Chapter 7 - Personality Influences on the Choice of Situations

Abstract

This chapter illustrates personality influences on the choice of situations. The choice of situations is an important cause of the temporal stability in individuals' behavior. The idea that people actively choose to be in situations that best “fit” their personalities is hardly a novel concept. In fact, its relevance to the matter of behavioral consistency has long been recognized by personality theorists. Personality theorists have been fairly successful in making conceptual distinctions among person concepts. Once individuals are in their chosen situations, their words and actions are genuine reflections of their personalities, and the fact that they display these behaviors in settings they have specifically chosen ensures a substantial degree of consistency in their behavior. Further, conceptual and methodology issues are highlighted in this chapter. The lack of conceptual work is not the only problem. Another and possibly more serious problem is that most researchers are still committed to the assumptions of mechanistic interactionism and the conventions of traditional empirical methods, such as the laboratory experiment. The obvious challenge is to identify and understand the consistencies in behavior that are expressed through the selection of situations without breaking the rules of conventional empirical investigation.