also, the cross-situational consistency measures themselves (i.e., the between-situation coefficients) are comparable to those previously reported in the literature (Hartshorne & May, 1928;Mischel&Peake, 1982; Newcomb, 1929).

Results Our analyses are organized as follows. First, we establish that our categories of low, medium, and high competency-demand situations were indeed functionally different, a prerequisite for testing our demand hypothesis. We do this by demonstrating that the consistency of behavior within our categories of situations is higher than the consistency between different categories. Second, we test the main prediction that aggressive and withdrawn children diverge into their preferred coping strategies (i.e., aggression, withdrawal) in high-demand situations. In order to clarify these analyses, we test the claim that behaviors that are central to a behavior category are more contingent on the type of situation than are more peripheral behaviors. Third, we test the hypothesis that observers' dispositional judgments should be more predictive of dispositionally relevant behavior in high-demand than in low-demand situations. Finally, we demonstrate that these specific condition-behavior contingencies can be detected only when membership in a dispositional category (i.e., aggressive, withdrawn) is based on criteria that are highly diagnostic of membership in those categories. A prerequisite for testing the demand hypothesis is that the categories of low-, medium-, and high-demand situations were

Interactions Between Dispositional Categories and Situation Demand

We next test the main hypothesis that children judged to be aggressive or withdrawn will display stable, predictable individual differences in dispositionally relevant behavior in situations with high competency requirements. For each dispositional domain (i.e., aggression, withdrawal, prosocial), all children were placed into quartiles based on adults' dispositional judgments (see Method). We then performed 3 (level of situation demand) x 4 (dispositional category) repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAS). The dependent variables were each of the observed behaviors relevant to the dispositional category of interest, as follows: aggression (verbal aggression, physical aggression, impulsivity); withdrawal (untalkative, isolates self, low activity); and prosocial (cooperative, involvement in activity, performance in activity).

1168

JACK C. WRIGHT AND WALTER M1SCHEL

Aggression. Physical aggression, the best or most central example of an aggressive act (see Method), increased over the quartiles of judged aggressiveness, F(l, 83) = 19.53, p < .001, and as a function of situation demand level, F(2, 166) = 33.65, p < .001 (see Figure 2). As competency requirements increased, physical aggression increased more sharply for the children judged to be aggressive than for nonaggressive children, as reflected in the Demand X Dispositional Category interaction, F(6, 166) = 6.45, p < .001. Similar results were observed for the verbal aggression measure, the next most central aggressive act (see Method): There was a significant effect for dispositional category, 7=1(3,83) = 30.31, p < .001; for situation demand, F(2, 166) = 45.76, p < .001; and for the Demand X Dispositional Category interaction, F(6,166) = 4.72, p < .001 (see Figure 2). However, for the least central aggressive act (impulsivity), there was no interaction between judged dispositional category and situation demand, f\6,166) = .59, p < .74 (see Figure 2). Withdrawal. Similar analyses were performed for the withdrawal category, this time recategorizing all children into quartiles based on adults' judgments of withdrawal. As expected, each of the behaviors most central to the withdrawal category (untalkative, isolates self, moves slowly) varied as a function of judged dispositional category, Fs(3, 83) > 7.38, ps < .001, and as a function of situation demand level, Fs(2, 166)> 5.91,ps < .01. Because all three of the withdrawn behaviors assessed in the hourly observation system were comparable in judged centrality to withdrawal (see Method), we did not expect these behaviors to vary in the degree to which they were contingent on situations. Indeed, there was a significant interaction between situation demand level and judged dispositional category for each of these behaviors, Fs(6, 166) > 4.08, ps < .001. Prosocial. Finally, these analyses were repeated for the prosocial category, again recategorizing children into quartiles based on adults'judgments of the prosocial construct. As in the previous analyses, there were significant main effects for judged dispositional category, Fs(3, 83) > 4.07, ps < .01, and for situation demand level, Fs(2, 166) > 5.49, ps < .01. However, there were no interactions between situation demand level and judged dispositional category, Fs(6, 166) < 1.60, ps > .15. This lack of interactions was as expected, given the previously noted absence of good exemplars of prosocial behavior in the population we studied.

(a) Highly central: physical aggression

1.5
Ql Highly Aggressive

1.0
Q2 Moderately Aggressive Q3 Slightly Aggressive
Q4 NonAggressive

.5

Low

Medium

High

(b) Moderately central: verbal aggression

2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 .5
Q2 Moderately Aggressive Q3 Slightly Aggressive
Q4 NonAggressive

Ql Highly Aggressive

Low

Medium

High

(c) Peripheral: impulsivity

2.5 2.0 1.5
Ql Highly Aggressive Q2 Moderately Aggressive Q3 Slightly Aggressive
Q4 NonAggressive

Cross-Sitnational Variability of Behavior

These obtained interactions between dispositional category and situation demand (see Figure 2) imply that children judged to be highly aggressive vary over situations in the frequency of aggressive behaviors but are relatively consistent across situations in the frequency of withdrawn behaviors (almost never displaying such behavior). Conversely, children judged to be highly withdrawn vary over situations in the frequency of withdrawn behaviors but are relatively consistent across situations in the frequency of aggressive acts (almost never displaying them). Essentially, when targets were absolutely consistent across situations, it was in behaviors most relevant to contrasting dispositional categories: The best examples of aggressive children displayed almost uniformly low rates of withdrawn be-

1.0

.5

Low Medium High Situation Competency Demand

Figure 2. Mean aggressive behaviors as a function of targets' judged aggressiveness and level of situation-competency demand. (Q4 = the children below the 25th percentile in the distribution of adults'judgments of children's aggressiveness; Ql = the children above the 75th percentile [see Method],)

DISPOSITIONAL CONSTRUCTS

1169

haviors, whereas the best examples of withdrawn children displayed almost uniformly low rates of aggressive behaviors. Naturally, this could be viewed as simply another way of describing the previous results, as it expresses the fact that means and variances are related. Yet what is psychometrically obvious nevertheless is important in understanding observers' dispositional judgments. One way to illustrate this interaction further (which of course follows from the interactions reported in Figure 2) is to compute a single index of how variable each child's behavior was across the situations (low, medium, and high demand). For example, for the aggression measure, we computed the variance of each of the individual aggression measures (physical aggression, verbal aggression, impulsivity) over the three levels of situation demand (low, medium, high). Similar variability measures were computed for the withdrawal and prosocial measures. Because these variability indexes produced skewed distributions, we performed analyses on logarithmic transforms, which yielded approximately normal distributions. The log of these variability measures for all three sets of behavioral measures (aggression, withdrawal, prosocial) were then used to predict adults' dispositional judgments via multiple regressions. The multiple regression indicated the following significant results. Children judged to be more aggressive displayed greater cross-situational variability of aggressive behavior, b = .70, ((83) = 8.72, p < .001, and less cross-situational variability in withdrawn behavior, b = -.28, ((83) = -2.50, p < .05. Conversely, children judged to be more withdrawn displayed higher cross-situational variability of withdrawn behavior, b = .38, ((83) = 3.56, p < .05, and less cross-situational variability of aggressive behavior, * = .44, ((83) = -4.70, p < .01. As expected, neither judgments of the children's aggression nor of their withdrawal were related to the variability of their prosocial behavior. Predictability of Behavior From Dispositional Judgments as a Function of Situation Demand Our analyses of the relation between dispositional judgments and situation demand suggest that observers' dispositional judgments should be relatively more predictive of individual differences in children's social behavior in high-demand situations than in low-demand situations (see Figure 2). Note that our ANov AS did not directly demonstrate this difference in the predictability of behavior as a function of situation demand. For example, although there is relatively little absolute variability in physical aggression in low-demand situations (see Figure 2), it is still possible that observers' dispositional judgments are highly correlated with the variability in physical aggression that did exist in those situations, however little there was in absolute terms. The correlation coefficientlong the coin of the realm in assessing the predictive utility of dispositional measures in the personality literaturereflects only the degree to which variance in one measure (e.g., level of physical aggression in low-demand situations) can be accounted for by the variance in another (e.g., observers' dispositional judgments), regardless of the total amount of variance in each. Therefore, it was essential to perform correlational analyses to test directly whether the

relative predictability of behavior (from observers' dispositional judgments) varied as a function of situation demand. In testing this hypothesis, we also wanted to ensure that our results could be compared with the results of other investigations in which different numbers of behavioral observations were used (e.g., Hartshome & May, 1928; Mischel & Peake, 1982; Newcomb, 1929). Thus, whereas the ANOVAS reported here all involved maximum numbers of occasions drawn from each situation (15 hourly observations per child), in the present analyses we systematically varied the number of occasions used to estimate children's behavioral tendencies in low-, medium-, and high-demand situations. Of course, results for smaller numbers of hourly observations could be statistically estimated from the results based on larger numbers (e.g., according to Spearman-Brown), but such estimation would require assumptions that we wished to avoid. Consequently, we examined the effects of frequency of observations directly by computing multiple behavioral criteria, each based on different sample sizes (i.e., the number of observations drawn from low, medium, and high situation demand). To ensure that the results would be representative of the underlying relation in the data, we bootstrapped our analyses. That is, we repeated the entire sampling process on multiple, independent trials, averaging over the outcomes to produce a final, more stable estimate of the relation between dispositional judgments and behavior. Specifically, the bootstrapping proceeded as follows: (a) Draw a random sample of behavioral observations (without replacement) of size n from a given category of situations for each child; (b) take the mean for each child over the n observations (obviously, only when n > 1); (c) compute the correlation between adults' dispositional judgments on the central features for that category (already noted) and the estimate obtained in (b); (d) repeat (a) through (c) a total of five times for each level of density n, thereby producing five correlation coefficients, each representing an estimate of the relation between judgment and behavior for that density level; (e) compute the mean (after r-z transformation) of the five correlation coefficients obtained in (d). Seven levels of sample size were used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, and 15. To simplify the presentation of the results, we formed one measure of hourly aggressive behavior by averaging over the three behaviors in the category (physical aggression, verbal aggression, impulsivity). Similarly, we formed one measure for the withdrawal and prosocial categories by averaging over the three behaviors falling in each category. (The full analyses for each of the individual behaviors are available from Jack C. Wright.) The results of this analysis for the aggression construct are presented in Figure 3. As expected, the correlations between judgment and behavior increased as a function of situation category and as a function of the number of occasions drawn from each situation category. For example, when only one occasion was drawn from each situation category, the correlation between adults' dispositional judgments and the behavioral criterion was .21 in low-demand situations and .41 in high-demand situations. When five occasions were drawn from each situation category, the correlation between judgment and behavior was .41 for low-demand situations; the coefficients increased to .47 for medium-demand and .61 for high-demand situations.

1170
.5

JACK C. WRIGHT AND WALTER MISCHEL

.7

High Demand
.4

.6
.3

Medium Demand
.5 Low Demand .4

/-squared
.2

.1

.3 .2 .1

.0

1 2 3 4 5

10

15

Number of observations per situation category

Figure 3. Mean correlations between adults' dispositional judgments of aggressiveness and children's aggressive behaviors as a function of situation-competency demand and number of observations.

Similar results were obtained for the withdrawal category, with the exception that correlations in the medium-demand situations were slightly lower than in their low-demand counterparts at each level of temporal aggregation. For example, for the withdrawal domain, when only one occasion was drawn from each situation category, the correlation between adults' dispositional judgments and the behavioral criterion was .26 for lowdemand situations and .30 for high demand. When 15 occasions were drawn from each situation, the coefficients increased to .46 for low-demand situations and .65 for high demand. In each case, the coefficient for medium-demand situations was slightly lower than the coefficient for low demand (e.g., .19 for 1 occasion and .32 for 15 occasions). Overall, the results for the prosocial domain were less clear. For 1 occasion criterion, the coefficients were. 16 and .22 for low-demand and high-demand situations, respectively; for 15 occasion criteria, the coefficients were .34 and .53, respectively. One interpretation of the linkages between observers' judgments and children's behavior is that the observers learned about the children gradually over the 6 weeks of living with them. To address this possibility, we repeated these analyses by using the dispositional judgments adults made on each of the 4 weeks in which they made their judgments. Note that the initial dispositional judgments (Week 1) were based on a relatively small amount of contact with the children (1 week of living with them), yet these judgments were no less related to the hourly observational measures. For the aggression category, the correlations between adults' dispositional judgments (for each of the 4 weeks separately) and children's aggressive behavior (maximum number of occasions) were .65, .62, .57, and .60; for the withdrawal category, the corresponding correlations were .56,

.58, .60, .48; for the prosocial category, the correlations were .44, .36, .41, and .39. Thus, there is no evidence that the linkage between adults' judgments and children's behavior increased over the weeks of their interaction with the children. Effects qfCentrality in the Identification of Aggressive and Withdrawn Targets The preceding correlational analyses provide clear evidence that observers' dispositional judgments could predict individual differences in children's social behavior in circumscribed situations. However, it is important to recognize that these results are based on procedures that ensured a close match between observers' dispositional judgments and the specific behaviors assessed during the hourly observations. For example, children were assigned to quartiles of judged aggressiveness on the basis of observers' judgments of the four features identified as most centra) to the aggression domain (i.e., fights, threatens others, is hostile, and is verbally abusive). As the criteria used to judge a child's aggressiveness become less central to the domain, one would expect two related outcomes. First, one would expect generally lower correlations between observers' dispositional judgments and children's social behavior. For example, if we used features judged less descriptive of the ideally aggressive child (e.g., yells, restless) to identify children's dispositional level of aggressiveness, linkages to their observed aggressive acts should be moderated. Second, as criteria for dispositional judgments of aggressiveness become looser, one would expect links to become diluted or more homogenous over categories of situations. For example, children judged to be loosely aggressive (using peripheral aggressive features) would not display the kind

DISPOSITIONAL CONSTRUCTS Table 2 Correlations Between Judgments of the Children and Their Social Behavior as a Function of Feature Centrality in the Judgment and Level of Situation-Competency Demand Situation demand level Centrality of features Sample feature Aggression
1 Low

1171

were central to a category were used to determine a child's aggressiveness or withdrawal. For example, for the features least central to the aggressive category, the correlation with aggressive behaviors in low-demand situations was .35, and the correlation with behavior in the high-demand situations was .34. A similar pattern may be observed for the withdrawal category. In short, the magnitude of the linkage between adults' dispositional judgments and children's social behavior was a joint function of the Centrality of the features on which their judg-

Low

Medium

High

2 3 4 High

Distractible Feels angry Acts impulsively Threatens others Withdrawal

.35 .42 .49 .45

.28 .51 .54 .57

.34 .59 .65 .67

ments were based and the demand level of the situations from which observations of children's behavior were drawn.

Discussion In developing a conditional approach to two dispositional constructsaggressive and withdrawnwe observed that children judged by adults to be aggressive or withdrawn varied considerably across situations in their dispositionally relevant behavior. Children judged to be aggressive varied across situations Note. The coefficients are the correlations between adults'judgments of how well the features at each level of Centrality described the children and the mean of the hourly observations of the relevant dispositional behavior in each type of situation. For example, when judgments of children's aggressiveness are based on the most central features, they predict the mean of children's aggressive behavior in high competencydemand situations with a correlation of .67. in aggressive behaviors; children judged to be withdrawn varied across situations in withdrawn behaviors. But although members of each dispositional category (even very good members) were cross-situationally variable, the pattern of this variability could be predicted with some success on the basis of an analysis of situation-competency requirements. Consider first the category of situations that made relatively few competency demands on children, as assessed by the degree to which they required skills that were cognitive (e.g., thinking rationally, attending to detail), self-regulatory (e.g., tolerating frustration, focusing in the face of distraction), and social (e.g., dealing with peer and adult conflict). In this category of easy situations, which included nominal camp situations such as fishing, waterfront, and movement, children judged to be aggressive displayed relatively little physical aggression. Indeed, children judged most aggressive (i.e., those in the upper quartile of observers' dispositional judgments) displayed levels of physical aggression that were virtually identical to the levels displayed by less aggressive children falling in the third quartile of observers' dispositional judgments. But children judged to be aggressive displayed sharp increases in physical aggression as situation-competency requirements increased. In the category of situations that made the highest number of competency requirements, which included nominal camp situations such as academic tutoring, cabin meeting, and woodworking, children judged to be most aggressive displayed significantly higher levels of physical aggression than did their nonaggressive counterparts. Similarly, children judged to be withdrawn displayed relatively low levels of withdrawn behavior in low competency-requirement situations but displayed relatively higher levels of dispositionally relevant behavior as competency requirements increased. In short, aggressive children displayed a specific condition-behavior contingency: As competency requirements increased, so did the level of aggressive acts. And withdrawn children displayed a similar, if opposite, pattern: As competency requirements increased, so did the level of withdrawn acts. In other words, children judged to be good examples of two dispositional categoriesaggressive and withdrawndiverged into what might be characterized as relatively stable aggressive ver-

1 Low

2 3 4 High

Cries Unusual movements Feels sad Unassertive

.19 .42 .41 .46

.30 .32 .33 .32

.22 .44 .52 .65

of local or specific predictability in high-demand situations that we observed for children judged to be really aggressive (using central aggressive features). To test these expectations, we formed four categories of features used to determine whether a child was identified as aggressive or withdrawn. The first consisted of the same four most central features used in previous analyses. The second category consisted of the four features next most central to the category. A similar procedure was used to identify the third and fourth Centrality categories and to classify the features with respect to withdrawal (prosocial was omitted because the previous analyses revealed little evidence of specific context-behavior links for that category). As in all of the previous analyses, adults' judgments of the children, using these features, were computed by averaging over their ratings on the features within each centrality category. These multiple-act dispositional judgments were then used to predict the aggressive, withdrawn, and prosocial behavioral measures in each level of situation demand. As shown in Table 2, the correlations between adults' judgments (e.g., aggressiveness) and the corresponding behavior criterion (e.g., aggregate measure of aggression) increased as a function of the judged Centrality of the features used to assess children's dispositions (aggressiveness, withdrawal). For example, judgments based on the features least central to the aggression category correlated .34 with aggressive behavior in highdemand situations; judgments based on the next most central features correlated .59 with behavior; and judgments based on the most central features correlated .67 with behavior. A similar pattern was obtained for the withdrawal category. Table 2 also shows that the increments in the predictive utility of the dispositional judgments occurred only when features that

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JACK. C. WRIGHT AND WALTER MISCHEL of the situations from which multiple occasions were drawn. For example, as the number of occasions sampled from lowdemand situations increased from 1 to 15, the predictability coefficient (i.e., the correlation between observers' dispositional judgments and targets' behavior) increased from .21 to .45. For high-demand situations, as the number of occasions increased from 1 to 15, the predictability coefficients increased from .41 to .67. On the basis of the coefficients obtained using the maximum available observations, one could estimate what level of predictability to be expected if we had obtained even larger numbers of observations (e.g., using the Spearman-Brown formula). For example, if we had obtained 30 observations per situation category, the predictability coefficient (for aggression) for low-demand situations would increase to .62 (r2 = .38), and the coefficient for high-demand situations would increase to .80 (r2 = .64). Clearly, the local predictability effect should not be overstated. Our results do not indicate that none of the variance in children's social behavior in low-demand situations could be predicted from observers' dispositional judgments. Rather, the correlational analyses indicate that observers' dispositional judgments accounted for more of the variance in children's social behavior in high competency-demand situations than in low-demand situations, even when the number of occasions aggregated is fully controlled (Epstein, 1979). Clearly, any conclusion about the scope of this finding and the competency-demand hypothesis more generally await further research. At this juncture we can generalize safely neither about other dispositions nor about other subject populations.

sus withdrawn coping strategies in those situations that were sufficiently demanding of cognitive, self-regulatory, and social skills. Beyond this general pattern of condition-behavior contingencies, we observed that behaviors varied in the degree to which they were sensitive to or contingent on situation demand as a function of their degree of centrality to the dispositional category. This variability in condition-behavior linkages was most apparent for the aggressive behaviors we assessed. Thus, physical aggression, the behavior most centra] to the category of aggressive acts, was highly contingent on the level of situation demand, varying from extremely low levels in low-demand situations (even for the most aggressive children) to relative higher levels in high-demand situations (see Figure 2). In contrast, impulsivity, a behavior more peripheral to the category of aggressive acts, was less contingent on the level of situation demand. Indeed, we observed no interaction between children's judged aggressiveness and situation demand for this more peripheral behavior. In short, the condition-behavior contingencies we observed for the aggression domain were highly circumscribed. From the perspective of the conditional approach, these results suggest that the dispositional construct aggressive might best be characterized as a relatively specific cluster of if-then condition-behavior relations. Condition-behavior contingencies appear to be most discriminating for central aggressive acts and more homogenous for peripheral aggressive acts. Clearly, additional work, involving much more fine-grained functional analyses of molecular behavior (e.g., Patterson, 1982; Wright & Dawson, 1987), will be required to determine more precisely the nature of these and other condition-behavior linkages for aggressive and withdrawn children. Additional work also will be required to explore further observers' ability to predict these specific condition-behavior contingencies as well as their ability to understand and recognize them in their perceptions of people.

Implications for Person Perception and Social Judgment

The critique of traditional trait and state assessments called attention to the role of observers' theories and constructs and to the many possible sources of bias and oversimplification in the judgment process (e.g., Mischel, 1968; Peterson, 1968). It emphasized that dispositional categories may reflect in part the constructs of the perceivers and not necessarily the actual organization of the actors' behavior. Extensive research on attribution biases and other shortcomings of social judgment further strengthened the view that people's implicit personality theories could overwhelm their observations of behavior (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Unfortunately, the recognition that traits are constructs generated by perceivers lent itself to the misinterpretation that they were merely cognitive illusions. Furthermore, the focus in recent years on conditions that produce inferential errors has distracted research efforts from examining the complementary conditions under which the linkages between observer's constructs and actors' behavior might be found. Our results indicate that under certain conditions the linkages between people's dispositional j udgments and actors' social behavior may be quite good. For example, the correlation between adults' dispositional judgments of children's aggressiveness and the behavioral measures of aggression in high-demand situations was .67. These findings and related work (e.g., Buss & Craik, 1983; Funder, 1987; Swann, 1984; Wright & Dawson, 1987; Wright & Mischel, 1987) suggest the need to reassess certain conclusions about the shortcomings of the social judge (e.g., Nisbett & Ross, 1980). We hasten to point out, however,

Role of Competency Demand in the Predictability of Behavior

Our predictability analyses revealed another set of effects that is related to but not synonomous with these interactions between dispositional judgments and situation-competency requirements. Observers' dispositional judgments varied in the degree to which they predicted (i.e., were correlated with) dispositionally relevant behavior as a function of the situation category from which those behaviors were sampled. For example, observers' judgments of children's aggressiveness predicted children's aggressive behaviors moderately well in low-demand situations (r = .45, r 2 = .20). Observers' dispositional judgments of children's aggressiveness were more predictive of children's behavior in high-competency-requirements situations (r = .67, r2 = .45). Thus, in addition to the spread effect illustrated in Figure 2 and tested in our ANOVAS, these correlational results indicate that, as predicted, the rank ordering of observers' dispositional judgments better captured the rank ordering of children's aggressive behavior in high-demand situations. These correlational analyses also illustrate that the usefulness of aggregation was mediated by the competency-demand level

DISPOSITIONAL CONSTRUCTS that several important boundary conditions apply to our findings and that they therefore should not be overgeneralized, as we consider next. Similarity between judgment and criterion. The predictive utility of dispositional judgments depends heavily on the similarity or inferential closeness between the behavioral features that are judged and those that constitute the behavioral criteria. Our results indicate that social judgments can and do link to the actor's behavior, but it is important to recognize that these links were relatively direct and specific: The criterion behaviors we sampled were closely matched to the judgments (e.g., specific features of aggression). Our perceivers were not asked to extrapolate extensively from fragmentary behavioral indicators to new situations or new types of behavior, nor to generate indirect clinical inferences (e.g., from brittle ego inferred from Rorschach responses to diverse coping behaviors as an engineer in the Peace Corps). Rather, the results obtained suggest that the layperson's characterizations of a well-known other person with such behavioral features as "threatens others" are linked to the occurrence of closely related aggressive acts (i.e., threatening behaviors in demanding situations) in the same general setting (camp). Our findings do not suggest the potential utility of broader extrapolations from observations (e.g., from camp to school) or the value of inferences to behavior that is not sampled from the same domain. On the contrary, behavioral features that seem less central to the dispositional category (e.g., impulsive to aggressive) appear to have less discriminative predictive value (i.e., in relation to demand level). Communication and judgment goals. Communication between observers can influence both the information on which dispositional judgments are based and the process by which they are made (Hoffman, Mischel, & Baer, 1984). Whereas much experimental work on person perception is concerned with the inference process of a single perceiver (Jones, 1979), the conditions in this field study ensured communication between observers. Such communication among our subjects undoubtedly affected their knowledge base of actors' behaviors (e.g., through anecdotes of a child's actions) as well as the types of dispositional categories they entertained (e.g., through sharing of impressions once they had been formed). The field setting thus did not provide complete independence between the observers in their judgments of the children and in the assessments of their behavior. Indeed, the treatment goals of Wediko's program ensured that communication would be frequent, that the quality of this communication would be relatively high, and that such communication (at least between adults) would be used for the purpose of improving judgment accuracy (e.g., identifying which children are really aggressive and when they are most aggressive). Propinquity, frequency, and breadth of interaction. Probably some of the most powerful constraints on the accuracy of social judgment include propinquity, frequency, and range of interaction. Frequency of exposure to actors' behavior sets upper limits on the number and diversity of acts one may witness and the number and diversity of contexts in which they may be observed. In this research, the frequency of interaction between observers and targets was high, providing repeated exposure to targets' behavior over substantial periods of time and indeed

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across a broad range of situations. Even during the first week of their residence in the program, each adult had some 70 to 80 hr of contact with the children in his or her living group across many activities. Thus, our findings of linkages between dispositional judgments and actors' behavior do not necessarily contradict previous findings of attributional biases or other judgment flaws in the earlier stages of impression formation (e.g., Jones, 1979). Judgment competencies adequate for encoding and summarizing robust behavioral tendencies under conditions of frequent and diverse interaction may be inadequate for dealing with minimal stimulus information (cf. Jones, 1979; McArthur & Baron, 1983; Swann, 1984). Our results do indicate the need to complement laboratory research on the early stages of impression formation with field paradigms that examine how impressions form, change, and are linked to targets' behavior over the course of long-term relationships in natural settings.

Alternative Interpretations
Clinical expertise. Beyond these boundary conditions, cer-

tain alternative interpretations of the results deserve mention. One is that adults' sensitivity to children's behavior could be attributed to their formal or informal training as counselors, training that could lead them to be more observant of children's aggressive and withdrawn acts. A related interpretation is that adults' sensitivity was the result of mere practice with the hourly observation system, which required that they record certain child behaviors. Although we believe that clinical expertise may well play a role in certain aspects of person perception (Murphy & Wright, 1984), there is little reason to believe that the kind of results reported in this investigation are due to the clinical expertise of our observers or to mere practice with behavior codes. In other work (e.g., Wright, 1983; Wright, Giammarino, & Parad, 1986) we have examined children's dispositional judgments of their peers' aggressiveness by using peer nomination techniques. The linkages between children's dispositional judgments of aggressiveness and their peers' aggressive behavior were similar to those we obtained for adult observers despite considerable differences in their perspectives and the methodologies used. Opportunity for social interaction. A second interpretation attempts to account for differences between low and high competency-requirement situations in terms of the sheer opportunities those situations offered children for interpersonal interaction. In this view, low competency-requirement situations (e.g., fishing, movement, waterfront) simply presented fewer opportunities for children to interact with one another or with adults than did high competency-requirements situations (e.g., woodworking, cabin meeting, academic tutoring). It is obviously true that low- and high-demand situations differed in the types of interpersonal interactions they allowed and required. Indeed, "dealing with peer conflict" and "dealing with adult conflict" were two of the competency-requirement measures used to discriminate between low and high competency-requirement situations. But there is little reason to believe that the low competency-requirement situations simply offered little opportunity for interpersonal interaction in general. All of the nominal

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JACK C. WRIGHT AND WALTER MISCHEL from their behavior at Wediko), such a psychometric approach to the data might be necessary and desirable. Our objection is to abusing general psychometric principles, as occurs when one attempts to explain a phenomenon in ad hoc fashion simply by giving it an appropriate psychometric name. It is one thing, for example, to acknowledge that camp situations surely affect children's aggressive behavior and that behavior is obviously easier to predict in some situations than in others and then simply to identify good or predictable situations or items post hoc. It is another thing to predict the situations or categories of situations in which social behavior should be most closely related to people's dispositional judgments, as we have attempted to do in this research. Such a priori rather than post hoc identification of the locus of predictability is a primary challenge for research seeking to identify both the nature of coherences in personality and the potential utility of social judgments about personality dispositions.

camp activities falling in the low-demand category involved considerable social interaction between children and between children and staff. For example, the activity waterfront (a lowdemand activity) involves sitting on the beach as a group before being allowed in the water, sharing waterfront equipment, a wide range of social contact while in the water and on the floating docks, and congregating on the beach at the end of the activity period before leaving the activity site. Similarly, woodworking (a high-demand situation) involves sitting together before the beginning of the activity to receive instructions, sharing woodworking tools and supplies, a wide range of social contact while working on an individual or group project, and congregating at the end of the activity period before leaving the activity site. In general, interpersonal interaction seemed to be a common element in all nominal activities, thus affording children ample opportunity to be aggressive with peers or with adults. In assessing the competency-requirement measure used to form categories of nominal situations, recall that three groups of observers (adult counselors at Wediko, children at Wediko, and an independent group of college undergraduates unfamiliar with the Wediko environment) had converging perceptions of situation-competency requirements (Susi, 1986). Indeed, the convergence was quite good; for example, the correlation between Wediko counselors' assessments of competency requirements and college undergraduates' assessments (based on written descriptions of the activities) was .93. The field paradigm we used makes it impossible to rule out factors that covaried with competency demand; for that, fine-grained experiments would be required. Obviously, our investigation shares the advantages as well as the disadvantages of all correlational field research. Nevertheless, we suggest that competency requirements represent one potentially important dimension along which these social situations varied. Post hoc psychometric view. A more sweeping criticism of the results is to say they merely illustrate psychometric principles that are obvious but all too often ignored in the study of personality. For example, it is psychometrically obvious that dispositional judgments cannot possibly predict targets' behavior in situations in which all people behave similarly. Given the impossibility of predicting individual differences in social behavior in such situations, it is not surprising that developers of psychological tests avoid them, deliberately omitting test items on which uniform responses are obtained from all people. According to this test analogy, our low-demand situations are comparable to bad items on a paper-and-pencil test of individual differences in the sense that they produced few individual differences in behavior. Thus, on purely psychometric grounds and without any information about competency requirements, one could argue that we should have eliminated these bad items (i.e., the nominal situations in which the base rates of aggressive and withdrawn behavior were low) before proceeding to examine the linkages between behavior and observers' dispositional judgments. We do not wish to suggest that a purely psychometric approach to the data might not have yielded impressive correlations between observers' dispositional judgments and the available behavioral criteria. Indeed, for some purposes other than ours (e.g., to predict children's academic success at school

Social Judgment Linked to Molecular Behavior

Although we attempted to obtain extensive behavioral data, our methodology involved memory-based assessments of children's behavior at the end of each hourly observation period. Such assessments, even when made in response to specific questions within a limited time frame, remain subject to a variety of possible judgment biases (e.g., Shweder, 1977). Thus memorybased assessments, even in hourly units with clearly specified behaviors as used in this effort, do not substitute for more finegrained observational techniques. It is therefore important to consider whether observations at the level of hourly observations of the sort we collected are indeed linked to more molecular measures of the children's behavior in our setting (Mischel, 1984; Wright, 1983; Wright, Giammarino, & Parad, 1986; Wright & Mischel, 1987). For example, in one investigation conducted in the Wediko setting in a subsequent summer (Wright & Mischel, 1987), we assessed the frequencies of children's social behaviors by using a fine-grained observational system modeled closely after Patterson's (1982). Thirty-two molecular acts were recorded at 6-s intervals for 5 min of continuous observation on 15 separate occasions. This produced a total of 75 min of observation for each of 64 children. The code categories included aggressive acts (e.g., hit, threat, tease, boss), withdrawn acts (e.g., submit, isolate self, play alone), and prosocial acts (e.g., help, share, talk prosocially). To assess how central each of the 32 acts was to the categories of interest, an independent panel of judges rated how often the ideal aggressive, withdrawn, and prosocial child would exhibit each act. The primary result of interest here concerns the linkage between observers' dispositional judgments (the same as those used in this present study) and the frequency of relevant 6-s behaviors. For example, observers'judgments of children's tendency to display verbal aggression were correlated with specific 6-s act codes that were central to aggression. The correlation between observers' dispositional judgments and the single most central aggressive 6-s act code (provoke) was .68. After correcting for disattenuation due to the unreliability of observers' judgments, this coefficient increased to .85. The correlations (with disattenuated coefficients in parentheses) between observers'

DISPOSITIONAL CONSTRUCTS dispositional judgments and the remaining four act codes relevant to aggression were yell, .35 (.61); boss, .16 (.35); disrupt, .41 (.67); and noncomply, .37 (.64). These correlations indicate that observers' dispositional judgments of aggression were clearly linked to specific aggressive acts even when those behaviors were measured with techniques that are resistant to systematic distortion effects or other rater biases.

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as potentially fundamental units for a conditional approach to dispositional constructs.

Summary and Conclusions

Taken collectively, our results help to develop a model of dispositional constructs that does not anchor the coherence of personality in high levels of cross-situational consistency. The findings also help to develop a framework for studying how the

Challenges to Conditional Views of Dispositions

Both personality and social psychologists have recognized increasingly the interactive nature of social behavior and the limitations of focusing exclusively on either persons or situations. As we noted in the introduction, for more than a decade there has been a growing interest in interactional conceptions of persons and situations (e.g., Magnusson, 1980; Magnusson & Endler, 1977). In spite of this recognition, conditional approaches to dispositions have been slow to emerge, and relatively contextfree models of dispositions have continued to dominate both personality assessment and personality research. Our study, although indicating the potential utility of conditional approaches in investigating dispositional constructs, also illustrates why the development of conditional approaches to personality dispositions has been slow and why unconditional models of dispositions retain their popularity. An explicitly conditional approach presents conceptual challenges and complexities not encountered in models of dispositions in which the role of contexts remains implicit and is addressed only in ad hoc fashion. In a conditional view, dispositional constructs involve the conjunction of three componentsa behavior category, a condition category, and a set of linking propositionseach of which must be considered in research attempting to validate the construct. A conditional approach also presents difficult empirical challenges because it requires explicit assessment of the situation properties that influence disposilionally relevant behavior, in contrast to unconditional approaches, which try to minimize the role of situations. As our research illustrates, this problem of identifying relevant situational properties becomes especially difficult when dealing with naturally occurring social situations whose nominal labels (e.g., meal times, bedtime, canoeing, swimming) may reveal nothing about their important psychological properties. We have attempted to deal with the conceptual and empirical challenges by focusing on two constructsaggression and withdrawaland on one fuzzy category of situations that emerged from analyses of observers' dispositional statements and from the personality literature: the category of competency demand. We have thus begun to examine only one variant of dispositional constructs within a conditional view, and we anticipate considerable challenges in the effort to clarify others. Subsequent research also will be needed to examine just how competency demands and related psychological conditions such as stress, frustrativeness, aversiveness, or difficulty affect the predictability of individual differences in particular dispositional domains. Such research, particularly if conducted in an experimental paradigm, could identify more precisely the types of ifthen context-behavior contingencies we have tried to illustrate

organization of behavior relates to the dispositional constructs of the social observer. Rather than requiring that dispositional constructs be rooted in high levels of cross-situational consistency for many behaviors, the conditional approach links these constructs to temporally stable behaviors that some people may display reliably but contingent on particular conditions. Such an approach recognizes both the coherence of personality and the variability of behavior across situations, focusing on the identification of local predictability. Though the results of this study allow alternative interpretations, they clearly indicate the need for models of person perception that address both the inferential flaws and the judgment competencies of the social observer. They also indicate the need for research that considers the potential uses, and not only the abuses, of dispositional constructs under appropriately circumscribed conditions.

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