On the cross‐cultural examination of acts and dispositions

The articles by Angleitner and Demtroder (1988) and Smid et al. (1988) raise several important issues about the study of acts, dispositions, and personality. While the results of Angleitner and Demtroder provide a powerful demonstration of the cross‐cultural generality of the act frequency approach, several conclusions appearing in both papers require clarification: (1) multiple category membership is a complexity that occurs in the natural object domain as well as in the act‐disposition domain, (2) the differences between the subjective conditional probability approach used by Smid et al., and the act frequency approach render the conclusions drawn by Smid et al. about the act frequency approach of Buss and Craik erroneous, and (3) distinctions among basic forms of personality data (beliefs about self, beliefs held by others about the self, and act trends in everyday life) require clear separation so that the multiple goals in personality psychology are not conflated.