This chapter continues the discussion we began in chapter 3. We maintain our focus on questions of description and explanation but now view these issues through the lens of personality theories that differ from the dimensional, factor-analytic approaches to which much of the previous chapter was devoted. Here, we first review interactionist approaches to personality. Since interactionism highlights the interplay between personal characteristics and situational factors, we next consider psychological analyses of situations. Third, we outline a particular interactional theory of personality, namely, social-cognitive theory.

The final sections of the chapter address the relation between social-cognitive and trait theories of personality. Given the prominence of these two approaches, exploring this relation is one of personalty psychology's most compelling theoretical tasks, as others have noted (McCrae & Costa, 1996). The theme we develop is that the differences between these approaches is not superficial but deep, in that they embrace different strategies of scientific explanation. Much of our discussion, then, is devoted to reviewing alternative strategies for explaining the consistency and coherence of personality functioning.

INTERACTIONISM

The simplest form of a person-based explanation of behavior would be to posit that people possess personal qualities that influence their behavior globally, in other words, in a relatively consistent manner across diverse circumstances. Personal attributes might be seen to exert a unidirectional causal effect on behavior. However, few personality psychologists explain behavior in this manner; instead, most are interactionists.