Person-Situation Interactions John F. Rauthmann

Rauthmann – Person-Situation Interactions

Person-Situation Interactions

John F. Rauthmann Wake Forest University [email protected]

Accepted version (before copy-editing) prepared for The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Personality and Individuals Differences (EPID) Volume II: Research Methods and Assessment Techniques

Word Count: 2318

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Abstract Critique from the person-situation debate that traits are not useful for understanding behavior spawned increased research on interactions between persons, situations, and behaviors. In a statistical sense, person  situation interactions represent how traits moderate situation effects and how situations moderate trait effects. In a conceptual sense, person-situation transactions concern how and why people with certain trait levels or genotypes maintain, construe, evoke, select, modify, and create certain situations or environments.

Keywords: person  situation interaction, situations, person-situation transaction, personsituation debate, interactional psychology


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Person-Situation Interactions Personality is defined via general tendencies of affect, behavior, cognition, and desire, also referred to as traits. Thus, traits are fairly abstract and removed from specific mental processes or behavior occurring in specific situations, also referred to as states. Nonetheless, traits are expected to predict momentary states, and states should show some evidence of consistency across different situations or time if an underlying stability-generating personality system is to be inferred. States, as manifestations of personality traits, always take place in specific situations (Fleeson & Jayawickreme, 2015), so we need to understand how personality and situations are linked. For example, Funder (2006) refers to a “personality triad” consisting of persons, behavior (including mental processes), and situations which are interwoven in complex ways. Any member of this triad could then be understood in terms of the other members. This is inspired by Lewin’s formula B = f(P, E) where momentary behavior B is a function of the momentary mental state of the person P and his/her actual environment E. Lewin understood the person and environment to be part of a common “field” so that they would need to be studied jointly. Later, Funder (2006) reconceptualized this Lewinian notion to B = f(P, S) where behavior is a joint function of the person P and the situation S. He also concluded that P = f(S, B) and S = f(P, B) must hold if true interactions among P, B, and S are captured. However, understanding how persons – with their personality traits – and situations contribute to behavior and, more generally, how the variables of this personality triad are interrelated has been a contentious issue of personality and social psychology, sparking the person-situation debate. This debate broadly revolved around the question whether personality or situations represent the dominant predictors of behavior. One answer was that personality and situations interacted with each other – that is, to explain and understand behavior, we should not study persons and situations separately but attend to their conjoint effects (i.e., interactions). Later, psychologists sought to understand which mechanisms and processes constitute such person-situation interaction effects.


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The Person-Situation Debate What came to be known as the person-situation debate revolved around several issues that were supposedly shortcomings of personality and traits as concepts of scientific inquiry (see Fleeson & Noftle, 2009 for an overview). First, the moment-to-moment consistency of behavior has been deemed too low to warrant the concept of a stable trait (e.g., Hartshorne & May, 1928). Thus, the reasoning went that situations determine behavior. Second, traits did not seem to predict behavior all too well (e.g., Mischel, 1968). Thus, the concept of “personality” was declared empty and useless. To defend the concepts of personality and traits, several strands of research showed that people are in many ways remarkably consistent and that traits exist, are meaningful, and can be deemed consequential for people’s lives (Kenrick & Funder, 1988). Among the responses to the person-situation debate were lines of research that strived to combine the person and the situation – that is, person-situation interactions – because neither on their own would be sufficient to explain, predict, and understand behavior. The first line, referred to as interactional psychology, was devoted to a statistical understanding of a person  situation interaction effect beyond main effects of persons and situations. The second line, here referred to as person-situation transaction research, emphasizes what it conceptually means if a person and a situation “interact”. These two lines explicitly address the person-situation debate by acknowledging that both person and situation variables are important, but that they may be entangled in complex ways. Interactional Psychology Most of psychology treated the Lewinian formula as if behavior were an additive function of person and environment variables. This would mean that behavior is independently predicted by traits and situations to some extent. It is this notion of personsituation independence that creates the possibility to pit the magnitude of person and situation


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effects against each other. In contrast, Magnusson and Endler introduced an interactional psychology (Endler & Magnusson, 1976) with the main tenet that behavior is a multiplicative function of the interaction between traits and situations. Statistically, a significant and substantial interaction effect (beyond the main effects of traits and situations) would mean that effects of traits depend on situations or, vice versa, that effects of situations depend on traits: traits moderate situation effects, and situations moderate trait effects. Conceptually, this means that certain people respond to certain situations differently than to others (or that certain situations elicit for certain people different responses than for others). Early research interpreted interactions more in statistical terms as interactions in an ANOVA-type design with effects of persons, situations, and person  situation interactions. A concrete application is Endler and Hunt’s (1966) S-R inventory: Using the example of anxiety, persons report how anxiety-inducing certain situations or stimuli S are and also record how likely or intense their anxious reactions or responses R to them would be. This creates a data structure where variance in anxious reactions can stem from the two main effects of persons (= individual differences in generally responding anxiously) and situations (= differences between situations in their general tendency to evoke anxious reactions) as well as the two-way interaction of person  situation (= unique anxious reactions of specific persons to specific situations, beyond main effects). Typical results of such S-R inventories is that the variance of the person  situation interaction is quite sizable. Other strands of research have also attended to person  situation interactions, such as educational (aptitude-by-treatment interactions: ATI), applied (Trait Activation Theory: TAT), clinical (diathesis-stress models), and behavior genetic literatures (gene-environment interactions). Particularly TAT may be seen as a modern spawn of interactional psychology because it posits that certain traits become activated only under certain situations which corresponds to a significant interaction effect.


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Person-Situation Transactions The problem with the statistical view of person  situation interactions is that (a) B = f(P, E) cannot capture all the causal relations between persons, situations, and behavior and (b) the interaction term is conceptually blurry because it is all-to-often not clear what it means. The traditional ANOVA-design models behavior as a dependent variable to be predicted from person and situation variables as independent variables. This could be seen as a one-sided approach because, as intended by Lewin, there are complex causal relations between persons, situations, and behavior. For example, Bandura captured them in his concept of causal or reciprocal determinism where persons, situations, and behaviors influence each other bidirectionally in all cases. More recent advances in personality psychology embody these principles, such as work on personality signatures and if-then patterns (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). Such approaches directly incorporate situations into the concept of a trait. Thus, a trait already denotes an interaction between the person and the situation because it is defined as an intra-individually stable pattern of “IF Situation X, THEN Response Y”. However, these approaches still do not address what exactly the interaction is and how it comes to be (i.e., how and why certain people are in certain situations and what they do to them). In other words, the mutual influence between persons and situations needs to be better understood. On a grand scale, there can be gene-environment transactions (Plomin et al., 1977). Gene-environment correlations can be passive (via parents an inherited genotype is correlated with the environment one is born into), evocative/reactive (genotype is correlated with certain reactions from others), and active (genotype is correlated with choosing and shaping certain environments). In contrast, gene-environment interactions occur when environmental effects on an outcome (e.g., delinquency) depend on the genotype and vice versa. Other researchers have focused on smaller scales: what people do to situations in their everyday lives (Ickes et al., 1997), which have been referred to as situation management


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strategies (Rauthmann & Sherman, 2016). Such strategies include maintenance (maintaining the situation as is), construal (uniquely perceiving or cognitively restructuring mental representations of the situation), evocation (usually unwillingly eliciting responses from others), selection (seeking or shunning certain situations), modification (actively changing an existing situation into something else), and creation (pro-actively generating an entirely new situation). The repeated utilization of such strategies may result in long-term developmental regulation and personality development (Caspi et al., 2005). To distinguish all of these mechanisms from statistical person  situation interactions, they are also referred to as person-situation transactions (Rauthmann & Sherman, 2016). Summary: Meanings of “Person-Situation Interaction” As summarized elsewhere (Lilienfeld et al., 2015; Olweus, 1977), a “person-situation interaction” can mean very different things, such as most commonly: (a) persons and situations both shape behavior; (b) relations between persons and situations are bidirectional (such that persons shape situations and situations shape persons); (c) persons and situations are interwoven in complex ways (which means that their effects on behavior cannot be separated properly); and (d) statistical effects of person variables depend on (i.e., are moderated by) situation variables and vice versa in the prediction of an outcome variable. Researchers should be aware of these meanings and ideally specify what exactly they mean. Methodological-Statistical Considerations To examine person  situation interactions or person-situation transactions, several methodological and statistical issues need to be taken into account. First, tracking personsituation transactions in the laboratory and in daily life requires intensive longitudinal data designs, such as experience sampling or ambulatory assessment. Second, large sample sizes are needed to reliably estimate robust person  situation interaction effects which can be relatively small in daily life (Sherman et al., 2015). Third, inherent in most research is the assumption that relations between persons and situations are linear. However, this need not be


the case as effects can also be curvilinear so that non-linear interactions occur (see Schmitt et al., 2013). Lastly, the representativeness and/or comprehensiveness of persons, traits, situations, and behaviors sampled can influence whether and which interactions occur. Thus, great care must be taken to select appropriate variables and populations.

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SEE ALSO: wbepid0105 wbepid0253 wbepid0118 wbepid0073

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References Caspi, A., Roberts, B. W., & Shiner, R. L. (2005). Personality development: Stability and change. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 453–484. Endler, N. S., & Hunt, J. M. (1966). Sources of behavioral variance as measured by the S-R Inventory of Anxiousness. Psychological Bulletin, 65, 336-346. Endler, N. S., & Magnusson, D. (1976). Toward an interactional psychology of personality. Psychological Bulletin, 83, 956-974. Fleeson, W., & Jayawickreme, E. (2015). Whole trait theory. Journal of Research in Personality, 56, 82-92. Funder, D.C. (2006). Towards a resolution of the personality triad: Persons, situations and behaviors. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 21-34. Fleeson, W., & Noftle, E. E. (2009). In favor of the synthetic resolution to the personsituation debate. Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 150-154. Hartshorne, H., & May, M. A. (1928). Studies in deceit. New York: Macmillan Co. Ickes, W., Snyder, M., & Garcia, S. (1997). Personality influence on the choice of situations. In R. Hogan, J. Johnson, & S. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology (pp. 165-195). New York: Academic Press. Kenrick, D.T., & Funder, D.C. (1988). Profiting from controversy: Lessons from the personsituation debate. American Psychologist, 43, 23-34. Lilienfeld, S.O, Sauvigné, K.C., Lynn, S.J., Cautin, R.L., Latzman, R.D., & Waldman, I.D. (2015). Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases. Frontiers in Psycholology, 6:1100. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01100 Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. New York: Wiley. Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review, 102, 246-268. Plomin, R., DeFries, J. C., & Loehlin, J. C. (1977). Genotype-environment interaction and correlation in the analysis of human behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 84, 309-322. Olweus, D. (1977). A critical analysis of the modern interactionist position. In D. Magnusson and N. S. Endler (Eds.), Personality at the Crossroads: Current Issues in Interactional Psychology (pp. 221-233), New York: Wiley. Rauthmann, J. F., & Sherman, R. A. (2016). Situation change: Stability and change of situation variables between and within persons. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1938. Schmitt, M., Gollwitzer, M., Baumert, A., Blum, G., Geschwendner, T., Hofmann, W. & Rothmund, T. (2013). Proposal of a nonlinear interaction of person and situation (NIPS) model. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 499. Sherman, R. A., Rauthmann, J. F., Brown, N. A., Serfass, D. S., & Jones, A. B. (2015). The independent effects of personality and situations on real-time expressions of behavior and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109, 872-888.


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Further Readings Endler, N. S., & Magnusson, D. (Eds.). (1976). Interactional psychology and personality. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Funder, D. C. (2008). Persons, situations and person-situation interactions. In O.P. John, R. Robins & L. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of Personality (3rd Ed.), pp. 568-580. New York: Guilford. Swann, W. B., Jr. & Seyle, C. (2005). Personality psychology’s comeback and its emerging symbiosis with social psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 155165.


Author Biography John Rauthmann currently works as an assistant professor at the Wake Forest University. Prior to that appointment he worked in the personality psychology unit at the HumboldtUniversity of Berlin in Germany, where he also received his PhD in 2014. His interests include, but are not limited to, personality structure and processes; psychological situations; and person-situation transactions.

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