Editorial: Personality and Situations

During the last few decades the personality domain has witnessed several major controversies, including the person±situation debate and the debates on accurate re ̄ection versus systematic distortion, on nomothetic versus idiographic approaches, on nature±nurture, etc. Within these controversies several sharp contrasts and pendulum movements have stood out. In particular, regarding the person±situation debate, during the late sixties global personality traits have been subjected to severe criticisms as being `excessively crude, gross units to encompass adequately the extraordinary complexity and subtlety of the discriminations that people constantly make' (Mischel, 1968, p. 301). In contrast with this, during the eighties, there was a clear renaissance of personality traits, culminating in an emerging consensus within a broad group of trait psychologists on the major dimensions underlying personality judgments within lexical approaches to personality: `Once upon a time, we had no personalities (Mischel, 1968). (. . .) Is it not exciting to see their return?' (Goldberg, 1993). During the sixties and early seventies, several commentators pointed to the low cross-situational consistency of traitrelevant behaviour, as indexed by correlations across persons between scores of objectively recorded behaviours in two di€erent situations (optionally after aggregation of the scores across di€erent observers, di€erent time points, and di€erent acts belonging to the same behaviour category). Related to the former, researchers have amply documented the importance of person by situation interactions in behavioural data. In contrast, from the late seventies on, it has been replied that behaviour scores do display high stabilities (in terms of correlations across persons), if ®rst an appropriate aggregation across situations is performed; the latter has been argued to be necessary to wash out measurement error or unreliability (Epstein, 1979). From the nineties on, however, a new movement can be discerned: at the turn of the millennium, from quite di€erent angles, calls can be heard for reconciliation, synthesis, and integration. As such, Magnusson and ToÈ restad in their 1993 Annual Review chapter advocated the construction of a general theoretical framework for personality research, within a dynamic, holistic view of personality. Revelle, from his side, concludes his 1995 Annual Review chapter with the announcement that `what the next decade promises is an integration of (. . .) many separate foci' (p. 321). Epstein (1996) simply states that `personality psychology should be integrative' (p. 435), whereas Funder (1996) and the guest editors of a special issue of the Journal of Research in Personality are at the outlook on the beach for the `Big One', that is, a