What is the term for the relatively stable set of characteristics that influences an individuals behavior?

Defining Social Values

Social values refer to a stable personality trait of preferring certain patterns of outcome distributions between self and others. Social values have been used to explain behavior in a variety of negotiation and decision-making situations where people need to coordinate their actions. Social value orientations, which reflect a trade-off between self-interest and collective interest, can be divided into two broad categories. People with proself orientations focus on the benefits they can acquire for themselves, whereas those with prosocial orientations focus on balancing their own benefits with others' benefits.

The most common proself orientations are individualism and competition. An individualist tries to maximize his or her own gain with little or no regard for the welfare of others. Competitors focus on maximizing their own gain relative to others. To see the difference between these two orientations, consider Table 1. A person has to choose among different monetary payoffs, labeled A through G. The choice determines his or her payoff, as well as what the other receives. Choice C provides the greatest gain to the self (60) and would be what an individualist prefers. In contrast, a competitor would prefer Choice B, even though it provides a lower dollar payoff than Choice C, because it provides a relative advantage of $25 rather than the $20 provided by Choice C.

Table 1. Different social value orientations

The most common prosocial orientation is cooperation, illustrated by Choice A in Table 1. A cooperator focuses on joint gain and would therefore prefer maximizing joint benefit between the self and another. The cooperator prefers $55 to $60 because Choice A also provides $50 to the other person for a joint total of $105, in comparison to the smaller joint totals for the other choices. Another prosocial orientation is egalitarianism, a preference for equality between the self and another. Choice D in Table 1 represents an egalitarian preference because it minimizes the difference between the self and another person. Egalitarians would prefer Choice D over Choice A because of the value they place on equality of outcomes, whereas cooperators would prefer Choice A over Choice D because of the value they place on joint gain. Recent research has suggested that people traditionally labeled ‘cooperators’ may be more motivated to maximize equality than joint gain.

A number of other possible social value orientations do not appear with great frequency in the population. An altruist would prefer Choice E, which provides the other with the greatest payoff, even at a cost to the self. An aggressor would prefer Choice F, which provides the other with the lowest possible payoff, even though it costs the self as well and only provides a $15 relative advantage compared to the $25 relative advantage provided by Choice B. Finally, masochists would intentionally reduce their own outcomes and would, therefore, find Choice G the most appealing.

There is a long-standing and persistent belief that risk taking is a stable personality trait, often referred to as risk attitude. The belief implies that a given individual will take similar risks across a range of situations and that some people will be more risk-averse (or more risk-seeking) across situations than others. The article reviews different definitions of risk attitude that show cross-situational consistency to varying degrees. Risk attitude defined within the expected utility framework varies greatly across situations as a function of decision content and outcome framing. A different conceptualization of risk taking, within a risk–value framework, models risk taking as a function of (a) decision makers' perception of the riskiness and return of different courses of action, and (b) their attitude towards perceived risk, i.e., the risk–value tradeoff factor. When modeled within this framework, situational differences in risk taking tend to be the result of differences in the perception of risk in different situations rather than differences in willingness to take on (perceived) risk, thus restoring credibility to the notion of perceived-risk attitude(PRA) as a stable trait. Individual differences in PRA exist, but are smaller and less systematic than individual and group differences in risk perception. While the determinants of risk perception are relatively well known at this point not much is known about the determinants of PRA. Personality differences in variables known to be related to risk taking seem to have their effect via differences in risk perception.

Neuroticism and Negative Affect

Some individuals appear to be generally more distress-prone than others. Psychometric and experimental studies identify stable personality traits that relate to the person's predisposition to experience negative emotion. Eysenck identified a dimension of neuroticism associated with a low threshold for emotional arousal. A similar dimension corresponds to one of the factors described by the five factor model of personality. Studies of temperament in infants and children, based on observations of behavior, also identify negative affectivity or distress-proneness as a fundamental dimension.

Neuroticism predicts negative moods such as depression and anxiety, although the strength of the relationship varies with situational stressors. It also predicts vulnerability to worry and disturbances of cognition. The association between neuroticism and distress is substantiated by both controlled experimental studies and field studies of everyday mood using diary or experience-sampling methods. Neuroticism is also elevated in patients suffering from emotional disorders. Longitudinal studies suggest that neuroticism is a factor predisposing clinical disorder, although there is some reciprocity between the personality trait and disorder. Elevated neuroticism may also be an outcome or a scar of mental illness. In addition, both the Eysenck and five factor models include an extraversion–introversion factor. Extraversion relates primarily to happiness and positive affect but also correlates negatively with distress measures to some extent. One influential view is that neuroticism is essentially a dimension of negative affectivity, whereas extraversion may be identified with positive affect, although this perspective may be oversimplified.

Neuroticism also relates to self-reported somatic distress and medical symptoms, including various psychosomatic conditions. It remains controversial whether more neurotic individuals are genuinely more prone to illness or whether they are just prone to complain about physical symptoms. However, a causal role for neuroticism is suggested by growing evidence that various negative affects, including depression, anger, and anxiety, operate as risk factors for illnesses, including coronary heart disease, although the effect sizes for the association between distress and illness are often small.

Current personality models generally adopt an interactionist or diathesis–stressor perspective, such that the distress response depends on the interaction of personal and situational factors. Hence, although more neurotic individuals are more vulnerable to distress, the extent to which they experience greater distress than less neurotic people on a given occasion varies with situational factors. A more subtle view of neuroticism is also suggested by life event research. Consistent with the negative affectivity hypothesis, more neurotic individuals seem to experience life events as more distressing. However, neurotic people also seem to experience a higher frequency of life events, which may reflect behavioral difficulties in adapting to life circumstances. For example, neuroticism relates to a higher frequency of interpersonal conflicts. Thus, there are at least three causal paths that may link neuroticism to distress: (1) high neurotics may be generally distress-prone, independent of external circumstances; (2) high neurotics may react to external events with elevated distress; and (3) high neurotics may behave in ways that elicit a higher frequency of distressing events. The dynamic nature of distress response is demonstrated also in studies of temperament in children. Overly distress-prone infants may be perceived as whiny or clingy, eliciting parental annoyance or neglect, which provokes further dysregulative responses from the child.

Conceptualization

Hostility is a negative attitude toward others consisting of enmity, denigration, and ill will. It is a stable personality trait with stability coefficients of 0.85 over 1 or 4 years, 0.67 over 5 years, and 0.40 over 24 years. Hostility appears to be a multidimensional trait with from two to four factor analyzed components. There is general agreement that the two key components are cynicism, or the belief that others are motivated by selfish concerns, and mistrust, or the belief that others are likely to be provoking and hurtful. Other components include such things as a hostile attributional style, which is the tendency to construe the actions of others as involving aggressive intent, and a hostile interactional style characterized by the tendency to challenge others, evade questions, and become easily irritated. Smith has argued for a transactional view of hostility, which includes aspects of both the person and the environment. When both hostility and social support are considered jointly, three distinct components emerge: (1) nonhostile and high socially supported healthy individuals, (2) highly hostile and low socially supported submissive individuals, and (3) highly hostile and high socially supported aggressive individuals.

Although hostility is often linked to the risk factors of anger and aggression, it is distinct from them in that it refers to a cognitive personality trait. Anger is an emotion that includes reactions ranging from mild irritation to intense anger and can be a transitory feeling state or an enduring predisposition. Aggression is a behavior defined as attacking or hurtful actions toward others, whether the harm is physical or verbal. Correlations among these characteristics are moderate, suggesting that they are related, but nonetheless distinct.

Studies that have examined the sociodemographic correlates of hostility have found that it increases with age, is higher in men than in women, is higher in minorities than in Caucasians, and is higher in individuals of lower than in those of higher socioeconomic status. Moreover, there is consistent evidence that hostility is associated with smoking, elevated body mass index, and heavy alcohol consumption. Since these correlates are, in themselves, risk factors for disease, they can serve as confounders for any association between hostility and disease. Confounding in this case would be making the mistake that the true association is between hostility and coronary disease, when in fact the true association is actually between one or more of these established coronary risk factors (which are linked to hostility) and coronary disease. It is important to control for these potential confounders in the design or analysis of studies assessing the health impact of hostility.

1 Mischel's Challenge to Personality

The view that social behavior derives from personality is deeply rooted in common sense and traditional views. People are widely believed to have stable personality traits that account for readily discernible patterns in their behavior. Indeed, the very concept of personality is usually understood in terms of consistency. That is, people are supposedly consistent in their motivations and actions.

Walter Mischel (1968) challenged this alleged consistency of personality in an influential book. Mischel proposed that if personality were composed of a stable, consistent set of traits, then psychological measures of traits should effectively predict social behavior quite strongly. From a review of published research studies, however, he concluded that personality traits have not been shown to have strong effects on behavior. Instead, he found that the correlations between traits and behaviors were usually small: Typically the correlation was found to be 0.20 to 0.30 out of a maximum possible 1.00. He used the term ‘personality coefficient’ to refer to the small correlations that were typically found.

Mischel therefore concluded that the situation is far more powerful than personality as a cause of social behavior. Following the standard statistical practice, he pointed out that a correlation of 0.30 accounts for only 9 percent of the variation in behavior, leaving the other 91 percent to the situation. Put simply, the situation was 10 times as powerful as personality in determining behavior.

This view was immediately recognized as challenging the view that personality is an important cause of social behavior. Psychologists were not the only ones to have believed in personality, for the general public has also had a long and firm belief in personality. Mischel's colleague Lee Ross (1977) coined the term ‘fundamental attribution error’ to refer to people's tendency to interpret someone's behavior as caused by that person's personality traits and to underestimate the importance of the situation in causing behavior. For example, people who observe an angry outburst will tend to conclude that the angry person has a hostile or aggressive personality while in fact the true cause of the angry outburst is likely to be a bad day, a provocation, a frustration, or some other cause rooted in the immediate situation. A well-known work by Jones and Nisbett (1971) pointed out that people tend to attribute their own behavior as caused by their situation (e.g., ‘I was only following orders’ or ‘I was just reacting to what you did’), whereas they interpret other people's behavior in terms of personality traits.

Mischel's book and his striking conclusions had a major impact on psychology. One implication was that psychologists should focus on analyzing the situation rather than the individual personality in order to be able to understand and predict behavior. Social psychologists, who specialized in studying the power of situations, embraced this conclusion to the detriment of personality psychologists. This attack on personality coincided with a period of rapid growth in US psychology departments, and as a result many universities hired social psychologists rather than personality psychologists, with the result that social psychology continues to be a much larger field than personality even several decades later.

A recent analysis of the controversy by Funder (1997) summarized Mischel's argument as having three essential parts. First, a review of the literature shows that there is an upper limit to how well one can predict someone's behavior from one situation to the next, and this upper limit is small (a correlation of around 0.20 to 0.30; Nisbett 1980 later revised this upward to 0.40). Second, situations are more important than traits in explaining behavior. Third, it is no use to measure personality, and the common and traditional view of people as consistent, personality-driven beings is wrong.

Individual characteristics

One type of human-related factor is individual characteristics that include an individual's trust propensity, attitudes, personality traits, and demographic factors. Some people are overall more trusting than others, and this propensity to trust is a stable personality trait (Lee & See, 2004). It is likely that an individual worker's propensity to trust determines the person's initial level of trust in industrial robots (Lee & See, 2004; Schaefer et al., 2016). In addition to the overall propensity, an individual worker's attitude and perception related to workplace technologies and robots may influence trust. Unlike domestic robots that are selected and adopted by those who will use the robots, workplace robots are often adopted to work environments by employers regardless of acceptance or preference of individual workers who work with the robots. Thus, workers’ overall attitudes toward robots may have significant impacts on their trust. For instance, many workers may perceive robots as a threat because they fear job replacement by robots in the workplace, which can result in low acceptance of robots in workplaces (Sanders, Kaplan, Koch, Swartz, & Hancock, 2019). When workers have negative attitudes, they are less likely to trust and rely on robots.

Certain personality traits also influence an individual's trust toward systems and technologies. Prior studies suggested that users are more likely to trust or rely on automated systems when they are extraverted, emotionally stable, and have intuitive rather than sensing personalities (Mcbride, Carter, & Ntuen, 2012; Merritt & Ilgen, 2008; Schaefer, 2013; Szalma & Taylor, 2011). For instance, Szalma and Taylor (2011) suggested that the trait of neuroticism is correlated with a lower level of agreement with automated advice, and Merritt and Ilgen (2008) demonstrated that extroverts are more likely to trust automated machines than introverts do. Although underlying mechanisms of these relationships are not fully understood, these findings may suggest that regardless of a robot's performance or functionality, an individual's level of trust may be determined by their characteristics.

In addition to individual propensity, attitude, and personality, various demographic factors such as age and gender can be associated with an individual's trust in robots and robotic environment. As diversity in workforces continues to increase, potential effects of the demographic factors on the interactions with robots are likely to have increasing impacts in workplaces. For instance, workforces are rapidly aging in many industries, which increases the impacts of age-related differences in workplaces. One of the issues that can be of particular interest to the older workers is the adoption of new industrial technologies. As new technologies continue to be introduced to many workplaces, these new technologies must be well-accepted by all users including older workers who may differ significantly from younger workers. For example, older workers may have different technology familiarity, health conditions, or injury risks. Although robotic technologies may provide greater benefits to older populations who generally have stronger needs for physical, cognitive, and social assistance in daily activities as well as during work performance, previous findings suggest that older adults are more likely to show negative emotional responses toward robots and tend to mistrust robots more than younger adults do (Sanders, Oleson, Billings, Chen, & Hancock, 2011; Scopelliti, Giuliani, & Fornara, 2005). Age-related differences in attitude and trust toward robots is an important demographic determinant for an individual worker's safe and effective interaction with robots in workplaces.

Other demographic factors are less decisive and based on limited empirical evidence (Sanders et al., 2011; Schaefer, 2013). For example, whereas some studies did not support gender- or ethnicity-related differences in trust in robots (Schaefer, 2013), other studies found significant effects of such demographic factors. For instance, women showed greater mistrust in robots compared to men (Scopelliti et al., 2005), and general trust in robots varies across different cultures (Evers, Maldonado, Brodecki, & Hinds, 2008; Li, Rau, & Li, 2010). More research is warranted to investigate the effects of various demographic factors on human-robot trust because it can provide significant implications given the increasingly diverse work environments.

Definition and Background

Sensation seeking is “the need for varied, novel, and complex sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical and social risk for the sake of such experiences” (Zuckerman, 1979, p. 10). It is a stable personality trait, and those high in the trait actively seek out arousal and stimulation and have a higher tolerance to negative life events (Zuckerman, 1979). Furthermore, sensation seekers are attracted to competitive or opportunistic behaviors with no regard for punishment contingencies (Ball & Zuckerman, 1990). This attraction to these situations is also coupled with the propensity to take risks (i.e., reckless driving, extreme sports) as it leads to feelings that increase physiological reactions, which is experienced as the desired sensation (Zuckerman, 2007). This, in turn, could transfer to the likelihood of performing successfully under pressure.

Gender Theory

The application of gender theories of caregiving has increased since the 1980s. This body of work has been greatly informed by feminist scholarship and has its roots in the gender socialization framework and social role perspective. Gender socialization proposes that gender roles are internalized as stable personality traits and result from gender differences in socialization during childhood. In contrast, a social role perspective explains gender differences in behaviors as the result of a person's current and continuous construction of social realities and the related role demands of these realities. Using a gender socialization framework to understand gender differences in caregiving and caring, one would expect early role socialization and personality factors to be linked to greater involvement of women in caregiving tasks. In contrast, a social role perspective would posit that women are more involved than men in caring activities because women have fewer alternative roles as a result of their limited access to diverse social resources. However, research has moved away from these two views of gender, focusing instead on issues related to inequity and identity. This redirection is due in part to the fact that women, by default, perform more care tasks than men and, in turn, express being more distressed. Moreover, distinct stressors affect women caregivers who often provide care both on the job and at home, which increases their vulnerability to stress. In general, feminist scholars do not promote the view of caring as a universal element of women's identity, or as a human quality, separate from the cultural and structural circumstances that create it. To feminist scholars, caring is a process that maintains and repairs our world and, in turn, one that should be highly valued within our world.

1. Relationship with Coronary Disease

Psychological studies in cardiovascular disease have extensively investigated hostility and, previously, the Type A behavior pattern. The influential studies by Friedman and Rosenman in the late 1950s on Type A behavior documented that this antagonistic personality trait is associated with incident myocardial infarction as well as with relevant cardiovascular risk factors (Friedman and Rosenman, 1959; Suarez et al., 1991; Welin et al., 1985). Later studies have indicated that hostility is the toxic component of Type A behavior. Hostility is assumed to be a stable personality trait characterized by cynical mistrust, aggressive responding, and an overall antagonistic attitude (Barefoot et al., 1983; Engebretson and Matthews, 1992). Most studies report an association between hostility/Type A behavior and severity of underlying coronary disease (Siegman et al., 1987; Williams et al., 1988) as well as first myocardial infarction (Barefoot et al., 1983; Meesters and Smulders, 1994; Shekelle et al., 1983). Research with primates supports a relationship between hostile behavior and severity of CAD (Manuck et al., 1995). In contrast, recurrent coronary syndromes are less consistently predicted by hostility/Type A behavior (Ragland, 1989; Shekelle et al., 1985). Moreover, the association between hostility and MI is more pronounced in younger (<55 years of age) than older men (Meesters et al., 1994; Siegman et al., 1987; Williams et al., 1988), suggesting a role of hostility at early stages of CAD progression.

Personality and Coping Styles

Research on the links between more enduring dispositions such as personality differences has only just begun to be reported. Neuroticism and extraversion have been found to be positively and negatively correlated with life satisfaction, respectively. Competence and achievement motivation, which are stable individual differences, are positively correlated with life satisfaction, as is the capacity to experience intrinsic satisfaction in leisure activities.

Coping style, the typical strategies with which people respond to negative external events, also may affect life satisfaction. Empirical studies indicate that coping style, much like stable personality traits, changes little during adulthood. The evidence suggests that there are few significant age-related differences in overall level of coping effectiveness. The influence of coping styles on subjective well-being among older persons has not received much attention. Among older patients with cancer and orthopedic pain, coping style is significantly related to quality of life, even after accounting for the duration and severity of illness. Passive and emotion-focused coping strategies are associated with negative responses to physical illness among older patients. Perceived control and health locus of control have been found to be indirectly (through their influence on activity/exercise levels) and directly related to life satisfaction. Higher self-efficacy in a number of areas of functioning predicts life satisfaction among widows and widowers, though the important domains for men were financial, instrumental, and health. For women, the important functional domains of life in which higher self-efficacy contributed to life satisfaction were interpersonal, emotional, social, and spiritual.