Persons, situations, and behaviors: consistency and variability of different behaviors in four interpersonal situations.
Understanding how persons, situations, and behaviors contribute to behavioral consistency is a central goal for the science of behavior. The present study focused on dyadic social situations that were created by professional actors who enacted 4 social roles derived from interpersonal theory: dominant, submissive, agreeable, and quarrelsome. A total of 128 behavioral episodes from 32 target participants who each interacted for 5 min with 4 same-sex actors were videotaped. Several behaviors were coded from the videos, and stranger-ratings of targets' personality and behavior in the four different situations were also obtained based on those videos. The results provided novel evidence regarding the cross-situational consistency of different behaviors and allowed the following conclusions: (a) on average, targets were both rank-order and intraindividually consistent; (b) molar behaviors were more rank-order consistent than were micro-level behaviors; (c) interpersonal behavioral tendencies were evident in directly observed behavior, and (d) high Conscientiousness may facilitate interaction with quarrelsome partners.
Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. sointu.leikas@helsinki.fi
Sointu
S
Leikas
Jan-Erik
JE
Lönnqvist
Markku
M
Verkasalo
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D009633:Nonverbal Communication / Q000523:psychology; D010551:Personality / Q000502:physiology*; D010555:Personality Inventory; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011581:Psychological Tests; D012380:Role; D012919:Social Behavior; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult