Mischel Walter
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA.
Annu Rev Psychol. 2004;55:1-22. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.55.042902.130709.
To build a science of the person, the most basic question was, and remains, how can one identify and understand the psychological invariance that distinctively characterizes an individual and that underlies the variations in the thoughts, feelings, and actions that occur across contexts and over time? This question proved particularly difficult because of the discrepancies that soon emerged between the expressions of consistency that were expected and those that were found. The resulting dilemma became known as the classic "personality paradox": How can we reconcile our intuitions-and theories-about the invariance and stability of personality with the equally compelling empirical evidence for the variability of the person's behavior across diverse situations? Which is right: the intuitions or the research findings? In this chapter I review and discuss some of the advances made to answer this question since it was posed. These findings have allowed a resolution of the paradox, and provide the outlines for a conception of the underlying structure and dynamics of personality that seems to better account for the data.
要构建一门关于人的科学，最基本的问题过去是，现在仍然是，一个人如何识别和理解那种独特地刻画一个个体并构成跨情境、跨时间出现的思想、情感和行为变化基础的心理不变性？由于很快在预期的一致性表现和实际发现的一致性表现之间出现了差异，这个问题被证明特别困难。由此产生的困境被称为经典的“人格悖论”：我们如何使我们关于人格的不变性和稳定性的直觉及理论，与同样有说服力的关于个体行为在不同情境中具有变异性的确凿证据相协调？哪一个是正确的：直觉还是研究结果？在本章中，我回顾并讨论自提出这个问题以来为回答它所取得的一些进展。这些发现使得这个悖论得以解决，并为一种似乎能更好地解释这些数据的人格潜在结构和动态的概念勾勒出了轮廓。
