摘要
For what now approaches 30 years, we have been thinking about and
investigating the implications of two personality parameters we have chosen
to call ego-control and ego-resiliency. We began while graduate students at
Stanford, many eras ago. Reasoning from the constructs as we then
understood them, we sought to evaluate their behavioral relevance in a wide
range of experim ental situations and psychological tests-response
extinction in a partial reinforcement context, norm establishment while
experiencing movement in an autokinetic situation, performance in the
Gottschaldt Embedded Figures Test, reactions to authority, divergent
thinking, level of aspiration, reactions to stress, psychological fatigue or
sa tia tio n , percep tual s tan d ard s o f sim ilarity , e thnocen trism —all
administered to the same group of college students. Our dissertation results
(J. Block, 1950; J. H. Block, 1951; J. Block& J. H. Block, 1951; J. H. B lock*
J. Block, 1952) were encouraging: In diverse areas of psychology-learning,
perception, interpersonal behaviors, attitudes, problem solving-the
observed individual differences (often considered then to be no more than
“nuisance variance”) were frequently, reliably, and lawfully related to the
personality constructs we had formulated. Especially powerful as a predictor
was a composite variable generated by summing the behaviors of an
individual over a variety of phenotypically diverse but conceptually related
experimental situations (J. Block, 1950, Chapter 10).