Personality and Assessment by Walter Mischel

Author:Walter Mischel [Mischel, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Psychology
ISBN: 0805823301
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 1967-12-31T14:00:00+00:00

Consistency of Intelligence and Related Skilled Behaviors

As noted in earlier chapters, intellectual and cognitive behaviors tend to be more consistent across situations than most personality dimensions. The consistency of these patterns may arise in part from the relatively uniform consequences they produce across situations. That is, discrimination training for achievement-related accomplishments and intellectual behavior may be less sharp than for dependency or sexual behavior. If the consequences for intellectual and achievement activities were more uniform across many situations they would lead to less discrimination and greater consistency of these behaviors in diverse settings.

The relative consistency of intellectual and achievement-related behaviors probably also reflects their dependence on basic skills and aptitudes, some of which hinge on genetic endowment. Moreover, intellectual skills and competencies involve long chains of interdependent components that are required for effective functioning across many situations. For example, if an individual has not mastered the fundamentals of a foreign language he is likely to perform uniformly poorly on all the many tasks for which that language is an essential component or prerequisite. A Frenchman who has not learned English is likely to fail tests of English reading, writing, conversation, comprehension, and so forth, regardless of the incentive conditions and reinforcement manipulations offered to him at the time of testing. Likewise, a child who cannot read is unlikely to do well on vocabulary and spelling tests.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.