Social-Cognitive Mechanisms and Personality Coherence: Self-Knowledge, Situational Beliefs, and Cross-Situational Coherence in Perceived Self-Efficacy

This article presents a social-cognitive analysis of cross-situational coherence in personality functioning Social-cognitive analyses are contrasted with those of trait approaches in personality psychology Rather than attributing coherence to high-level constructs that correspond directly to observed patterns of social behavior, social-cognitive theory pursues a “bottom-up” analytic strategy in which coherence derives from interactions among multiple underlying causal mechanisms, no one of which corresponds directly to a broad set of responses Research investigating social and self-knowledge underlying cross-situational coherence in a central social-cognitive mechanism, perceived self-efficacy, is presented Idio-graphic analyses revealed that individuals' schematic self-knowledge and situational beliefs give rise to patterns of high and low self-efficacy appraisal across diverse, idiosyncratic sets of situations that do not, in general, correspond to traditional high-level trait categories Bottom-up analyses in personality psychology are related to other disciplines' analyses of organization in complex, adaptive systems