Introduction to the Special Issue: Integrating Personality and Social Psychology

Some 50 years ago, in 1937, Gordon Allport published Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. Much in the manner of his brother Floyd's Social Psychology of 1924, Gordon Allport's book served as a seminal text and promoted the development of courses on personality within academic departments of psychology. At the same time, however, Allport vigorously argued for the independence of personality from social psychology. Over the ensuing half century, personality and social psychologists have often seemed to work in ignorance of each other's work—even at cross-purposes. This unfortunate situation is partly reflected in the vigorous response to Mischel's (1968) critique of traditional trait and psychodynamic approaches to personality, as well as the repeated debates over the organization of Division 8 of the American Psychological Association (otherwise known as the Society for Personality and Social Psychology) and jurisdiction over the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP). At the same time a number of investigators, and not just in the post-1968 cohort, have attempted to transcend what has often seemed to be a fruitless person-situation debate. Working steadily and in many cases without even referring explicitly to longstanding disputes, these researchers and theorists have attempted to integrate the concerns, concepts, principles, and paradigms of personality and social psychology. The intended goal, regardless of whether it has been explicitly stated, has been the development of a fuller view of the individual in his or her social context. Such articles have appeared in the pages of JPSP for a long time. However, it seemed to the current editors that the time was right for publication of a Special Issue that would gather in one place a number of exemplars of this integrative activity. The purpose of this Special Issue is not to mark one approach as superior to others but rather to present a wide variety of approaches to the problem of integrating personality and social psychology. This introductory essay seeks to underscore some of the integrative aspects of the articles collected here and to help point the direction for future activity along the same lines. The Special Issue was conceived by the editors of the several sections of JPSP: Attitudes and Social Cognition, Intergroup Relations and Group Processes, and Personality Processes and Individual Differences. Readers of JPSP were invited to submit proposals for the Special Issue in the form of abstracts. A total of 107 abstracts were processed by November 1, 1986 (some investigators submitted more than one abstract). In 85 cases the author was encouraged to submit a full article: A total of 70 actually did so. Several of the published articles provide a social psychological perspective on topics traditionally within the domain of personality. For example, Prentice (1987) presents three studies showing that social attitudes and values have many of the qualities of personal possessions and that in some people at least, the three types of entities function together as coherent modes of personal expression. Similarly, Strauman and Higgins (1987) offer an interpersonal view of that most personal of psychological qualities—the self-concept. They argue that the self-concept represents others' views of oneself as well as one's own view of self and that the occurrence of discrepancies between these views can invoke feelings of guilt and depression.