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Title
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Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
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Author
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Wilson, Robert
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Vazire, Simine
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Research Area
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Development
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Topic
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Self and Identity Development
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Abstract
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What does it mean to know a person? In his famous article, McAdams (1995) addresses this question from the perspective of personality psychology and concludes that personality traits are “the psychology of the stranger.” To really know someone, you need to know more than just how they typically think, feel, and behave on average (a common definition of traits). You need to know how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors change depending on their role and context, why those fluctuations occur (the underlying motives and causes of those patterns), and how they make sense of their own patterns over time (their life narrative). In this essay, we argue that although there has been little empirical work on within‐person fluctuations in personality, the time is ripe to examine these patterns. New technology has made it possible to quantify momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and to track the contextual factors that underlie these fluctuations (i.e., “personality signatures”). By capturing individual differences at this dynamic level, we can gain a better understanding of how people differ from one another. This will also open the door to new research questions, such as investigating the amount of insight people have into their own and others' personality signatures.
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Identifier
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etrds0327
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extracted text
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Taking Personality to the Next Level:
What Does It Mean to Know
a Person?
ROBERT WILSON and SIMINE VAZIRE
Abstract
What does it mean to know a person? In his famous article, McAdams (1995)
addresses this question from the perspective of personality psychology and
concludes that personality traits are “the psychology of the stranger.” To really
know someone, you need to know more than just how they typically think, feel,
and behave on average (a common definition of traits). You need to know how
their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors change depending on their role and context,
why those fluctuations occur (the underlying motives and causes of those patterns),
and how they make sense of their own patterns over time (their life narrative).
In this essay, we argue that although there has been little empirical work on
within-person fluctuations in personality, the time is ripe to examine these patterns.
New technology has made it possible to quantify momentary thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors, and to track the contextual factors that underlie these fluctuations
(i.e., “personality signatures”). By capturing individual differences at this dynamic
level, we can gain a better understanding of how people differ from one another.
This will also open the door to new research questions, such as investigating the
amount of insight people have into their own and others’ personality signatures.
“We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.”
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
INTRODUCTION
PERSONALITY TRAITS AND PERSONALITY STATES
When we describe what people are like, we often begin by talking about their
general tendencies. For example, we might describe Sally as an agreeable
person and Tricia as a disagreeable person. These trait descriptions allow
us to easily describe Sally and Tricia’s past behavior and anticipate their
future behavior. Furthermore, we can use these broad individual differences
to predict a wide range of outcomes such as occupational success and divorce
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
(Barrick & Mount, 1991; Karney & Bradbury, 1995; Ozer & Benet-Martinez,
2006).
However, people vary quite a bit around these average tendencies. Sally
may be agreeable most of the time, but surely she has moments when she
interrupts others or acts unkind. Although these fluctuations are usually
treated as noise in personality trait research, they are themselves an individual difference. Indeed, we can think of Sally’s fluctuations on agreeableness
as a part of her personality. Perhaps Sally is typically agreeable but fluctuates a lot, whereas Tricia is consistently disagreeable. Focusing on the
within-person fluctuations in personality states does not contradict the fact
that there are also stable individual differences at the trait level.
Fleeson (2001, 2004, 2007) has proposed a very elegant way of conceptualizing personality traits and states in a single model (Figure 1). According
to Fleeson’s density distribution approach to personality, personality traits
(e.g., Sally and Tricia’s average levels of agreeableness) are summaries of
each person’s more nuanced density distribution of states. That is, Sally’s
trait level of agreeableness (high) is the mean of her state agreeableness. But
the full distribution of Sally’s states gives us a much richer picture of Sally’s
personality—we can see that her personality states range all the way from
low agreeableness to high agreeableness (although the latter state is much
more common than the former for Sally). In contrast, Tricia’s trait level of
agreeableness (low) is basically all we need to know to discern what she
is like on agreeableness—she does not fluctuate much around her typical,
pretty disagreeable state.
Fleeson’s empirical work shows that most people exhibit almost all levels
of a given trait at some point during a typical week. Most of us have
0.5
Sally
Tricia
% of time
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
1
Low
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Level of agreeableness
Figure 1 Personality as a density distribution of states.
10
High
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
3
some agreeable moments and some disagreeable moments. However, there
are very robust individual differences in our average states—some of us
consistently experience agreeable states much more often than disagreeable
states, and others show the opposite pattern. Moreover, these individual
differences in average states are stable from week to week—someone who
experiences mostly agreeable states 1 week is likely to do so the next week.
The same goes for other traits (e.g., extraversion, neuroticism, etc.).
By conceptualizing personality traits as density distributions of states, we
can get closer to McAdams’s ideal of knowing not just what a person is like
on average but also understanding the dynamic ways in which they fluctuate
over time and across situations. Knowing the shape of a person’s distribution
of personality states provides more nuance than just knowing their trait level,
and provides the opportunity for even further understanding. Specifically,
once we know how much people fluctuate around their global traits, we can
investigate the causes of those fluctuations.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
PERSONALITY SIGNATURES
The brute fact that Sally is sometimes very agreeable and at other (rare) times
quite disagreeable is valuable information about Sally’s personality in itself.
However, it raises other questions. For example, what causes Sally to vary
on agreeableness? Can we predict these fluctuations based on Sally’s role,
her mood, or her environment? These are the kinds of questions that motivated Mischel and Shoda to develop the Cognitive Affective Personality System (CAPS) model of personality (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). In CAPS, Sally’s
unique pattern of cause and effect is her “if … then” contingency, or her personality signature.
This model takes us another level deeper in our understanding of personality. The goal is not just to describe how much people’s personality states
fluctuate, but to explain those fluctuations. Some of the fluctuations may be
caused by similar triggers for most people. For example, most people are
probably more agreeable when they are with people they like compared to
when they are with people they do not like. To the extent that a person’s
“if … then” contingencies are driven by universal triggers, that does not
really give us much information about how people differ from one another.
However, some personality triggers are probably idiosyncratic. Perhaps
Sally is more agreeable around people she knows well, whereas Tricia is
more agreeable (to the extent that she is ever agreeable) around strangers.
These unique “if … then” contingencies are what constitute a person’s
unique personality signature.
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
According to the CAPS model, the influence of external triggers on personality states is mediated by cognitive and affective processes. That is, Sally’s
cognitive and affective reaction to strangers (vs close others) is what explains
her drop in agreeableness. Thus, the entire dynamic system, from external
triggers to mental processes to behavior, is what constitutes a person’s personality. As such, to fully understand a person, you need to understand not
just their global traits and their density distribution of states but also the triggers that predict their fluctuations and the cognitive and affective processes
that explain these patterns. This idea is not unique to CAPS. In addition to
McAdams, many other personality theorists have argued that understanding people’s idiosyncratic reactions to different situations is fundamental to
capturing their personality (Allport, 1937; Lewin, 1936; Magnusson & Endler,
1977).
EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
So far, most of the work on personality signatures has been theoretical
(Allport, 1937; McAdams, 1995; Mischel, 1973, 2004; Mischel & Shoda, 1995,
1998, 1999). There is very little empirical work examining personality beyond
global traits (cf., Fournier, Moskowitz, & Zuroff, 2008; Shoda, Mischel, &
Wright, 1994). Fleeson has pushed the field into new territory by documenting that most people vary quite a bit around their average states (i.e.,
traits), and that this within-person variation is itself a fundamental aspect
of a person’s personality. However, the research has pretty much stopped
there. The next frontier for personality research is to empirically examine the
patterns that may be hidden within these density distributions—personality
signatures. Here, we review some of the fundamental questions that need to
be addressed.
What Are the “Active Ingredients” of Situations That Trigger Fluctuations in Personality States? We know how to measure the “then” part of the “if … then”
contingency—the personality states (although we rely on the assumption
that the taxonomy of personality traits also applies to states, an assumption
that needs further examination; see Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1998). However,
there is very little consensus about the taxonomy of the “if” part of the
contingency—the situational triggers. What are the important dimensions
along which situations differ? Several researchers have suggested taxonomies or catalogues of situational variables that are meant to capture the
“psychologically active ingredients” of situations—the factors that affect
how people think, feel, and behave (e.g., Funder, Furr, & Colvin, 2000; Moos,
1973; Saucier, Bel-Bahar, & Fernandez, 2007). This is a good start, but more
exploratory research needs to be done, including research combining the
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
5
“if” and “then” halves of the personality signature, to identify which aspects
of situations can predict the variance in people’s personality states. This is
the first step in measuring personality signatures.
Do Most People Have Idiosyncratic Personality Signatures? Once we identify
situational triggers that explain fluctuations in state personality, we can
examine the extent to which these triggers are idiosyncratic or universal.
Are Sally’s fluctuations in agreeableness caused by the same triggers as
Tricia’s and everyone else’s? Fleeson’s results cannot directly speak to
this—even though most people vary quite a bit around their average states,
it is still possible that the same triggers account for the variance in each
person’s states. Many personality theorists firmly believe that this is not the
case—that Sally’s fluctuations are caused by different triggers (and different
cognitive and affective reactions to triggers) than are Tricia’s fluctuations.
This intuition is central to all idiographic approaches to personality, including McAdams’. It is almost an article of faith in personality theory that you
cannot fully know a person without understanding her unique personality
signatures Thus, the next step for personality research in this area is to
empirically measure the idiosyncrasies of personality signatures.
What Processes Mediate the Effect of Triggers on Personality States? Once we
can identify people’s unique personality signatures, the next step in understanding the person is delineating the cognitive and affective processes that
explain how the situational triggers produce variations in thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors. This step involves going from simply describing people’s
patterns (e.g., Sally is less agreeable around strangers than around friends)
to explaining them (e.g., Sally feels anxious around strangers, which causes
her to act disagreeable). One empirical example of this type of research is
Downey’s work on rejection sensitivity (Downey & Feldman, 1996; Downey,
Freitas, Michaelis, & Khouri, 1998; Downey, Mougios, Ayduk, London, &
Shoda, 2004). These studies indicate that people high in rejection sensitivity
are more likely to interpret ambiguous information (e.g., a partner leaving
the experiment) as rejection and this cognitive interpretation leads to the
self-fulfilling prophecy, where rejection sensitivity ultimately leads to unsatisfying romantic relationships and dissolution (Downey & Feldman, 1996;
Downey et al., 1998). This is an example of moderated mediation, where the
trigger (i.e., ambiguous partner behavior) causes people high in rejection
sensitivity (i.e., moderator) to engage in the self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e.,
moderated mediator), which leads to negative relationship outcomes. More
research is needed to identify other such dynamic within-person processes
that account for individual differences in personality signatures. Ultimately,
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
this research would help us not only to predict when people will fluctuate
from their global traits but also to understand why they do so.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES
One of the main reasons that little empirical research has been conducted on
personality signatures is that there are important methodological obstacles
to such research. Idiographic approaches to personality require extensive
repeated measurements in order to obtain enough power to investigate
within-person processes. Furthermore, to study personality signatures, it
is necessary to measure both situational variables (i.e., potential triggers)
and personality states over time. In addition, people may not be consciously
aware of their triggers, their personality states, or both, and thus ideally
these would be measured both subjectively and objectively. Finally, these
variables should be measured in people’s natural environments in order to
have the best chance of capturing ecologically valid assessments of people’s
patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving in response to the triggers they
encounter in their daily lives. Fortunately, new technological developments
make it easier and cheaper than ever to collect such data. Here, we describe
several methods that can be used to achieve these goals, and we give an
example of one of our ongoing studies that implements these methods
(Vazire et al., 2014).
Daily Life Studies: Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). Daily life studies
have been around for over 100 years and come under a variety of names such
as diary methods, experience sampling methods (ESMs), ambulatory assessment, and ecological momentary assessment (EMA). The common theme is
that these methods are conducted outside of the laboratory in approximately
real time, focus on systematically measuring the behavior, perceptions, environment, and/or physiology of participants, and are assessed on repeated
occasions (Mehl & Conner, 2012). These methods provide remarkably rich
information about people but historically they have been very difficult to
implement (for a review, see Wilhelm, Perrez, & Pawlik, 2012). Fortunately,
the proliferation of smartphones and expansion of Internet access has made
the collection of daily life data much easier (see discussion in Miller, 2012).
For example, it is now feasible for researchers to conduct an EMA study
by writing a web questionnaire that can be accessed from any smartphone
or Internet-connected device. In a modern EMA design, participants can be
prompted by text or e-mail to log into a web questionnaire and complete a
report about their thoughts, feelings, behavior, and/or situation. It is possible
to prompt participants several times per day for several days or weeks and
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
7
ask them to give “status updates” of both situational variables (e.g., Did you
like the people you were with? Was it a familiar situation?) and personality
states (e.g., Did you act extraverted? Did you feel calm?).
In our ongoing study, over 400 college student participants have completed
EMA reports up to four times per day for 2 weeks. Our questionnaire asks
participants to report on their mood (11 items, e.g., “happy,” “lonely”), personality states (10 items, e.g., “rude,” “reliable”) and situation (13 items, e.g.,
“how much did you like the people you were with?,” “how deep/substantive
was the conversation?”). We enter participants into a lottery for each survey
they complete (which costs us about 22 cents per completed survey). Our
average response rate has been 52%, with 75% of participants completing at
least 15 of 56 surveys (M = 29.4, SD = 15.2).
Daily Life Studies: Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR). EMA provides valuable information about subjective experiences but this method is hampered
by the limitations inherent in any self-report measure, such as blind spots in
self-knowledge and consistency motivations (Paulhus & Vazire, 2007; Vazire,
2010). There is also a concern that self-reports of certain constructs (e.g., depth
of conversation) are so subjective that between-person comparisons cannot
be trusted without some form of external corroboration. Fortunately, technological advances are making it possible to passively collect a rich trove of
information about situations and behaviors that can act as a validation check
for EMA and potentially add complimentary information about if-then triggers not captured by self-reports.
For example, our ongoing study incorporates the electronically activated
recorder (EAR), which is an iPhone- or iPod-based application designed to
record brief sound snippets from participants’ natural environment as they
go about their day. We ask our participants to clip an iPod Touch with the
EAR software to the outside of their clothing during the first week of the
EMA portion of the study. The EAR is programmed to record 30-s audio files
every 9.5 min, giving us over 700 audio files per participant. One benefit of
the EAR recordings is that they can be coded and recoded as many times
as desired. There is no established taxonomy of situations and the ability to
capture behavior broadly is highly desirable because the same audio files can
be used to test a range of behaviors depending on the hypothesis of interest.
Our team of research assistants is currently coding sound files on items that
parallel the EMA variables (e.g., personality states, depth of conversation) as
well as other variables that are unique to the EAR data (e.g., coding specific
behaviors such as laughing, apologizing, bragging). Taken together, the EAR
codings and EMA ratings gives us a multimethod repeated measures design
that is ideal for assessing common if-then personality triggers and distinctive
personality signatures.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
What are the most important questions that remain to be answered? One aim
of our current study is to examine the average within-person relationships
among the situation variables and the personality states. That is, on average, what do personality signatures look like for each situation–personality
state combination? For example, on average, are people happier when they
are having deeper conversations? The next aim is to examine individual differences around this average within-person slope. That is, are there idiosyncratic variations in these personality signatures? For example, is happiness
more contingent on depth of conversation for some people than others? From
there, we can examine moderators (e.g., which people show a stronger relationship between depth of conversation and happiness?) and mediators (e.g.,
is the association between depth of conversation and happiness accounted
for by self-disclosure?). This allows us to predict who will have what personality signatures (moderators) and understand what internal processes might
explain these patterns (mediators).
We hope this project will lay the groundwork for assessing people’s
personality signatures, and that these methods can then be used to study
new basic and applied research questions. Here, we give a few examples of
research questions that we will be able to tackle once these methods have
been validated.
SELF- AND OTHER-KNOWLEDGE OF PERSONALITY SIGNATURES
A fundamental question that cuts across all subdisciplines of psychology
is how well do people know themselves (Vazire & Carlson, 2011; Vazire
& Wilson, 2012; Wilson, 2009). In the realm of personality, we now have
quite strong evidence that people have some insight into their global
traits, but also have important blind spots in this arena (Carlson, Vazire,
& Oltmanns, 2013; Vazire, 2010). However, very little is known about how
much self-knowledge people have about the dynamic aspects of their
personality. Do people know how much their personality states fluctuate?
Do they know the causes of those fluctuations? That is, do they know
their personality signatures? McAdams argues that to really know another
person, we must understand them at this dynamic level. The same can be
said of self-knowledge: for a person to really know herself would mean for
her to know not only how she is on average but also when and why she
deviates from her typical personality profile.
One intriguing possibility is that self- and other-knowledge of personality
signatures may be asymmetrical. The research on self- and other-knowledge
of global personality traits suggests that there are some traits the self can
judge more accurately than can close others, and some traits that close others
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
9
can see accurately but the self cannot. The same might be true of personality
signatures. For example, people might have good self-insight into what triggers their fluctuations in neuroticism, but close others may be better at identifying the factors that trigger fluctuations in agreeableness (because agreeableness is more observable to others and perhaps less salient to the self).
Identifying the bright spots and blind spots in self- and other-knowledge of
personality signatures can help us understand the process of self-perception
and the function that self-insight and self-deception might be serving in people’s everyday lives.
Moreover, once we know what aspects of their personality signatures people tend to be unaware of, we can develop interventions to try to improve
self-knowledge in these areas. For example, if people tend to be unaware of
their idiosyncratic triggers for agreeableness, giving them feedback may help
them select the situations that bring out their desired levels of agreeableness.
To the extent that we can identify the mediators that explain why these triggers cause fluctuations in personality states, we may even be able to intervene
in that process and help people break maladaptive patterns.
HOW DOES PERSONALITY INFLUENCE THE SELECTION OF SITUATIONS?
So far we have discussed environmental triggers as if they are independent
drivers of personality fluctuations, but people actively navigate their world
and personality likely plays an important role in the selection of environments. Such an indirect effect of personality may help explain individual
differences in the presence or absence of certain triggers in daily life. For
example, an extrovert may attend more parties, and being at parties is likely
a situational trigger to act more extroverted. Untangling this reciprocal relationship presents exciting new opportunities for understanding dynamic
person-by-situation interactions.
HOW CAN RESEARCH ABOUT PERSONALITY SIGNATURES BE APPLIED TO REAL-WORLD
PROBLEMS?
Another exciting avenue for research on personality signatures is the potential application of this work in real-world contexts. For example, many mental disorders are characterized by unique patterns of fluctuations in moods
or personality states (e.g., bipolar disorder). Developing better techniques for
assessing these patterns will help us understand these disorders better, and
may also help with treatment. For example, the methods described could
be used to identify people’s idiosyncratic triggers for manic or depressive
episodes, and people could be given empirical feedback about their own
unique triggers. The same could be done for other health and mental health
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
problems (e.g., chronic pain, insomnia, social anxiety). This feedback could
then be used to help people select healthier situations or break unhealthy
patterns of “if … then” contingencies.
Similarly, research on personality signatures has the potential to be very
useful in organizational settings. One challenge in organizations is identifying people who will thrive in various kinds of positions (e.g., leadership positions, high stress positions, etc.). For example, research suggests that there
are important individual differences in how people respond to high status
positions and winning verses losing (Mehta, Jones, & Josephs, 2008). Specifically, people with high testosterone levels who lose in a competition are less
likely to want to compete a second time but more likely to want to compete
if they win. On the other hand, winners and losers with low testosterone
do not differ in their willingness to compete a second time. This is an excellent example of how understanding people’s personality signatures can help
predict context-specific behavior. Ultimately, this kind of research could help
people make better choices for themselves and their organizations, and maximize person-environment (or person-role) fit.
CONCLUSION
What makes a person unique is not just their global patterns of thinking,
feeling, and behavior but also the pattern of responses to external triggers in
theireveryday life. To know a person well requires moving beyond understanding the general tendencies and learning what “pushes their buttons.”
New tools provide a way to quantify fluctuations in thoughts, feelings, and
behavior with unprecedented detail and precision. Social scientists now have
the opportunity to study life as it is actually lived at the individual level in
order to better understand how people differ from one another. Examining
personality at this dynamic level will help move our field forward to a more
fine-grained and comprehensive understanding of personality. It is an exciting time to be a social-personality psychologist.
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Saucier, G., Bel-Bahar, T., & Fernandez, C. (2007). What modifies the expression of
personality tendencies? Defining basic domains of situation variables. Journal of
Personality, 75(3), 479–504.
Shoda, Y., Mischel, W., & Wright, J. C. (1994). Intraindividual stability in the organization and patterning of behavior: Incorporating psychological situations into
the idiographic analysis of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
67(4), 674–687.
Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self-other knowledge
asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2),
281–300.
Vazire, S., & Carlson, E. N. (2011). Others sometimes know us better than we know
ourselves. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(2), 104–108.
Vazire, S., & Wilson, T. D. (Eds.) (2012). Handbook of self-knowledge. New York, NY:
Guilford Press.
Wilson, T. D. (2009). Know thyself. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4, 384–389.
Carlson, E. N., Vazire, S., & Oltmanns, T. F. (2013). Self-Other knowledge asymmetries in personality pathology. Journal of Personality, 81(2), 155–170.
Vazire, S., Wilson, R. E., Solomon, B., Bollich, K., Harris, K., Weston, S., … , Jackson,
J. J. (2014). Personality and interpersonal roles. Study in progress.
Wilhelm, P., Perrez, M., & Pawlik, K. (2012). Conducting research in daily life: A
historical review. In M. R. Mehl & T. S. Conner (Eds.), Handbook of research methods
for studying daily life (pp. 62–86). New York, NY: Guilford.
ROBERT WILSON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Robert Wilson is a graduate student in Psychology at the University of
California, Davis. His research examines patterns in how people fluctuate
around their average individual differences. The ways in which we vary
in our daily lives can be a result of idiosyncratic responses to situations
and other external forces. He uses a multimethod approach (self-reports,
informant-reports, experience sampling, EAR audio recordings, Facebook behavioral codings) to examine how our personalities vary across
environmental and social situations. He also examines the amount of
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
13
self-awareness people generally have about their personality and behavioral
patterns.
SIMINE VAZIRE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Simine Vazire is associate professor of psychology at the University of
California, Davis. She is the director of the Personality and Self-Knowledge
laboratory. Her research examines how well people know their own personality. She studies questions such as: Why do close others sometimes
know us better than we know ourselves? What are the consequences of
lacking self-knowledge? How can self-knowledge be improved? How are
personality and social relationships related to well-being? Her research is
funded by the National Science Foundation.
RELATED ESSAYS
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-
Taking Personality to the Next Level:
What Does It Mean to Know
a Person?
ROBERT WILSON and SIMINE VAZIRE
Abstract
What does it mean to know a person? In his famous article, McAdams (1995)
addresses this question from the perspective of personality psychology and
concludes that personality traits are “the psychology of the stranger.” To really
know someone, you need to know more than just how they typically think, feel,
and behave on average (a common definition of traits). You need to know how
their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors change depending on their role and context,
why those fluctuations occur (the underlying motives and causes of those patterns),
and how they make sense of their own patterns over time (their life narrative).
In this essay, we argue that although there has been little empirical work on
within-person fluctuations in personality, the time is ripe to examine these patterns.
New technology has made it possible to quantify momentary thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors, and to track the contextual factors that underlie these fluctuations
(i.e., “personality signatures”). By capturing individual differences at this dynamic
level, we can gain a better understanding of how people differ from one another.
This will also open the door to new research questions, such as investigating the
amount of insight people have into their own and others’ personality signatures.
“We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.”
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
INTRODUCTION
PERSONALITY TRAITS AND PERSONALITY STATES
When we describe what people are like, we often begin by talking about their
general tendencies. For example, we might describe Sally as an agreeable
person and Tricia as a disagreeable person. These trait descriptions allow
us to easily describe Sally and Tricia’s past behavior and anticipate their
future behavior. Furthermore, we can use these broad individual differences
to predict a wide range of outcomes such as occupational success and divorce
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
(Barrick & Mount, 1991; Karney & Bradbury, 1995; Ozer & Benet-Martinez,
2006).
However, people vary quite a bit around these average tendencies. Sally
may be agreeable most of the time, but surely she has moments when she
interrupts others or acts unkind. Although these fluctuations are usually
treated as noise in personality trait research, they are themselves an individual difference. Indeed, we can think of Sally’s fluctuations on agreeableness
as a part of her personality. Perhaps Sally is typically agreeable but fluctuates a lot, whereas Tricia is consistently disagreeable. Focusing on the
within-person fluctuations in personality states does not contradict the fact
that there are also stable individual differences at the trait level.
Fleeson (2001, 2004, 2007) has proposed a very elegant way of conceptualizing personality traits and states in a single model (Figure 1). According
to Fleeson’s density distribution approach to personality, personality traits
(e.g., Sally and Tricia’s average levels of agreeableness) are summaries of
each person’s more nuanced density distribution of states. That is, Sally’s
trait level of agreeableness (high) is the mean of her state agreeableness. But
the full distribution of Sally’s states gives us a much richer picture of Sally’s
personality—we can see that her personality states range all the way from
low agreeableness to high agreeableness (although the latter state is much
more common than the former for Sally). In contrast, Tricia’s trait level of
agreeableness (low) is basically all we need to know to discern what she
is like on agreeableness—she does not fluctuate much around her typical,
pretty disagreeable state.
Fleeson’s empirical work shows that most people exhibit almost all levels
of a given trait at some point during a typical week. Most of us have
0.5
Sally
Tricia
% of time
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
1
Low
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Level of agreeableness
Figure 1 Personality as a density distribution of states.
10
High
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
3
some agreeable moments and some disagreeable moments. However, there
are very robust individual differences in our average states—some of us
consistently experience agreeable states much more often than disagreeable
states, and others show the opposite pattern. Moreover, these individual
differences in average states are stable from week to week—someone who
experiences mostly agreeable states 1 week is likely to do so the next week.
The same goes for other traits (e.g., extraversion, neuroticism, etc.).
By conceptualizing personality traits as density distributions of states, we
can get closer to McAdams’s ideal of knowing not just what a person is like
on average but also understanding the dynamic ways in which they fluctuate
over time and across situations. Knowing the shape of a person’s distribution
of personality states provides more nuance than just knowing their trait level,
and provides the opportunity for even further understanding. Specifically,
once we know how much people fluctuate around their global traits, we can
investigate the causes of those fluctuations.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
PERSONALITY SIGNATURES
The brute fact that Sally is sometimes very agreeable and at other (rare) times
quite disagreeable is valuable information about Sally’s personality in itself.
However, it raises other questions. For example, what causes Sally to vary
on agreeableness? Can we predict these fluctuations based on Sally’s role,
her mood, or her environment? These are the kinds of questions that motivated Mischel and Shoda to develop the Cognitive Affective Personality System (CAPS) model of personality (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). In CAPS, Sally’s
unique pattern of cause and effect is her “if … then” contingency, or her personality signature.
This model takes us another level deeper in our understanding of personality. The goal is not just to describe how much people’s personality states
fluctuate, but to explain those fluctuations. Some of the fluctuations may be
caused by similar triggers for most people. For example, most people are
probably more agreeable when they are with people they like compared to
when they are with people they do not like. To the extent that a person’s
“if … then” contingencies are driven by universal triggers, that does not
really give us much information about how people differ from one another.
However, some personality triggers are probably idiosyncratic. Perhaps
Sally is more agreeable around people she knows well, whereas Tricia is
more agreeable (to the extent that she is ever agreeable) around strangers.
These unique “if … then” contingencies are what constitute a person’s
unique personality signature.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
According to the CAPS model, the influence of external triggers on personality states is mediated by cognitive and affective processes. That is, Sally’s
cognitive and affective reaction to strangers (vs close others) is what explains
her drop in agreeableness. Thus, the entire dynamic system, from external
triggers to mental processes to behavior, is what constitutes a person’s personality. As such, to fully understand a person, you need to understand not
just their global traits and their density distribution of states but also the triggers that predict their fluctuations and the cognitive and affective processes
that explain these patterns. This idea is not unique to CAPS. In addition to
McAdams, many other personality theorists have argued that understanding people’s idiosyncratic reactions to different situations is fundamental to
capturing their personality (Allport, 1937; Lewin, 1936; Magnusson & Endler,
1977).
EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
So far, most of the work on personality signatures has been theoretical
(Allport, 1937; McAdams, 1995; Mischel, 1973, 2004; Mischel & Shoda, 1995,
1998, 1999). There is very little empirical work examining personality beyond
global traits (cf., Fournier, Moskowitz, & Zuroff, 2008; Shoda, Mischel, &
Wright, 1994). Fleeson has pushed the field into new territory by documenting that most people vary quite a bit around their average states (i.e.,
traits), and that this within-person variation is itself a fundamental aspect
of a person’s personality. However, the research has pretty much stopped
there. The next frontier for personality research is to empirically examine the
patterns that may be hidden within these density distributions—personality
signatures. Here, we review some of the fundamental questions that need to
be addressed.
What Are the “Active Ingredients” of Situations That Trigger Fluctuations in Personality States? We know how to measure the “then” part of the “if … then”
contingency—the personality states (although we rely on the assumption
that the taxonomy of personality traits also applies to states, an assumption
that needs further examination; see Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1998). However,
there is very little consensus about the taxonomy of the “if” part of the
contingency—the situational triggers. What are the important dimensions
along which situations differ? Several researchers have suggested taxonomies or catalogues of situational variables that are meant to capture the
“psychologically active ingredients” of situations—the factors that affect
how people think, feel, and behave (e.g., Funder, Furr, & Colvin, 2000; Moos,
1973; Saucier, Bel-Bahar, & Fernandez, 2007). This is a good start, but more
exploratory research needs to be done, including research combining the
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
5
“if” and “then” halves of the personality signature, to identify which aspects
of situations can predict the variance in people’s personality states. This is
the first step in measuring personality signatures.
Do Most People Have Idiosyncratic Personality Signatures? Once we identify
situational triggers that explain fluctuations in state personality, we can
examine the extent to which these triggers are idiosyncratic or universal.
Are Sally’s fluctuations in agreeableness caused by the same triggers as
Tricia’s and everyone else’s? Fleeson’s results cannot directly speak to
this—even though most people vary quite a bit around their average states,
it is still possible that the same triggers account for the variance in each
person’s states. Many personality theorists firmly believe that this is not the
case—that Sally’s fluctuations are caused by different triggers (and different
cognitive and affective reactions to triggers) than are Tricia’s fluctuations.
This intuition is central to all idiographic approaches to personality, including McAdams’. It is almost an article of faith in personality theory that you
cannot fully know a person without understanding her unique personality
signatures Thus, the next step for personality research in this area is to
empirically measure the idiosyncrasies of personality signatures.
What Processes Mediate the Effect of Triggers on Personality States? Once we
can identify people’s unique personality signatures, the next step in understanding the person is delineating the cognitive and affective processes that
explain how the situational triggers produce variations in thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors. This step involves going from simply describing people’s
patterns (e.g., Sally is less agreeable around strangers than around friends)
to explaining them (e.g., Sally feels anxious around strangers, which causes
her to act disagreeable). One empirical example of this type of research is
Downey’s work on rejection sensitivity (Downey & Feldman, 1996; Downey,
Freitas, Michaelis, & Khouri, 1998; Downey, Mougios, Ayduk, London, &
Shoda, 2004). These studies indicate that people high in rejection sensitivity
are more likely to interpret ambiguous information (e.g., a partner leaving
the experiment) as rejection and this cognitive interpretation leads to the
self-fulfilling prophecy, where rejection sensitivity ultimately leads to unsatisfying romantic relationships and dissolution (Downey & Feldman, 1996;
Downey et al., 1998). This is an example of moderated mediation, where the
trigger (i.e., ambiguous partner behavior) causes people high in rejection
sensitivity (i.e., moderator) to engage in the self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e.,
moderated mediator), which leads to negative relationship outcomes. More
research is needed to identify other such dynamic within-person processes
that account for individual differences in personality signatures. Ultimately,
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
this research would help us not only to predict when people will fluctuate
from their global traits but also to understand why they do so.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES
One of the main reasons that little empirical research has been conducted on
personality signatures is that there are important methodological obstacles
to such research. Idiographic approaches to personality require extensive
repeated measurements in order to obtain enough power to investigate
within-person processes. Furthermore, to study personality signatures, it
is necessary to measure both situational variables (i.e., potential triggers)
and personality states over time. In addition, people may not be consciously
aware of their triggers, their personality states, or both, and thus ideally
these would be measured both subjectively and objectively. Finally, these
variables should be measured in people’s natural environments in order to
have the best chance of capturing ecologically valid assessments of people’s
patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving in response to the triggers they
encounter in their daily lives. Fortunately, new technological developments
make it easier and cheaper than ever to collect such data. Here, we describe
several methods that can be used to achieve these goals, and we give an
example of one of our ongoing studies that implements these methods
(Vazire et al., 2014).
Daily Life Studies: Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). Daily life studies
have been around for over 100 years and come under a variety of names such
as diary methods, experience sampling methods (ESMs), ambulatory assessment, and ecological momentary assessment (EMA). The common theme is
that these methods are conducted outside of the laboratory in approximately
real time, focus on systematically measuring the behavior, perceptions, environment, and/or physiology of participants, and are assessed on repeated
occasions (Mehl & Conner, 2012). These methods provide remarkably rich
information about people but historically they have been very difficult to
implement (for a review, see Wilhelm, Perrez, & Pawlik, 2012). Fortunately,
the proliferation of smartphones and expansion of Internet access has made
the collection of daily life data much easier (see discussion in Miller, 2012).
For example, it is now feasible for researchers to conduct an EMA study
by writing a web questionnaire that can be accessed from any smartphone
or Internet-connected device. In a modern EMA design, participants can be
prompted by text or e-mail to log into a web questionnaire and complete a
report about their thoughts, feelings, behavior, and/or situation. It is possible
to prompt participants several times per day for several days or weeks and
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
7
ask them to give “status updates” of both situational variables (e.g., Did you
like the people you were with? Was it a familiar situation?) and personality
states (e.g., Did you act extraverted? Did you feel calm?).
In our ongoing study, over 400 college student participants have completed
EMA reports up to four times per day for 2 weeks. Our questionnaire asks
participants to report on their mood (11 items, e.g., “happy,” “lonely”), personality states (10 items, e.g., “rude,” “reliable”) and situation (13 items, e.g.,
“how much did you like the people you were with?,” “how deep/substantive
was the conversation?”). We enter participants into a lottery for each survey
they complete (which costs us about 22 cents per completed survey). Our
average response rate has been 52%, with 75% of participants completing at
least 15 of 56 surveys (M = 29.4, SD = 15.2).
Daily Life Studies: Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR). EMA provides valuable information about subjective experiences but this method is hampered
by the limitations inherent in any self-report measure, such as blind spots in
self-knowledge and consistency motivations (Paulhus & Vazire, 2007; Vazire,
2010). There is also a concern that self-reports of certain constructs (e.g., depth
of conversation) are so subjective that between-person comparisons cannot
be trusted without some form of external corroboration. Fortunately, technological advances are making it possible to passively collect a rich trove of
information about situations and behaviors that can act as a validation check
for EMA and potentially add complimentary information about if-then triggers not captured by self-reports.
For example, our ongoing study incorporates the electronically activated
recorder (EAR), which is an iPhone- or iPod-based application designed to
record brief sound snippets from participants’ natural environment as they
go about their day. We ask our participants to clip an iPod Touch with the
EAR software to the outside of their clothing during the first week of the
EMA portion of the study. The EAR is programmed to record 30-s audio files
every 9.5 min, giving us over 700 audio files per participant. One benefit of
the EAR recordings is that they can be coded and recoded as many times
as desired. There is no established taxonomy of situations and the ability to
capture behavior broadly is highly desirable because the same audio files can
be used to test a range of behaviors depending on the hypothesis of interest.
Our team of research assistants is currently coding sound files on items that
parallel the EMA variables (e.g., personality states, depth of conversation) as
well as other variables that are unique to the EAR data (e.g., coding specific
behaviors such as laughing, apologizing, bragging). Taken together, the EAR
codings and EMA ratings gives us a multimethod repeated measures design
that is ideal for assessing common if-then personality triggers and distinctive
personality signatures.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
What are the most important questions that remain to be answered? One aim
of our current study is to examine the average within-person relationships
among the situation variables and the personality states. That is, on average, what do personality signatures look like for each situation–personality
state combination? For example, on average, are people happier when they
are having deeper conversations? The next aim is to examine individual differences around this average within-person slope. That is, are there idiosyncratic variations in these personality signatures? For example, is happiness
more contingent on depth of conversation for some people than others? From
there, we can examine moderators (e.g., which people show a stronger relationship between depth of conversation and happiness?) and mediators (e.g.,
is the association between depth of conversation and happiness accounted
for by self-disclosure?). This allows us to predict who will have what personality signatures (moderators) and understand what internal processes might
explain these patterns (mediators).
We hope this project will lay the groundwork for assessing people’s
personality signatures, and that these methods can then be used to study
new basic and applied research questions. Here, we give a few examples of
research questions that we will be able to tackle once these methods have
been validated.
SELF- AND OTHER-KNOWLEDGE OF PERSONALITY SIGNATURES
A fundamental question that cuts across all subdisciplines of psychology
is how well do people know themselves (Vazire & Carlson, 2011; Vazire
& Wilson, 2012; Wilson, 2009). In the realm of personality, we now have
quite strong evidence that people have some insight into their global
traits, but also have important blind spots in this arena (Carlson, Vazire,
& Oltmanns, 2013; Vazire, 2010). However, very little is known about how
much self-knowledge people have about the dynamic aspects of their
personality. Do people know how much their personality states fluctuate?
Do they know the causes of those fluctuations? That is, do they know
their personality signatures? McAdams argues that to really know another
person, we must understand them at this dynamic level. The same can be
said of self-knowledge: for a person to really know herself would mean for
her to know not only how she is on average but also when and why she
deviates from her typical personality profile.
One intriguing possibility is that self- and other-knowledge of personality
signatures may be asymmetrical. The research on self- and other-knowledge
of global personality traits suggests that there are some traits the self can
judge more accurately than can close others, and some traits that close others
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
9
can see accurately but the self cannot. The same might be true of personality
signatures. For example, people might have good self-insight into what triggers their fluctuations in neuroticism, but close others may be better at identifying the factors that trigger fluctuations in agreeableness (because agreeableness is more observable to others and perhaps less salient to the self).
Identifying the bright spots and blind spots in self- and other-knowledge of
personality signatures can help us understand the process of self-perception
and the function that self-insight and self-deception might be serving in people’s everyday lives.
Moreover, once we know what aspects of their personality signatures people tend to be unaware of, we can develop interventions to try to improve
self-knowledge in these areas. For example, if people tend to be unaware of
their idiosyncratic triggers for agreeableness, giving them feedback may help
them select the situations that bring out their desired levels of agreeableness.
To the extent that we can identify the mediators that explain why these triggers cause fluctuations in personality states, we may even be able to intervene
in that process and help people break maladaptive patterns.
HOW DOES PERSONALITY INFLUENCE THE SELECTION OF SITUATIONS?
So far we have discussed environmental triggers as if they are independent
drivers of personality fluctuations, but people actively navigate their world
and personality likely plays an important role in the selection of environments. Such an indirect effect of personality may help explain individual
differences in the presence or absence of certain triggers in daily life. For
example, an extrovert may attend more parties, and being at parties is likely
a situational trigger to act more extroverted. Untangling this reciprocal relationship presents exciting new opportunities for understanding dynamic
person-by-situation interactions.
HOW CAN RESEARCH ABOUT PERSONALITY SIGNATURES BE APPLIED TO REAL-WORLD
PROBLEMS?
Another exciting avenue for research on personality signatures is the potential application of this work in real-world contexts. For example, many mental disorders are characterized by unique patterns of fluctuations in moods
or personality states (e.g., bipolar disorder). Developing better techniques for
assessing these patterns will help us understand these disorders better, and
may also help with treatment. For example, the methods described could
be used to identify people’s idiosyncratic triggers for manic or depressive
episodes, and people could be given empirical feedback about their own
unique triggers. The same could be done for other health and mental health
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
problems (e.g., chronic pain, insomnia, social anxiety). This feedback could
then be used to help people select healthier situations or break unhealthy
patterns of “if … then” contingencies.
Similarly, research on personality signatures has the potential to be very
useful in organizational settings. One challenge in organizations is identifying people who will thrive in various kinds of positions (e.g., leadership positions, high stress positions, etc.). For example, research suggests that there
are important individual differences in how people respond to high status
positions and winning verses losing (Mehta, Jones, & Josephs, 2008). Specifically, people with high testosterone levels who lose in a competition are less
likely to want to compete a second time but more likely to want to compete
if they win. On the other hand, winners and losers with low testosterone
do not differ in their willingness to compete a second time. This is an excellent example of how understanding people’s personality signatures can help
predict context-specific behavior. Ultimately, this kind of research could help
people make better choices for themselves and their organizations, and maximize person-environment (or person-role) fit.
CONCLUSION
What makes a person unique is not just their global patterns of thinking,
feeling, and behavior but also the pattern of responses to external triggers in
theireveryday life. To know a person well requires moving beyond understanding the general tendencies and learning what “pushes their buttons.”
New tools provide a way to quantify fluctuations in thoughts, feelings, and
behavior with unprecedented detail and precision. Social scientists now have
the opportunity to study life as it is actually lived at the individual level in
order to better understand how people differ from one another. Examining
personality at this dynamic level will help move our field forward to a more
fine-grained and comprehensive understanding of personality. It is an exciting time to be a social-personality psychologist.
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Miller, G. (2012). The smartphone psychology manifesto. Perspectives on Psychological
Science, 7(3), 221–237.
Mischel, W. (1973). Toward a cognitive social learning reconceptualization of personality. Psychological Review, 80(4), 252–283.
Mischel, W. (2004). Toward an integrative science of the person. Annual Review of
Psychology, 55, 1–22.
Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality:
Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review, 102(2), 246–268.
Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1998). Reconciling processing dynamics and personality
dispositions. Annual Review of Psychology, 49(1), 229–258.
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Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1999). Integrating dispositions and processing dynamics
within a unified theory of personality: The cognitive-affective personality system.
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Guilford Press.
Moos, R. H. (1973). Conceptualizations of human environments. American Psychologist, 28(8), 652–665.
Ozer, D. J., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2006). Personality and the prediction of consequential outcomes. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 401–421.
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asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2),
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ourselves. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(2), 104–108.
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Carlson, E. N., Vazire, S., & Oltmanns, T. F. (2013). Self-Other knowledge asymmetries in personality pathology. Journal of Personality, 81(2), 155–170.
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for studying daily life (pp. 62–86). New York, NY: Guilford.
ROBERT WILSON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Robert Wilson is a graduate student in Psychology at the University of
California, Davis. His research examines patterns in how people fluctuate
around their average individual differences. The ways in which we vary
in our daily lives can be a result of idiosyncratic responses to situations
and other external forces. He uses a multimethod approach (self-reports,
informant-reports, experience sampling, EAR audio recordings, Facebook behavioral codings) to examine how our personalities vary across
environmental and social situations. He also examines the amount of
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
13
self-awareness people generally have about their personality and behavioral
patterns.
SIMINE VAZIRE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Simine Vazire is associate professor of psychology at the University of
California, Davis. She is the director of the Personality and Self-Knowledge
laboratory. Her research examines how well people know their own personality. She studies questions such as: Why do close others sometimes
know us better than we know ourselves? What are the consequences of
lacking self-knowledge? How can self-knowledge be improved? How are
personality and social relationships related to well-being? Her research is
funded by the National Science Foundation.
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Taking Personality to the Next Level:
What Does It Mean to Know
a Person?
ROBERT WILSON and SIMINE VAZIRE
Abstract
What does it mean to know a person? In his famous article, McAdams (1995)
addresses this question from the perspective of personality psychology and
concludes that personality traits are “the psychology of the stranger.” To really
know someone, you need to know more than just how they typically think, feel,
and behave on average (a common definition of traits). You need to know how
their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors change depending on their role and context,
why those fluctuations occur (the underlying motives and causes of those patterns),
and how they make sense of their own patterns over time (their life narrative).
In this essay, we argue that although there has been little empirical work on
within-person fluctuations in personality, the time is ripe to examine these patterns.
New technology has made it possible to quantify momentary thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors, and to track the contextual factors that underlie these fluctuations
(i.e., “personality signatures”). By capturing individual differences at this dynamic
level, we can gain a better understanding of how people differ from one another.
This will also open the door to new research questions, such as investigating the
amount of insight people have into their own and others’ personality signatures.
“We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.”
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
INTRODUCTION
PERSONALITY TRAITS AND PERSONALITY STATES
When we describe what people are like, we often begin by talking about their
general tendencies. For example, we might describe Sally as an agreeable
person and Tricia as a disagreeable person. These trait descriptions allow
us to easily describe Sally and Tricia’s past behavior and anticipate their
future behavior. Furthermore, we can use these broad individual differences
to predict a wide range of outcomes such as occupational success and divorce
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
(Barrick & Mount, 1991; Karney & Bradbury, 1995; Ozer & Benet-Martinez,
2006).
However, people vary quite a bit around these average tendencies. Sally
may be agreeable most of the time, but surely she has moments when she
interrupts others or acts unkind. Although these fluctuations are usually
treated as noise in personality trait research, they are themselves an individual difference. Indeed, we can think of Sally’s fluctuations on agreeableness
as a part of her personality. Perhaps Sally is typically agreeable but fluctuates a lot, whereas Tricia is consistently disagreeable. Focusing on the
within-person fluctuations in personality states does not contradict the fact
that there are also stable individual differences at the trait level.
Fleeson (2001, 2004, 2007) has proposed a very elegant way of conceptualizing personality traits and states in a single model (Figure 1). According
to Fleeson’s density distribution approach to personality, personality traits
(e.g., Sally and Tricia’s average levels of agreeableness) are summaries of
each person’s more nuanced density distribution of states. That is, Sally’s
trait level of agreeableness (high) is the mean of her state agreeableness. But
the full distribution of Sally’s states gives us a much richer picture of Sally’s
personality—we can see that her personality states range all the way from
low agreeableness to high agreeableness (although the latter state is much
more common than the former for Sally). In contrast, Tricia’s trait level of
agreeableness (low) is basically all we need to know to discern what she
is like on agreeableness—she does not fluctuate much around her typical,
pretty disagreeable state.
Fleeson’s empirical work shows that most people exhibit almost all levels
of a given trait at some point during a typical week. Most of us have
0.5
Sally
Tricia
% of time
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
1
Low
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Level of agreeableness
Figure 1 Personality as a density distribution of states.
10
High
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
3
some agreeable moments and some disagreeable moments. However, there
are very robust individual differences in our average states—some of us
consistently experience agreeable states much more often than disagreeable
states, and others show the opposite pattern. Moreover, these individual
differences in average states are stable from week to week—someone who
experiences mostly agreeable states 1 week is likely to do so the next week.
The same goes for other traits (e.g., extraversion, neuroticism, etc.).
By conceptualizing personality traits as density distributions of states, we
can get closer to McAdams’s ideal of knowing not just what a person is like
on average but also understanding the dynamic ways in which they fluctuate
over time and across situations. Knowing the shape of a person’s distribution
of personality states provides more nuance than just knowing their trait level,
and provides the opportunity for even further understanding. Specifically,
once we know how much people fluctuate around their global traits, we can
investigate the causes of those fluctuations.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
PERSONALITY SIGNATURES
The brute fact that Sally is sometimes very agreeable and at other (rare) times
quite disagreeable is valuable information about Sally’s personality in itself.
However, it raises other questions. For example, what causes Sally to vary
on agreeableness? Can we predict these fluctuations based on Sally’s role,
her mood, or her environment? These are the kinds of questions that motivated Mischel and Shoda to develop the Cognitive Affective Personality System (CAPS) model of personality (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). In CAPS, Sally’s
unique pattern of cause and effect is her “if … then” contingency, or her personality signature.
This model takes us another level deeper in our understanding of personality. The goal is not just to describe how much people’s personality states
fluctuate, but to explain those fluctuations. Some of the fluctuations may be
caused by similar triggers for most people. For example, most people are
probably more agreeable when they are with people they like compared to
when they are with people they do not like. To the extent that a person’s
“if … then” contingencies are driven by universal triggers, that does not
really give us much information about how people differ from one another.
However, some personality triggers are probably idiosyncratic. Perhaps
Sally is more agreeable around people she knows well, whereas Tricia is
more agreeable (to the extent that she is ever agreeable) around strangers.
These unique “if … then” contingencies are what constitute a person’s
unique personality signature.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
According to the CAPS model, the influence of external triggers on personality states is mediated by cognitive and affective processes. That is, Sally’s
cognitive and affective reaction to strangers (vs close others) is what explains
her drop in agreeableness. Thus, the entire dynamic system, from external
triggers to mental processes to behavior, is what constitutes a person’s personality. As such, to fully understand a person, you need to understand not
just their global traits and their density distribution of states but also the triggers that predict their fluctuations and the cognitive and affective processes
that explain these patterns. This idea is not unique to CAPS. In addition to
McAdams, many other personality theorists have argued that understanding people’s idiosyncratic reactions to different situations is fundamental to
capturing their personality (Allport, 1937; Lewin, 1936; Magnusson & Endler,
1977).
EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
So far, most of the work on personality signatures has been theoretical
(Allport, 1937; McAdams, 1995; Mischel, 1973, 2004; Mischel & Shoda, 1995,
1998, 1999). There is very little empirical work examining personality beyond
global traits (cf., Fournier, Moskowitz, & Zuroff, 2008; Shoda, Mischel, &
Wright, 1994). Fleeson has pushed the field into new territory by documenting that most people vary quite a bit around their average states (i.e.,
traits), and that this within-person variation is itself a fundamental aspect
of a person’s personality. However, the research has pretty much stopped
there. The next frontier for personality research is to empirically examine the
patterns that may be hidden within these density distributions—personality
signatures. Here, we review some of the fundamental questions that need to
be addressed.
What Are the “Active Ingredients” of Situations That Trigger Fluctuations in Personality States? We know how to measure the “then” part of the “if … then”
contingency—the personality states (although we rely on the assumption
that the taxonomy of personality traits also applies to states, an assumption
that needs further examination; see Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1998). However,
there is very little consensus about the taxonomy of the “if” part of the
contingency—the situational triggers. What are the important dimensions
along which situations differ? Several researchers have suggested taxonomies or catalogues of situational variables that are meant to capture the
“psychologically active ingredients” of situations—the factors that affect
how people think, feel, and behave (e.g., Funder, Furr, & Colvin, 2000; Moos,
1973; Saucier, Bel-Bahar, & Fernandez, 2007). This is a good start, but more
exploratory research needs to be done, including research combining the
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
5
“if” and “then” halves of the personality signature, to identify which aspects
of situations can predict the variance in people’s personality states. This is
the first step in measuring personality signatures.
Do Most People Have Idiosyncratic Personality Signatures? Once we identify
situational triggers that explain fluctuations in state personality, we can
examine the extent to which these triggers are idiosyncratic or universal.
Are Sally’s fluctuations in agreeableness caused by the same triggers as
Tricia’s and everyone else’s? Fleeson’s results cannot directly speak to
this—even though most people vary quite a bit around their average states,
it is still possible that the same triggers account for the variance in each
person’s states. Many personality theorists firmly believe that this is not the
case—that Sally’s fluctuations are caused by different triggers (and different
cognitive and affective reactions to triggers) than are Tricia’s fluctuations.
This intuition is central to all idiographic approaches to personality, including McAdams’. It is almost an article of faith in personality theory that you
cannot fully know a person without understanding her unique personality
signatures Thus, the next step for personality research in this area is to
empirically measure the idiosyncrasies of personality signatures.
What Processes Mediate the Effect of Triggers on Personality States? Once we
can identify people’s unique personality signatures, the next step in understanding the person is delineating the cognitive and affective processes that
explain how the situational triggers produce variations in thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors. This step involves going from simply describing people’s
patterns (e.g., Sally is less agreeable around strangers than around friends)
to explaining them (e.g., Sally feels anxious around strangers, which causes
her to act disagreeable). One empirical example of this type of research is
Downey’s work on rejection sensitivity (Downey & Feldman, 1996; Downey,
Freitas, Michaelis, & Khouri, 1998; Downey, Mougios, Ayduk, London, &
Shoda, 2004). These studies indicate that people high in rejection sensitivity
are more likely to interpret ambiguous information (e.g., a partner leaving
the experiment) as rejection and this cognitive interpretation leads to the
self-fulfilling prophecy, where rejection sensitivity ultimately leads to unsatisfying romantic relationships and dissolution (Downey & Feldman, 1996;
Downey et al., 1998). This is an example of moderated mediation, where the
trigger (i.e., ambiguous partner behavior) causes people high in rejection
sensitivity (i.e., moderator) to engage in the self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e.,
moderated mediator), which leads to negative relationship outcomes. More
research is needed to identify other such dynamic within-person processes
that account for individual differences in personality signatures. Ultimately,
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
this research would help us not only to predict when people will fluctuate
from their global traits but also to understand why they do so.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES
One of the main reasons that little empirical research has been conducted on
personality signatures is that there are important methodological obstacles
to such research. Idiographic approaches to personality require extensive
repeated measurements in order to obtain enough power to investigate
within-person processes. Furthermore, to study personality signatures, it
is necessary to measure both situational variables (i.e., potential triggers)
and personality states over time. In addition, people may not be consciously
aware of their triggers, their personality states, or both, and thus ideally
these would be measured both subjectively and objectively. Finally, these
variables should be measured in people’s natural environments in order to
have the best chance of capturing ecologically valid assessments of people’s
patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving in response to the triggers they
encounter in their daily lives. Fortunately, new technological developments
make it easier and cheaper than ever to collect such data. Here, we describe
several methods that can be used to achieve these goals, and we give an
example of one of our ongoing studies that implements these methods
(Vazire et al., 2014).
Daily Life Studies: Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). Daily life studies
have been around for over 100 years and come under a variety of names such
as diary methods, experience sampling methods (ESMs), ambulatory assessment, and ecological momentary assessment (EMA). The common theme is
that these methods are conducted outside of the laboratory in approximately
real time, focus on systematically measuring the behavior, perceptions, environment, and/or physiology of participants, and are assessed on repeated
occasions (Mehl & Conner, 2012). These methods provide remarkably rich
information about people but historically they have been very difficult to
implement (for a review, see Wilhelm, Perrez, & Pawlik, 2012). Fortunately,
the proliferation of smartphones and expansion of Internet access has made
the collection of daily life data much easier (see discussion in Miller, 2012).
For example, it is now feasible for researchers to conduct an EMA study
by writing a web questionnaire that can be accessed from any smartphone
or Internet-connected device. In a modern EMA design, participants can be
prompted by text or e-mail to log into a web questionnaire and complete a
report about their thoughts, feelings, behavior, and/or situation. It is possible
to prompt participants several times per day for several days or weeks and
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
7
ask them to give “status updates” of both situational variables (e.g., Did you
like the people you were with? Was it a familiar situation?) and personality
states (e.g., Did you act extraverted? Did you feel calm?).
In our ongoing study, over 400 college student participants have completed
EMA reports up to four times per day for 2 weeks. Our questionnaire asks
participants to report on their mood (11 items, e.g., “happy,” “lonely”), personality states (10 items, e.g., “rude,” “reliable”) and situation (13 items, e.g.,
“how much did you like the people you were with?,” “how deep/substantive
was the conversation?”). We enter participants into a lottery for each survey
they complete (which costs us about 22 cents per completed survey). Our
average response rate has been 52%, with 75% of participants completing at
least 15 of 56 surveys (M = 29.4, SD = 15.2).
Daily Life Studies: Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR). EMA provides valuable information about subjective experiences but this method is hampered
by the limitations inherent in any self-report measure, such as blind spots in
self-knowledge and consistency motivations (Paulhus & Vazire, 2007; Vazire,
2010). There is also a concern that self-reports of certain constructs (e.g., depth
of conversation) are so subjective that between-person comparisons cannot
be trusted without some form of external corroboration. Fortunately, technological advances are making it possible to passively collect a rich trove of
information about situations and behaviors that can act as a validation check
for EMA and potentially add complimentary information about if-then triggers not captured by self-reports.
For example, our ongoing study incorporates the electronically activated
recorder (EAR), which is an iPhone- or iPod-based application designed to
record brief sound snippets from participants’ natural environment as they
go about their day. We ask our participants to clip an iPod Touch with the
EAR software to the outside of their clothing during the first week of the
EMA portion of the study. The EAR is programmed to record 30-s audio files
every 9.5 min, giving us over 700 audio files per participant. One benefit of
the EAR recordings is that they can be coded and recoded as many times
as desired. There is no established taxonomy of situations and the ability to
capture behavior broadly is highly desirable because the same audio files can
be used to test a range of behaviors depending on the hypothesis of interest.
Our team of research assistants is currently coding sound files on items that
parallel the EMA variables (e.g., personality states, depth of conversation) as
well as other variables that are unique to the EAR data (e.g., coding specific
behaviors such as laughing, apologizing, bragging). Taken together, the EAR
codings and EMA ratings gives us a multimethod repeated measures design
that is ideal for assessing common if-then personality triggers and distinctive
personality signatures.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
What are the most important questions that remain to be answered? One aim
of our current study is to examine the average within-person relationships
among the situation variables and the personality states. That is, on average, what do personality signatures look like for each situation–personality
state combination? For example, on average, are people happier when they
are having deeper conversations? The next aim is to examine individual differences around this average within-person slope. That is, are there idiosyncratic variations in these personality signatures? For example, is happiness
more contingent on depth of conversation for some people than others? From
there, we can examine moderators (e.g., which people show a stronger relationship between depth of conversation and happiness?) and mediators (e.g.,
is the association between depth of conversation and happiness accounted
for by self-disclosure?). This allows us to predict who will have what personality signatures (moderators) and understand what internal processes might
explain these patterns (mediators).
We hope this project will lay the groundwork for assessing people’s
personality signatures, and that these methods can then be used to study
new basic and applied research questions. Here, we give a few examples of
research questions that we will be able to tackle once these methods have
been validated.
SELF- AND OTHER-KNOWLEDGE OF PERSONALITY SIGNATURES
A fundamental question that cuts across all subdisciplines of psychology
is how well do people know themselves (Vazire & Carlson, 2011; Vazire
& Wilson, 2012; Wilson, 2009). In the realm of personality, we now have
quite strong evidence that people have some insight into their global
traits, but also have important blind spots in this arena (Carlson, Vazire,
& Oltmanns, 2013; Vazire, 2010). However, very little is known about how
much self-knowledge people have about the dynamic aspects of their
personality. Do people know how much their personality states fluctuate?
Do they know the causes of those fluctuations? That is, do they know
their personality signatures? McAdams argues that to really know another
person, we must understand them at this dynamic level. The same can be
said of self-knowledge: for a person to really know herself would mean for
her to know not only how she is on average but also when and why she
deviates from her typical personality profile.
One intriguing possibility is that self- and other-knowledge of personality
signatures may be asymmetrical. The research on self- and other-knowledge
of global personality traits suggests that there are some traits the self can
judge more accurately than can close others, and some traits that close others
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
9
can see accurately but the self cannot. The same might be true of personality
signatures. For example, people might have good self-insight into what triggers their fluctuations in neuroticism, but close others may be better at identifying the factors that trigger fluctuations in agreeableness (because agreeableness is more observable to others and perhaps less salient to the self).
Identifying the bright spots and blind spots in self- and other-knowledge of
personality signatures can help us understand the process of self-perception
and the function that self-insight and self-deception might be serving in people’s everyday lives.
Moreover, once we know what aspects of their personality signatures people tend to be unaware of, we can develop interventions to try to improve
self-knowledge in these areas. For example, if people tend to be unaware of
their idiosyncratic triggers for agreeableness, giving them feedback may help
them select the situations that bring out their desired levels of agreeableness.
To the extent that we can identify the mediators that explain why these triggers cause fluctuations in personality states, we may even be able to intervene
in that process and help people break maladaptive patterns.
HOW DOES PERSONALITY INFLUENCE THE SELECTION OF SITUATIONS?
So far we have discussed environmental triggers as if they are independent
drivers of personality fluctuations, but people actively navigate their world
and personality likely plays an important role in the selection of environments. Such an indirect effect of personality may help explain individual
differences in the presence or absence of certain triggers in daily life. For
example, an extrovert may attend more parties, and being at parties is likely
a situational trigger to act more extroverted. Untangling this reciprocal relationship presents exciting new opportunities for understanding dynamic
person-by-situation interactions.
HOW CAN RESEARCH ABOUT PERSONALITY SIGNATURES BE APPLIED TO REAL-WORLD
PROBLEMS?
Another exciting avenue for research on personality signatures is the potential application of this work in real-world contexts. For example, many mental disorders are characterized by unique patterns of fluctuations in moods
or personality states (e.g., bipolar disorder). Developing better techniques for
assessing these patterns will help us understand these disorders better, and
may also help with treatment. For example, the methods described could
be used to identify people’s idiosyncratic triggers for manic or depressive
episodes, and people could be given empirical feedback about their own
unique triggers. The same could be done for other health and mental health
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
problems (e.g., chronic pain, insomnia, social anxiety). This feedback could
then be used to help people select healthier situations or break unhealthy
patterns of “if … then” contingencies.
Similarly, research on personality signatures has the potential to be very
useful in organizational settings. One challenge in organizations is identifying people who will thrive in various kinds of positions (e.g., leadership positions, high stress positions, etc.). For example, research suggests that there
are important individual differences in how people respond to high status
positions and winning verses losing (Mehta, Jones, & Josephs, 2008). Specifically, people with high testosterone levels who lose in a competition are less
likely to want to compete a second time but more likely to want to compete
if they win. On the other hand, winners and losers with low testosterone
do not differ in their willingness to compete a second time. This is an excellent example of how understanding people’s personality signatures can help
predict context-specific behavior. Ultimately, this kind of research could help
people make better choices for themselves and their organizations, and maximize person-environment (or person-role) fit.
CONCLUSION
What makes a person unique is not just their global patterns of thinking,
feeling, and behavior but also the pattern of responses to external triggers in
theireveryday life. To know a person well requires moving beyond understanding the general tendencies and learning what “pushes their buttons.”
New tools provide a way to quantify fluctuations in thoughts, feelings, and
behavior with unprecedented detail and precision. Social scientists now have
the opportunity to study life as it is actually lived at the individual level in
order to better understand how people differ from one another. Examining
personality at this dynamic level will help move our field forward to a more
fine-grained and comprehensive understanding of personality. It is an exciting time to be a social-personality psychologist.
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ROBERT WILSON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Robert Wilson is a graduate student in Psychology at the University of
California, Davis. His research examines patterns in how people fluctuate
around their average individual differences. The ways in which we vary
in our daily lives can be a result of idiosyncratic responses to situations
and other external forces. He uses a multimethod approach (self-reports,
informant-reports, experience sampling, EAR audio recordings, Facebook behavioral codings) to examine how our personalities vary across
environmental and social situations. He also examines the amount of
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
13
self-awareness people generally have about their personality and behavioral
patterns.
SIMINE VAZIRE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Simine Vazire is associate professor of psychology at the University of
California, Davis. She is the director of the Personality and Self-Knowledge
laboratory. Her research examines how well people know their own personality. She studies questions such as: Why do close others sometimes
know us better than we know ourselves? What are the consequences of
lacking self-knowledge? How can self-knowledge be improved? How are
personality and social relationships related to well-being? Her research is
funded by the National Science Foundation.
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