Abstract
The issues of consistency in behavior has been extensively discussed by personality and social psychologists in the last few years. To what extent is behavior consistent across many situations, and to what extent is it predictable in a single situation on the basis of our knowledge of the situation and the persons in it? It has long been assumed that behavior is a function of the person, the situation, and the interaction between the two. Under certain circumstances most people may act similarly in a particular situation, because the situation activates very basic common goals or needs, such as the desire for survival or for respect by one’s peers. Usually, however, people will behave differently in a particular situation as a function of their individual characteristics (Bowers, 1973; Ekehammar, 1974).
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Staub, E. (1978). Predicting Prosocial Behavior: A Model for Specifying the Nature of Personality-Situation Interaction. In: Pervin, L.A., Lewis, M. (eds) Perspectives in Interactional Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3997-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3997-7_5
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