One limitation (or one might say, one advantage of) personality trait measures is that they try to assess how a person usually is or is perceived to be. To get at basic dispositions in how we think and act, what we feel and desire, you’d like to smooth over situational and contextual effects as much as possible. This procedure has the side effect of smothering most within-person variation in personality.
Allan Clifton presented data in a symposium organized by @hardsci on the nifty idea that other people provide a powerful context for the expression of personality.
The study involved getting participants (who first gave self-reports of their gross personality) to list 30 members of their social network (friends, classmates, family, roommates, coworkers). They then assessed what their own personality was like when they interacted with each person in their social network. While most of these self-perceptions agreed with the initial assessment of the target’s own “usual” personality, there was some variability. For example, one participant might rate themselves as normally agreeable but highly disagreeable when they are with either of their roommates.
The next step was to get a sample of the people in a target’s social network to in turn rate the target. It turns out that these informant reports converged with the target’s own assessment. The two roommates rated the participant as highly disagreeable while everyone on their sports team assessed the target as agreeable.
So it seems that other people are strong contexts in which our personalities are expressed, perceived, and understood. This goes some way toward being more specific in the debate over situations and behavior. One criticism of this research program–an agenda that explores within-person variability in personality and the environment in which it is expressed–is that it has never been very exact in what exactly a situation is, how they are defined and classified. Clifton’s study gives the specifics. This makes sense particularly if we think that personality variation is an adaptive individual difference to different social niches.
