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Cognitive-Affective Personality System

Mischel believes that inconsistencies in behavior reflect stable patterns of variation within a person based on different situations. He proposes that people's behavior can be predicted by their unique pattern of behaving differently in different situations (e.g. if A then X, but if B then Y). This is because personality processes information about situations differently, leading to variable behavior. Mischel identifies five cognitive-affective units that allow people to interact stably with their environment, including encoding strategies, competencies, expectancies, goals and values, and emotional responses.

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Vaniah Claire
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158 views10 pages

Cognitive-Affective Personality System

Mischel believes that inconsistencies in behavior reflect stable patterns of variation within a person based on different situations. He proposes that people's behavior can be predicted by their unique pattern of behaving differently in different situations (e.g. if A then X, but if B then Y). This is because personality processes information about situations differently, leading to variable behavior. Mischel identifies five cognitive-affective units that allow people to interact stably with their environment, including encoding strategies, competencies, expectancies, goals and values, and emotional responses.

Uploaded by

Vaniah Claire
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Cognitive-Affective

Personality System
Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
Mischel does not believe that inconsistencies in behavior are
due to the situation: he recognizes that inconsistent behaviors
reflect stable patterns of variation within a person.

He and Shoda see these stable variations in behavior in the


following framework: If A, then X: but if B, then Y.

People's pattern of variability is their behavioral signature, or


their unique and stable pattern of behaving differently in
different situation.
Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
Behavior Prediction

Mischel's basic theoretical position for prediction and


explaining behavior is as follows: If personality is a stable
system that processes information about the situation, then
as people encounter different situations, they should behave
differently as those situations vary.
Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
Behavior Prediction

Therefore, Mischel believes that even though people's


behavior may reflect some stability over time, it tends to vary
as situations vary.
Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
Situation variables

Situation variables include all those stimuli that people attend


to in a given situation.
Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
Cognitive-Affective Units

Cognitive-affective units include all those psychological,


social, and physiological aspects of people that permit them
to interact with their environment with some stability in their
behavior.

Mischel identified five such units.


Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
Cognitive-Affective Units

First are encoding strategies or people's individualized


manner of categorizing information they receive from external
stimuli.

Second are the competencies and self-regulatory strategies.


Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
Cognitive-Affective Units

One of the most important of these competencies is


intelligence, which Mischel argues is responsible for the
apparent consistency of other traits

In addition, people use self-regulatory strategies to control


their own behavior through self-formulated goals and self-
produced consequences.
Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
Cognitive-Affective Units

The third cognitive-affective units are expectancies and


beliefs, or people's guesses about the consequences of each
of the different behavioral possibilities.

The fourth cognitive-affective unit includes people's


subjective goal and values, which tend to render behavior
fairly consistent.
Cognitive-Affective
Personality System
Cognitive-Affective Units

Mischel's fifth cognitive-affective unit includes affective


responses, including emotions, feelings, and the effect that
accompanies physiological reactions.

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