WALTER MISCHEL’S THEORY

Walter Mischel analyzes personality from a cognitive learning approach, focusing particularly on cognitive variables because the human capacity to think is central to personality. He substitutes cognitive affective units for global traits, and explicitly considers the role of the situation in predicting behavior, without assuming that situations affect everyone in the same way.

BIOGRAPHY

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Walter Mischel was born in 1930 in Vienna, Austria. His Jewish family fled Europe to avoid the Nazi persecutions in 1938, thereby avoiding the fate of many of his friends and their families who were killed in the gas chambers. Like many Europeans, they immigrated to New York City, working hard in a family store, where young Walter also worked. In his autobiography, Mischel describes a love of the city that again drew him back many years later, and a passion for reading and painting.

Mischel attended college at New York University and did graduate work at the City College of New York, where he studied clinical psychology and completed a master’s thesis linking psychology with his interest in art.

Mischel’s teaching career began with brief faculty positions in Colorado (1956– 1958) and at Harvard University (1958–1962), where Gordon Allport was one of his esteemed colleagues, and where he met his second wife. It was at Harvard that Mischel formally stated his criticism of personality assessment and its poor predictive value, based on a review of the existing literature and on his personality assessment research for the Peace Corps. Mischel then moved to Stanford University, where he taught and conducted research from 1962 to 1982, interacting with many esteemed colleagues, including Albert Bandura. Despite his clinical training, his career moved away from clinical populations and increasingly emphasized research. At the Stanford nursery school, Mischel conducted his “marshmallow test” research on delay of gratification, which has since become famous in reenactments on YouTube. This research demonstrated the early development of ego capacities by thinking, a major theme in his model of personality.

After 20 years in California while at Stanford University, Mischel returned to New York, first for a tentative year at New York University in 1980, and then he moved permanently in 1983 to Columbia University. There he continued collaborative research with many students and colleagues, enjoyed a family life with three daughters and six grandchildren, and relished the culture of Manhattan.

IN A NUTSHELL

• Mischel investigated children’s development of a capacity to delay gratification. Cognitive variables are important in this development, such as thinking about something else to avoid impulsive behavior. The delay of gratification research seems to be tapping a core ego strength. When children learn to delay gratification, they are mastering a skill with important consequences for their future.
• Mischel challenged the assumption of global personality traits that led to consistent behavior across many situations, finding inconsistency instead. Behavior is much more situationally variable than trait theory had assumed. He initiated the trait-versus-situation debate, pitting the concept of traits that should produce consistency across a variety of situations, against a situational argument that says behavior should vary with situations.
• Instead of traits, Mischel proposed cognitive affective units (CAUs), or person variables, including competencies (person variables concerned with what a person is able to do), encoding strategies (concepts for describing situations and events), and personal constructs (trait terms, which people use to describe themselves and other people). These aspects of personality enable adaptation to the environment, in the unique style of an individual.
• His overall CAPS (Cognitive Affective Personality System) model has implications for individuals and also for interpersonal and cultural phenomena. In this model, instead of global traits, Walter Mischel and his colleague Yuichi Shoda describe a person’s consistent cognitive and emotional patterns. These determine the individual’s way of adjusting or responding to situations. Instead of trying to list all possible cognitive and emotional patterns, the model represents a general framework to be expanded for a variety of applications.

Reference - Theories of Personality - Understanding Persons, Susan Cloninger, The Sage Colleges, 6th edition

This article is part of Personality Course series. If you miss previous articles, you can find them below.

Personality Course	Sigmund Freud
Carl Jung	Alfred Adler
Erik Erikson	Karen Horney
Gordon Allport	Raymond Catell
Ivan Pavlov	Eisenk, Gray, Cloninger
Dollard and Miller	Skinner and Staats

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