Links Between Personality Judgments and Contextualized Behavior Patterns: Situation-Behavior Profiles of Personality Prototypes

Research on personality judgment traditionally has assumed that the perceiver is guided intuitively by an implicit theory of global situation-free dispositions. In contrast, the cognitive social model of personality hypothesizes more contextualized person variables (e.g., how the individual encodes the situation, and the relevant expectancies it activates) that underlie the structure of social behavior. These person variables are expected to be expressed as stable profiles of if … then …, situation-behavior contingent relations: she does A when X but she does B when Y. This model predicts that prototypic exemplars of different personality types are characterized by meaningful profiles of behavior variability, patterned distinctively across situations. To examine the ecological validity of this hypothesis, children in a summer residential camp setting were observed for an average of 167 hours to track their on-going behavior across situations for 6 weeks. Each child also was rated for goodness of fit to the prototype of an aggressive, withdrawn, or friendly child. As predicted, distinctive, stable patterns of situation-behavior contingent relations (A when X, B when Y) identified the behavioral signatures—the profiles of person-situation interactions—of different personality exemplars. The results demonstrate links between judgments and situation-behavior patterns that go beyond the overall average behavioral tendencies expected by traditional conceptions of personality.