DEVELOPMENTAL REVIEW 3, 108- 114 (1983)

A Road Careened into the Woods: Comments on Dr. Morrison’s Commentary

EVERETT WATERS

State University qf New York ut Stony Brook

AND

L. ALAN SROUFE

University of Minrwsota

Morrison’s commentary on the paper entitled “Social Competence as a De- velopmental Construct” (E. Waters & L. A. Sroufe, Developmental Review,

1983, 3,79-97) focused primarily on the relevance of grand theory to contempo- rary issues in developmental psychology. The present comments reiterate central themes in the Waters and Sroufe paper that were either misconstrued or not discussed in the commentary. Waters and Sroufe offered (I) a definitional sketch rather than a grand theory, (2) a discussion of the need to employ diverse mea- sures in order to assess a single construct at different ages? (3) much more exten- sive reference to empirical evidence than indicated in the commentary, and (4) a detailed discussion of assessment strategies common to various projects in which the coherence of individual development has been most evident in empirical data.

We appreciate the time and scholarship that our friend and erstwhile colleague from Minnesota has invested in preparing comments on our paper. It is so much the better that this has also been an occasion for him to develop and present current issues in theory construction that are of interest in his own area of research. In our own comments, we would like to enumerate several points that are misunderstood or overlooked in Dr. Morrison’s discussion. In addition, there are several issues on which we and Dr. Morrison simply read the same data differently. And finally, we would like to comment on a general issue of theory construction that is more salient in the commentary than in our paper but nonetheless is quite interesting to us.

Reconstructing Our Paper from the Commentary

Commentaries are necessarily selective in their emphasis. A commen- tary is not merely a synopsis. At the same time, commentaries generally convey something of the organization and perspective of the original paper, as well as a sense of the authors’ goals. The paper we wanted to write and the paper Dr. Morrison read differ on at least four significant points.

108 0273-2297183 $3.00 Copyright 0 1983 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

COMMENTS ON MORRISON 109

Dejning a construct. Dr. Morrison perceives great scope in our pre- sentation of the competence construct, and likens our efforts in scale, if not in quality, to the ambitious grand schemes to which Freud, Werner, and Erikson devoted their careers. Sadly, our aspirations were not nearly as grand as all this. We prepared a paper that can be divided into four sections: (1) a brief definition, a sketch at best, of the kind of construct we would be referring to; (2) a brief presentation of the notion that it is necessary to employ diverse measures to assess any particular construct at different points in development; (3) a summary of recent data pointing to the coherence of individual development from early infancy through early adolescence; and (4) a summary of assessment strategies common to the various projects in which the coherence of individual development has been most evident.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its usefulness in so many contexts, the concept of competence has proven difficult to define, and the array of traits now associated with it is both extensive and difficult to schematize. Indeed, if there is a theory of competence at all today, it may be little more than the theory that all good things go together. Unfortunately, this offers little guidance in the development of theory or the design of re- search. Thus we have merely tried to sketch a construct in sufficient detail to anchor our presentation of a developmental and methodological perspective. At this point in the game we have a fairly open definition of a single construct in mind. This is not grand theory, but we felt that a single significant construct could very well rest on definitional sketches, anal- ogy, and example, and still play an important role in organizing devel- opmental theory and research, and thus eventually advance its own level of definition.

Competence overdrawn. Since the concept of competence is so often equated with any and everything that is good and desirable, perhaps it is understandable that Dr. Morrison construes us to have in mind a con- struct that cuts broadly across all the major domains of development. Thus he characterizes our approach as monistic (i.e., disposed to sub- sume a wide range of phenomena under one or a few concepts) and universalist (i.e., insensitive to the context specificity of knowledge and skills). In fact, we are explicitly working on a construct associated with the domain of social competence. Moreover, we present social compe- tence as a higher-level construct that subsumes (not displaces) an array of more narrowly defined constructs which, in turn, share in the ability to engage a wide variety of specific skills (competencies).

The notion that we might have hegemonistic tendencies vis-a-vis Dr. Morrison’s own field of cognitive and perceptual development seems to have arisen from our references to the “coordination of affect, cognition,

110 WATERS AND SROUFE

and behavior.” This is an important topic in the assessment of social behavior, because traditional assessments have not placed sufficient em- phasis on social perception or upon assessment in tasks that engage social problem-solving skills in ecologically valid contexts. But cognition, as a process, is quite distinct from the trait we call intelligence. One of the goals of our paper was to emphasize that developmentally appropriate assessment involves taking subjects’ level of cognitive development into account, and that social perceptions (e.g., a child’s expectation that par- ents will generally be available and responsive) can be assessed quite effectively if we employ multiple behavioral criteria in interpersonally significant assessment contexts. As far as we can tell, this emphasis has nothing whatsoever to do with IQ. But it does imply that it will be neces- sary to appreciate the context sensitivity of behavior in order to detect the coherence of individual development.

Milestones. If, as Dr. Morrison indicates, monistic approaches to de- velopmental theory characteristically assign high status the acquisition of developmental milestones, then this is certainly the wrong word to characterize our approach. We have discussed the mutability of devel- opmental milestones at length in our work on fear and wariness (e.g., Waters, Matas, & Sroufe, 1975) and emphasized that emphasis on mile- stones rather than on the cognitive processes and sensitivity to context can only restrict our view of the course and organization of development.

There is quite a difference between conceptualizing development as a series of specific acquisitions, and appreciating that the interactive and cognitive processing demands imposed by typical environments change dramatically with age. Emphasis on developmental milestones minimizes the importance of research on developmental processes for the design of measures. Emphasis on age-appropriate assessment, as described in our paper, does quite the opposite.

Theory into data. As we have mentioned above, a very substantial part of our paper concerned strategies for developmental assessment. We placed special emphasis on factors that we think have made the difference between success and failure in many longitudinal studies over the years. We wish that the data we outlined and the issues of assessment that we summarized could have received more attention in the commentary. In our view, much of what Dr. Morrison has taken as evidence against the value of broadly defined constructs is the direct result of assessment failures.

Convictions and Data

Quite aside from his comments on our paper, Dr. Morrison argues with conviction that this is not the time for grand theory in developmental

COMMENTS ON MORRISON 111

psychology. Moreover, he claims not to argue this from any a priori con- viction but only from the compelling impact of diverse sets of empirical findings. We have seen the same data and, since we have not reached the same conclusion, we are inclined to suspect that convictions influence the cast of the data to the eyes of the beholder.

The Mischel myth. In 1968 Mischel offered a three-fold indictment of research on individual differences. He asserted that on the basis of an extensive review, it was his view that individual differences (with excep- tions in the area of cognition and cognitive style) were (a) rarely stable across time or situations, (b) rarely intercorrelated in meaningful ways, or if they were it reflected constructions of the observer rather than coher- ence in actual behavior, and (c) of little use in clinical assessment. Dr. Morrison endorses this view. Moreover, it discourages him as to the coherence of behavior across constructs.

While Mischel’s view stood as the received wisdom for a decade, there is much that can be said in defense of individual differences research. First of all, as Block (1977) has pointed out, Mischel’s view is not based on a published review of any particular body of literature but upon a highly selective characterization of a field. Many of the negative results that Mischel cites are simply poor tests of ridiculous hypotheses. It obvi- ously does not make sense to indict either a methodology or the use of trait constructs in psychological theory on the basis of the success or failure of the worst or even the modal research of the day. This is espe- cially true if we can identify research in which sounder hypotheses and more sophisticated assessment are consistently associated with more co- herent results. As we read the literature, this “better” literature has long been at hand and is increasing rapidly. Moreover, Block (1977), Epstein (1979, 1980, 1982), Fishbein and Ajzen (1974), Moskowitz and Schwartz (in press), and, if we may say so, our own paper have provided detailed explanations of both negative results and the recent trend toward impres- sively coherent individual differences across time, situation, and be- havioral domains. Moreover, Mischel himself seems to have moved to- ward a subtler and more moderate view than is often attributed to him (e.g. Mischel and Peake, 1982).

The problem with trait constructs has probably never been that they are inherently defective. Instead, they have often been poorly conceptualized and poorly measured. This has been especially true when behavioral data have been employed (see Waters, 1978 for a discussion). In addition, the primary difficulties with trait constructs in psychological theory have been (a) the tendency to construe evrry variable as a trait and (b) the reference to traits as causes of behavior rather than as summaries of behavior that themselves require explanation (Wiggins, 1974). These problems can be remedied and their persistence over the years need not

112 WATERS AND SROUFE

discourage us as to the potential usefulness of constructs that refer to consistency across time or situations.

The most persistent problems in recent developmental assessment have been (a) failure to recognize that behavior has psychometric properties (i.e., observations can be accurate but unreliable) and (b) failure to ap- preciate that the same behavior can have different correlates in different contexts. These problems are discussed in detail in our paper and in the research we cite, though not at all in the commentary. We hope that if Dr. Morrison continues to follow the literature on coherence of social be- havior across time, situations, and behavioral domains, he will soon have more reason to be encouraged about broader constructs.

Knowledge and development. A great deal of recent literature in cogni- tive psychology has indeed demonstrated that developmental differences in processing skill are significantly influenced by levels of knowledge concerning the materials and tasks under study. While this research says a great deal about the nature of age differences in cognitive processing, and is extremely helpful in distinguishing various contributions to the acquisi- tion of specific skills, it does not even begin to imply that “developmental differences in thinking and processing are primarily a function of knowl- edge differences.” This would be to assert that adults merely know more facts than children. It is quite true that when children have exceptional knowledge on a specific topic they operate at more sophisticated levels, and adults with limited knowledge operate at less sophisticated levels. But this does not rule out qualitative differences in the representation or means of accessing information, or in the ability to generalize strategies or knowledge across tasks in adulthood.

In our view, individuals undergo a great deal of change in the course of development. A portion of this change, is (1) orderly (i.e., amenable to measurement and description), (2) cumulative, (3) directional (i.e., goes to a known outcome), (4) amenable to acceleration, retardation, or diver- sion, but not easily reversed, and (5) characteristic of most members of a species or of one sex. This is the portion of change that we characterize as developmental change. It is not necessarily the greatest proportion of the change that an individual experiences in his or her life. But the models of it that we have inherited from the field of biology are coherent and elegant and apply remarkably well across vast domains of physical and behavioral development. The notion of developmental change is the closest thing that psychology has to an organizing principle comparable to the theory of evolution in biology. It is the metaphor upon which organismic theories of development are founded and seems to us to defy classification in terms of the two dimensions that Dr. Morrison has employed. It would require a great deal more than the fruits of recent cognitive psychology to discour- age us from this view.

COMMENTS ON MORRISON 113

In conclusion, we would like to comment on the very interesting issues of theory construction that Dr. Morrison has raised in his commentary. These are not salient in our paper, and they do not refer to any particular body of data for their justifications. They are matters of strategy.

In our own research, we have tended to place our bets on fairly broad constructs: wariness, security, competence. Dr. Morrison is presumably betting on somewhat more narrowly defined constructs. If our research concerned perception, cognition, and reading, as his does, we might well follow suit. In part we are responding to fruitless proliferation of trait constructs that preceded our generation of research. In part, we are plac- ing a bet. As long as we avoid the genre of grand theory that is indifferent to data, we do not anticipate any worse outcome than potentially being proved wrong. And as long as we pose empirical tests of our hypotheses, which we try to do, we should be able to lift ourselves back onto the straight and narrow without wandering too long or too far. The paper we have written was intended to communicate some sense of how and why we are proceeding as we are. To make this public is to invite both collab- oration and commentary. Dr. Morrison seems committed to pluralism/ contextualism as a model for psychological theory. In the end, we remain pragmatists, and we are inclined to agree with Pepper (1942) that even when approaches to theory cannot be integrated, it is possible to shift from one to another as occasions require. And we agree with Leona Tyler (1981) that it is quite desirable to do so when the context requires it.

REFERENCES

Block, J. Recognizing the coherence of personality. In D. Magnusson & N. Endler (Eds.). Prrsondify it the crossroads. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. 1977.

Epstein, S. The stability of behavior. I. On predicting most of the people much of the time.

.lounza/ ofPu.~oncrlity and Sock/ Psychology. 1979, 37, 1097- 1126. Epstein, S. The stability of behavior. II. Implications for psychological research. Antcric,an

Psychologist, 1980, 35, 790-806.

Epstein, S. The stability of behavior across time and situations. In A. Rabin, J. Aronoff. A. Barclay, & R. Zucker (Eds.), Ftlrthcr exploratiom in personality (vol. 2). New York:

Wiley, 1982. Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. Attitudes toward objects as predictors of single and multiple

behavioral criteria. P.sycho/ogica/ Rrvir~c~, 1974, 81, 59-74. Mischel, W. Personulity clnd ASS~SS~C~I~. New York: Wiley, 1968.

Mischel, W. & Peake, P. K. Beyond deja vu in the search for cross-situational consistency. Psychological Revirn,, 1982, 89, 730-755.

Moskowitz. D., & Schwartz, J. A validity comparison of behavior and ratings by knowledg-

able observers. Journd of Personality and Socid Psyhology, 1982, in press, Pepper, S. World hypothrsas: A ~trcc& it? c,t~itlence. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

1942.

114 WATERS AND SROUFE

Tyler, L. More stately mansions-Psychology extends its boundaries. In M. Rosenzweig &

L. Porter (Eds.), Annual Review ofPsycho~o,gy, 1981, 32, l-20. Waters, E. The reliability and stability of individual differences in infant-mother attach-

ment. Child Development, 1978, 49, 483-494.

Waters, E., Matas, L., & Sroufe, L. A. Infants’ reactions to an approaching stranger: Description, validation, and functional significance of wariness. Child Developmenf,

1975, 46, 348-356.

Wiggins, J. In defense of traits. Unpublished manuscript, University of British Columbia,

1974.

RECEIVED: November 8, 1982.