PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Intraindividual Stability in the Organization and Patterning of Behavior: Incorporating Psychological Situations Into the Idiographic Analysis of Personality

In nomothetic analyses, the cross-situational consistency of individual differences in social behavior, assessed in vivo in a camp setting, depended on the similarity in the psychological features of situa-tions. As predicted by the social-cognitive theory of personality, idiographic analyses revealed that individuals were characterized by stable profiles of;/... then..., situation-behavior relation-ships that formed "behavioral signatures " of personality (e.g., he aggresses when warned by adults but complies when threatened by peers. Thus, the intraindividual organization of behavior variation across situations was enduring but discriminatively patterned, visible as distinctive profiles of situa-tion-behavior relationships. Implications were examined for an idiographic reconceptualization of personality coherence and its behavioral expressions in relation to the psychological ingredients of situations. Allport (1937) introduced the concept of idiographic analy-ses half a century ago, urging personologists to understand each individual deeply in terms of how that person functions, instead of just studying "the operations of a hypothetical 'average' mind " (p. 61). Nonetheless, the idiographic focus has been by-passed by mainstream personality psychology. Probably this ne-glect reflects not a lack of interest but an absence of appropriate methods and theory for studying individual functioning in ways that are objective and scientific rather than intuitive and clini-cal. In our view, understanding individual functioning requires identifying first the psychological situations that engage a par-ticular person's characteristic personality processes and the dis