Yuichi Shoda, one of the top researchers in child development, began conducting personality research in the 1980s, at the height of the academic conflict between the trait theoristsl) and the situation theorists. He thought there was a third way to think about personality, not in terms of traits or situations, but in terms of the ways in which traits and situations interacted. To persuade other scientists of the legitimacy of his theory, he knew he would need a very convincing study, one that gathered a large amount of behavioral data on individuals across a variety of natural settings. He decided to study children at a residential summer camp program in New Hampshire.↵
The kids ranged in age from six to thirteen and were mostly from low-income families in the Boston area. Shoda followed 84 children (60 boys and 24 girls) around the camp during every hour of camp activity, for six weeks, documenting their behavior in every location except for the bathrooms. To accomplish this enormous undertaking, Shoda relied on a team of seventy-seven adult camp counselors who recorded more than 14,000 hours of observation, an average of 167 hours for each child. The camp counselors also filled out subjective ratings for every child at the end of every hour.↵
At the end of the summer, Shoda painstakingly sifted through this massive bundle of data by first analyzing each individual child's behavior, and then looking for collective patterns. The results were plain and unmistakable: each child exhibited different personalities in different situations.↵
Think about trait models of personality for a moment. The Myers-Briggs, for example, definitely does not say that our traits fundamentally change depending on the setting; as a matter of fact, it says the opposite: that dispositions like whether we are introverted or extroverted influence our behavior no matter the situation. Trait-based personality tests assume that we can be either extroverts or introverts... but not both. Yet, Shoda discovered that every child really was both.↵
A girl might be extroverted in the cafeteria, but introverted on the playground. A boy might be extroverted on the playground, but introverted in math class. And it was not the situation alone that was the determining factor: if you picked two girls, one might be introverted in the cafeteria and extroverted in the classroom, while the other might be extroverted in the cafeteria and introverted in the classroom. The way someone behaved always depended on both the individual and the situation. There was no such thing as a person's essential nature. Sure, you could say someone was more introverted or extroverted on average - this was, in fact, exactly what trait psychology amounted to. But if you relied on averages, then you missed out on all the important details of a person's behavior. (...)