A componential model of situation effects, person effects, and situation-by-person interaction effects on social behavior

Social and personality psychology seek to understand the regularities of human behavior in social context and to separate critical causal variables assumed to reside in the social situation, in the person, and in the interaction between the two. A componential model is presented, which assumes that the three types of effect are theoretically and conceptually independent, although they may be confounded in practice. A review of past theory and research suggests that many social and personality psychologists have misconstrued situation and person effects as competing for a limited pool of behavioral variance. A conceptual re-orientation may overcome the limitations of both radical situationism and defensive dispositionism.