Walter

Mischel

Cognitive Affective Personality Systems

Objective:
Having a Eureka moment for Cognitive Affective Personality System

Who is Walter Mischel?

Walter Mischel was born on February 22, 1930. In Vienna only a short distance from that of Sigmund Freuds home. The Mischels were forced to move to US after the Nazis annexed Austria as part of the Reich. They arrived in America and the family settled in Brooklyn, New York. In college, Mischel was dissatisfied by the ratcentered psychology during his undergrad which led him to a more humanistic Freudian Psychoanalysis . While in his MA program in the City College of New York, he was employed as a social worker. His experience as a social worker led him to doubt the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory, and see the necessity of empirical data to evaluate the claims of psychology.
Source: Feist & Feist, 2007, Theories of Personality, 6th Edition, Mc Graw Hill

Who is Walter Mischel?

During his PhD studies in Ohio State University (1953 1956), the students were informally divided by the works of Julian Rotter or George Kelly. Unlike other students who conformed with either side, Walter admired both men. This would later greatly influence his own work. In 1955, Mischel was offered an opportunity to conduct research among certain tribes in the Caribbean. His experience with the tribes was to be the foundation of his own theory into personality. On 1968, Mischel published, Personality and Assessment. This work, was drawn from his experience as consultant with the Peace Corps. Here, Mischel challenged much of traditional psychology, that focused on innate dispositions (traits, introversion etc.) and exposed that they were limited and weak predictors of behavior, and that assessment and measurement tools unreliable and imprecise. Now, Walter Mischel is a multi-awarded professor in Columbia University, New York.
Source: Feist & Feist, 2007, Theories of Personality, 6th Edition, Mc Graw Hill

Evolution of Cognitive-Affective Personality System

On 1968, Mischel dropped the bomb on the field of Psychology with his famous work, Personality and Assessment. Mischel argued that the situation is the primary basis for understanding people. Here, he challenged the traditional view of inner dispositions, which set a firestorm among psychologists. However, during the late 1970s, Mischel began to emphasize the view that people are situation-processors. People construct meanings in various situations which illumines how people are complex and unique. By 1979, Mischel morphed into his extreme situationism to interactional constructivist. Mischel espoused that people interact with the situations they are in by constructing meanings as he/she interacts with the various features of situations. This evolution became complete, to what is now, the CognitiveAffective Personality System.
Source: Berecz, Theories of Personality: A Zonal Perspective, 2009, Pearson

Foundational Concepts in Cognitive-Affective Personality System

Consistency Paradox: peoples behaviors show a relative and significant amount of consistency but has high variability in situations.

Person Situation Interaction: [Global] personal dispositions influence behavior only under certain conditions and certain situations. Behavior is caused by peoples perceptions of themselves in particular situations.
Source: Feist & Feist, 2007, Theories of Personality, 6th Edition, Mc Graw Hill Photo Source: Electric Ocean, Deviant Art

What is the Cognitive Affective Personality System?

CAPS seeks to account for the variability across situations as well as stability of behavior within a person. CAPS illustrate that the inconsistencies of behaviors across situations are not random nor due solely to the situation itself but are potentially predictable and reflect stable patterns of variations. CAPS undertake to study the whole person, in a way of saying, it attempts to comprehensively blend persons, situations, and mediating strategies in to a holistic system.
Source: Berecz, Theories of Personality: A Zonal Perspective, 2009, Pearson Source: Feist & Feist, 2007, Theories of Personality, 6th Edition, Mc Graw Hill

Simply, CAPS follows a basic framework

If A, then X; but if B then Y

The Variables in this formula are what we call the cognitive affective units.

Cognitive Affective Units

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Encodings Expectancies and Beliefs Affects Goals and Values Competencies and SelfRegulatory Pattern

Source: Berecz, Theories of Personality: A Zonal Perspective, 2009, Pearson Photo Source: Smashell, Deviant Art

1. Encodings
Categories (constructs) for characterizing self, others, events, and situations.
Situations can be interpreted or construed in any number of ways. People use cognitive processes to transform these stimuli into personal constructs, by consulting their self concept, worldviews, and how they look at people.

Source: Berecz, Theories of Personality: A Zonal Perspective, 2009, Pearson Source: Feist & Feist, 2007, Theories of Personality, 6th Edition, Mc Graw Hill

2. Expectancies and Beliefs

Expectancies include speculations about likely outcomes of events, estimates about self-efficacy, and surmises about the social world. 2 Types of Expectancy a. Behavior Outcome Expectancy (ifthen framework) b. Stimulus Outcome Expectancy (events are likely to occur after a given stimuli) People enact behavior by incorporating their subjective beliefs and expectations in a given situation.
Source: Berecz, Theories of Personality: A Zonal Perspective, 2009, Pearson Source: Feist & Feist, 2007, Theories of Personality, 6th Edition, Mc Graw Hill

3. Affects
Affects include emotions, feelings, physiological reactions. Ultimately, affects are not isolated aspects of a persons framework. They are overlapping and inseparable with cognition and other Cognitive Affective Units. Affects primarily influence a persons reaction and response to particular situations.

Source: Berecz, Theories of Personality: A Zonal Perspective, 2009, Pearson Source: Feist & Feist, 2007, Theories of Personality, 6th Edition, Mc Graw Hill

4. Goals and Values

Behaviors and responses to situations are largely goal and value oriented. Goals and Values are crucial in determining which personal or situational will be translated into action.

Source: Berecz, Theories of Personality: A Zonal Perspective, 2009, Pearson Source: Feist & Feist, 2007, Theories of Personality, 6th Edition, Mc Graw Hill

4. Competencies and Self-Regulatory Pattern

This Unit is what a person knows and what he or she sets for herself. Mischel also refers to this as the vast array of information we acquire about the world and our relationship to it. By observing ourselves and others we learn what we can do, and what we cannot.
*Note: Social Learning Theorists believe that people do not require external stimuli (e.g. rewards or punishments) to shape their behavior, people can set goals for themselves and reward and punish themselves contingent upon whether results move towards those goals. This is what we call self-regulation.
Source: Berecz, Theories of Personality: A Zonal Perspective, 2009, Pearson Source: Feist & Feist, 2007, Theories of Personality, 6th Edition, Mc Graw Hill

Cognitive Affective Personality System

Features of the Situation 1. 2. 3. 4. Etc.

Behaviors

Encoding Process

Behavior Generation Process Interactions among Mediators

Walter Mischels theory is a product of a long experimental work. His theory is not a theory of personality in the classical sense. It is not a theory that shows individual peculiarities or characteristics in terms of the self as agent. Rather, CAPS understands the person as processor. It provides the connection between the Person-Processor and the Situation-Perceived. Whereas, Psychoanalysis and Humanism speak in universal terms and Behaviorism, too narrow, Social Cognitive Theories strike a balance between traits and circumstance. In that, it has become an emerging zeitgeist in the pursuit of integrative understanding the human person.
Source: Berecz, Theories of Personality: A Zonal Perspective, 2009, Pearson

Thank you!