An initial broad-level mapping of personality-situation contingencies in self-report data ☆ Marie N. Conley, Gerard Saucier ⁎ University of Oregon, USA abstract article info Article history: Received 2 February 2017 Received in revised form 3 July 2017 Accepted 13 July 2017 Available online xxxx It is commonplace observation that situations can affect the expression of personality dispositions. But psychol- ogy has typically addressed this relationship in a broad, unspecific way, with little attention yet to which situa- tions might particularly affect which dispositions. Here, our premise is that critical information might arise from examining how a range of specific situations are perceived to affect each of a range of specific personality tendencies. 500 participants completed a questionnaire in which 15 items referencing attributes were juxtaposed with each of 29 differing situations that are salient to laypersons, and patterns compared with scores on a short Big Five (plus Honesty) measure. This design enabled a preliminary mapping of basic personality-by-situation dynamics. Honesty yielded the least variance between situations, with Extraversion and Emotional Stability showing the most. Variation in each personality dimension had its own pattern of situational contingency: for ex- ample global Extraversion scores were particularly predicted by extraverted tendencies in situations involving unfamiliar others. The emergence of these patterns suggests that at least some such dimensions are relevant to and diagnosed by responses to a particular limited range of situations. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Personality traits Persons Situations Person-situation interactions 1. Introduction One of the goals of personality psychology is to be able to describe and predict individuals' behavior with maximum accuracy. Historically, and across a wide variety of linguistic and cultural contexts, one of the most popular and widely accepted methods for attempting to do so has been through traits (John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008). Traits are long-lasting attributes of personality that presumably involve stability across different situations (John & Gosling, 2000). Under an extreme version of a trait theory, there would be no behavioral variation attrib- utable to situations. It is, however, a commonplace observation that individuals do not behave consistently regardless of where they are or whom they are with; people often vary their behavior to fit the situational context. Therefore, to understand the whole person, or to capture the patterns accurately, both situations and behavioral attributes must be accounted for (Bem & Allen, 1974; Fleeson, 2004; Funder, 2006; Mischel & Shoda, 2000). This paper will examine the relationship between situations and trait-variation, in the interest of developing a fuller understanding of how individual personality is exposed. Trait models of personality assume cross-situational consistency (John & Gosling, 2000). That is, the personality terms are used in a decontextualized way and instructions for the questionnaires often ask individuals to generalize or average across situations; at issue is whether the person is outgoing, kind, etc., in general, as opposed to in one or another specific situation. Using trait factors to describe person- ality provides a summary of an individual's behavior more or less aver- aged across situations. It assumes consistent trait-behavior, e.g., individuals who are extraverted should be outgoing both at a party and if they are working at a job. It also assumes stability over time, that an individual's trait scores would remain the same at one time point as at any other time point. The interaction of situations and stabil- ity is not easily checked in studies of retest stability because the retest may involve the same averaging across situations, rather than the indi- vidual being described in a new or different situation. In his 1968 book, Personality and Assessment, Walter Mischel expressed the belief that the predictive ability of traits is severely limit- ed; that individuals vary so much from situation to situation and over time that there is no such thing as stable personality. Mischel (2004) cited studies that found that the average correlation coefficient for daily behavior across situations was about 0.14 (Newcomb, 1929), and that the assumption that rank-ordering of individuals on trait behavior would remain stable across situations was unsupported (e.g., Hartshorne & May, 1928). This perspective generated a new line of research that focused on personality as dynamic and variable rather than stable over time and place. In this perspective personality is not Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx ☆ Author Note: Thanks are due to Sanjay Srivastava for advisory contributions to work on this project. Raw data file is included as supplementary material. ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, 1227 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1227, USA. E-mail address: gsaucier@uoregon.edu (G. Saucier). PAID-08438; No of Pages 7 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.07.013 0191-8869/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Personality and Individual Differences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid Please cite this article as: Conley, M.N., & Saucier, G., An initial broad-level mapping of personality-situation contingencies in self-report data, Per- sonality and Individual Differences (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.07.013