On Predicting Some of the People Some of the Time: the Search for Cross-situational Consistencies in Behavior

The historically recurring controversy over the existence of cross-situational consistencies in behavior is sustained by the discrepancy between our intuitions, which affirm their existence, and the research literature, which does not. It is argued that the nomothetic assumptions of the traditional research paradigm are incorrect and that by adopting some of the idiographic assumptions employed by our intuitions, higher cross-situational correlation coefficients can be obtained. A study is reported which shows that it is possible to identify on a priori grounds those individuals who will be crosssituationally consistent and those who will not, and it is concluded that not only must personality assessment attend to situations—as has been recently urged—but to persons as well.