Originally Posted by
Singu
Correlating verbal reports of behavior averaged across specific situations does little to illuminate the central issue of whether trait measures predict how people will actually behave under different conditions. Scores pooled across situations may embody high, moderate or low behavioral variability. In testing for behavioral generality, one must measure directly how individuals vary in their behavior under different circumstances, rather than how, on the average, they stand in relation to others, or how well judges agree among themselves in their over-all impressions of the individuals selected to study.
In the few behaviors that Bem and Allen actually measured, the self-described unchangeables were found to be more consistent for talkativeness but not for conscientious actions, thus revealing an inconsistency in the predictor of behavioral consistency.
In a more comprehensive study examining different measures of self-reported consistency and many personality dimensions, Chaplin and Goldberg (1983) found that self-reported consistency is uniformly unpredictive. Not only do different indexes of consistency disagree but, however it is measured, the self-reported consistent types are no more uniform in their behavior than the changeable types on any personality dimension.
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