Situational construal is related to personality and gender

Abstract

Using the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ), this study investigates the relationship between personality, gender and individual differences in perceptions (or construals) of four situations experienced by undergraduate participants (N = 205) in their daily lives. Results indicate that while people generally agree about the psychological characteristics of situations, they also have reliably distinctive perceptions that are related to personality and gender. Further, lay judges are fairly accurate in predicting the systematic ways in which personality and gender are related to distinctive perceptions, showing that these relationships align with prior theorizing and with common sense. The small but reliable individual differences in situational construal demonstrated by this research may accumulate into large and consequential effects over time.

Introduction

For some the world is a hostile place where men are evil and dangerous; for others it is a stage for fun and frolic. It may appear as a place to do one’s duty grimly; or a pasture for cultivating friendship and love.

     Gordon Allport (1961, p. 266)

An individual’s perception of his or her social environment has two possible sources: (1) the objective features of the stimulus situation and (2) the psychological attributes of the person who perceives it (Murray, 1938). Therefore, to understand each individual’s distinctive view of the world requires methods to measure the objective features of his or her situation as well as the individual’s personality.

Numerous methods – including self-report, peer-report, and countless inventories – have been developed to assess personality. The measurement of psychologically relevant features of situations lags far behind (Reis, 2008, Wagerman and Funder, 2009). Researchers who otherwise emphasize the “power of the situation” typically neglect to specify the psychologically active ingredients that give situations their power. Only recently have investigators renewed attention to the importance of conceptualizing situations (Reis, 2008) and developing tools for situational assessment (Sherman et al., 2010, Sherman et al., 2012, Wagerman and Funder, 2009).

One reason why researchers may have shied away from investigating situations is that such an endeavor immediately confronts a difficult conceptual question: Where do situations exist: in the objective world or in the eye of the beholder? Many writers have noted that every situation is inevitably filtered through the perceptions of each person who experiences it (Hogan, 2009, Magnusson, 1974, Murray, 1938, Nystedt, 1981, Rauthmann, 2012, Reis, 2008). As Mischel (1977, p. 253) observed, “any given, objective stimulus condition may have a variety of effects, depending on how the individual construes and transforms it” and Bem and Allen (1974, p. 518) went so far as to claim that “the classification of situations…will have to be in terms of the individual’s phenomenology, not the investigator’s.” In other words, these comments imply, situations exist primarily if not only in the eye of the beholder.

While such comments seem reasonable, they can be taken too far. Objective reality exists and matters. The best direct evidence that objective properties of situations matter consists of experimental social psychology’s many demonstrations of experimental manipulations that affect all people in the same way or, at very least, enough people in the same way as to generate statistically significant findings. Indeed, the assumption that objective aspects of situations yield predictable behavioral results is built into every interpretation of a significant mean difference between an experimental and control condition.

An even more serious conceptual problem is that when situations are defined solely by how individuals construe them, the analysis reverts back into the study of personality (Wagerman, 2007). Consider two people playing a game. One is characteristically competitive and the other is not. The first individual might construe the game as involving and motivating and respond with a high level of activity and engagement. The second might construe the game as pointless and respond with behavioral and emotional withdrawal. The differences in these individuals’ behaviors could be explained on the basis of their distinctive perceptions, but in the course of this analysis the situation itself – the actual game – has disappeared! The situation’s objective properties have ceased to be a concern. Instead, analytical focus has returned to differences between individuals, where conventional personality analysis began in the first place.

Defining situations in terms of individual construals also opens the risk of circularity. The first person’s competitive behavior might be “explained” on the basis of his or her perception of the situation as competition-evoking – which is not helpful. If situations are to be deemed important and worthy of study in their own right, they must be separated from the perceptions (and personalities) of the people in them (Block and Block, 1981, Reis, 2008, Sherman et al., 2010).

Thus, any attempt to understand how people perceive their social environment must begin by addressing the question “What are the objective properties of situations?” Such properties could include easily observable facts such as the ambient temperature or the number of other people present. But more psychological properties are both likely to be more behaviorally important and certain to be more difficult to measure. The only method to approach objective assessment of properties such as these is through the time-honored criterion of consensus. For example, if all or almost all observers agree that a situation “contains emotional threats” or is “potentially enjoyable,” these descriptions can for all intents and purposes (except, perhaps, ultimate philosophical ones) be considered “objective” properties of the situation. Throughout the rest of this article, therefore, we shall use the terms “consensual” and “objective” interchangeably.

The availability of objective conceptualizations of situations would make it possible to address two central questions concerning how they are construed: (1) how much and in what ways do two (or more) individuals construe the (objectively) same situation differently? And (2) to what degree and in what ways does an individual’s construal of a situation differ from its objective nature? The first question speaks to Allport, 1937, Allport, 1961 conceptualization of personality influencing different ways individuals perceive and therefore respond to the same situation (see the epigram at the beginning of this article). The second goes to Murray’s (1938) classic distinction between alpha press, the situation as it is, and beta press, the situation as it is perceived. Discrepancies between alpha and beta press, Murray believed, could reflect not just personality but psychological dysfunction.

Despite its long-recognized importance (Allport, 1937, Murray, 1938), situational construal has been surprisingly neglected by empirical research. A few groundbreaking studies have examined particular aspects of situational construal. Research on rejection sensitivity has demonstrated that some individuals interpret ambiguous behaviors from their romantic partners as signs of impending rejection, often with self-fulfilling effects (Downey and Feldman, 1996, Downey et al., 1998). Other studies have examined the propensity of aggressive children to interpret ambiguous stories as including characters with hostile intentions (e.g., Dodge, 1993, Dodge and Frame, 1982). These differences in construal may stem from an increased propensity to organize their memories around hostile themes (Zelli et al., 1996, Zelli et al., 1995). While research like this is valuable we are not aware of studies that have simultaneously addressed the contrast between the situation as perceived and its objective features or assessed situational construal across a range of properties (rather than just one), in a variety of situations that the individual has actually experienced.

The goal of this research is to examine the ways in which personality may be related to distinct perceptions, or construals, of the situations people encounter in their daily lives. Participants completed five lab sessions over five weeks. During the first session, participants provided information about their own personalities. This included measures of some of the most widely researched personality traits: Well-Being, Depression, the Big Five, and Narcissism, among others. During the remaining four lab sessions—spread across four weeks—participants wrote a brief description of what they were doing the previous day at a time specified by the researcher.¹ Typical responses included “I was doing homework,” “I was at home with my friends,” and “I was watching TV.” After writing their brief description, participants rated that situation’s psychological properties using the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ) Version 2.0. Later, research assistants independently read each description and then rated the participant’s situation using the RSQ. The average of the four ratings formed a consensual or “objective” view of the situation’s psychological properties. In data analysis, linear regression partialled these consensual views out of the participant’s ratings, leaving residuals which represent each participant’s distinct view, or construal. Finally, analyses examined the relationships between these construals and relevant personality traits.

The overall research question concerns whether personality—broadly defined—is related to distinctive perceptions of situations. Based on Allport’s (1961) perspective and everyday experience, we expect a positive answer to this general question.

Specifically, Five Factor Theory (McCrae & Costa, 2008) offers grounds for expecting how Big Five personality traits will relate to situation construal. Based on the conventional understanding of the meaning of this trait, persons who are high on Agreeableness should perceive equivalent situations (on average) as more cooperative, less competitive, and less insulting compared to those low on Agreeableness. Persons high on Conscientiousness should perceive their situations as ones in which it is important to do their absolute best, to be perceived as hard-working, and where success is important as compared to those who are lower on Conscientiousness. Persons high on Extraversion should perceive their situations as opportunities to grab the attention of others and to socialize with others as compared to those low on Extraversion. Persons high on Neuroticism should construe their situations to be more anxiety inducing, more negative, and more insulting than those low on Neuroticism. Those high on Openness should perceive their situations to be more aesthetically involving and intellectually stimulating compared to persons low on Openness.

Beyond the Big 5 personality traits, persons who are depressed can be expected to perceive their situations as more negative, limiting, and evocative of self-pity than those who are less depressed (Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961). Persons who are high in well-being should construe their situations to be less stressful as well as more pleasant and enjoyable than persons lower on well-being (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). Finally, persons who are high on Narcissism should construe their situations as opportunities to be the center of attention (Raskin & Terry, 1988), to advance their sexual prowess (Holtzman & Strube, 2010), to express their charm (Back, Schmukle, & Egloff, 2010), and to control others compared to those who are less Narcissistic (Holtzman et al., 2010, Morf and Rhodewalt, 2001).

While these informal predictions – derived both from prior research and from common sense – are useful, an empirical test requires that we quantify our expectations. To do so we gathered lay predictions of how people high on each of these aforementioned traits (e.g., high in Agreeableness, high in Depression) would tend to perceive their situations. These lay predictions allow us to directly quantify the degree to which patterns of predicted construal are related to patterns actually observed in our data (see Section 2).

In addition to the particular ways in which traits relate to the construal of situations, it is also important to consider how large of an effect to expect. For example, if we predict that persons high on Openness should tend to perceive their everyday situations as more aesthetically involving and intellectually stimulating than those lower on Openness, how large of a construal effect is reasonable to expect? To address this question, consider the source of an individual’s perception of his or situation. According to Murray (1938) a perception of a situation stems from both alpha press, the actual objective properties of the situation, and beta press, the individual’s distinctive construal of those properties. The focus of this study is on the degree to which personality is related to beta press.

From a statistical perspective, relationships between personality and distinctive perceptions of situations require (and are limited by) variability in personality and perceptions. Research on person perception (e.g., Funder, 1999, Jussim, 2012, Kenny, 1994) has repeatedly demonstrated that people are generally accurate perceivers of others in their social worlds, which implies that they are likely to be accurate perceivers of their social contexts (i.e., situations) as well. Indeed, in many respects the entire enterprise of experimental social psychology relies on participants similarly and accurately perceiving the experimental manipulations (i.e., situations) they encounter. Notwithstanding occasional claims that individual construals are all-important, people by and large respond to reality as they must (Rauthmann, 2012). Therefore, when decomposing an individual’s perception of a situation into the constituent parts outlined by Murray (1938), the lion’s share of the variance should be accounted for by objective features of the situation, or alpha press, and only a small portion by distinctive construal, or beta press. Thus, it is anticipated that the relationship between personality and one’s distinct perception of a single situation should be small. Still, every individual experiences countless situations every day and, as was noted by Abelson (1985), small effects cumulate over time into important outcomes.