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Motivational Styles in Everyday Life: A Guide to Reversal Theory Michael J. Apter. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association (www.apa.org). 2001, 373 pp., $39.95 (hardcover).
Many of my fellow graduate students and I watched in shock and awe as Walter Mischel (1968, 1973) laid siege to trait and factor psychology. Perhaps the only trait that survived his conceptual and empirical assault was intelligence, and even the foundations of that concept were left shaken. The so-called "dominant" individual, Mischel explained, might be submissive in another situation or in the same situation interpreted differently.
Those were heady years. David Premack (1965) had earlier annihilated all vestiges of "noun" from the concept of reinforcement. Reinforcers were not things, but highly probable behaviors (HPBs) that could be used to reinforce lowly probable behaviors. Grandma's law "Finish your dinner, then you can go out to play" only worked if going out to play was a highly probable behavior. If the child were exhausted from a full day of play, the opportunity to go out would no longer be highly probable, and thus would not reinforce eating spinach or anything else. Classical decision theory was also maturing and suggesting that our life choices were a function of the utilities (an array of Premackian reinforcers) and the probabilities of their occurrence inherent in each alternative (Horan, 1979; Katz, 1966). Cognitive restructuring, derived from Albert Ellis's (1962) elegant simplicity, was the treatment du jour for addressing irrational utilities or inaccurate probability information. Soon Albert Bandura (1977, 1982) would embellish his already brilliant work in observational learning by suggesting that self-efficacy could be changed via performance attainments thus producing durable new behaviors.
Trait and factor psychology, with its stodgy notions of personality type, could not weather the assault on exceptions to its rules, and like many of the gods of our youth vanished into the dustbin of history. My fellow graduate students and I hitched our wagons to the rising star of cognitive-behaviorism and never looked back.
Through it all Michael J. Apter never gave up the faith, though he did reform it a bit. His book Motivational Styles of Everyday Life: A Guide to Reversal Theory details his life's work over the past several decades. By focusing on states as opposed to traits,...