Personality and Intellectual Capabilities in Sport Psychology

Abstract

More than four decades ago, philosophers Dewey and Bentley (1949) argued that there are three phases in the development of theories in each scientific discipline: (a) self-action, in which objects are regarded as behaving under their own power; (b) interaction, in which objects are regarded as being in a causal interaction where one acts upon another; and (c) process transaction, in which objects are regarded as relating to one another within a system. Within psychology, it has long been debated as to which source accounts for most of the variance in human behavior (Houts, Cook, & Shadish, 1986; Kenrick & Funder, 1988; Pervin, 1985). For instance, Ekehammar (1974) differentiated between “personologism” (which advocates stable, intraorganismic constructs as the main determinants of behavioral variance) and “situationism” (which emphasizes situational factors as the main source of be-havioral variance). It seemed to Ekehammar that personality psychology was moving toward being governed by interactionism. The latter “can be regarded as the synthesis of personologism and situationism, which implies that neither the person nor the situation per se is emphasized, but the interaction of these two factors is regarded as the main source of behavioral variation” (p. 1026).