Variability in Personality Expression Across Contexts: A Social Network Approach

Individual differences and personality traits across situations

BACKGROUND

According to the Big Five theory, personality can be classified into five traits (i.e., extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness), and past research showed that situations impact personality. In the present study, (1) we measured which of these five personality traits changed according to different situations and (2) tested whether the across-situation variability (ASV; i.e., a continuous variable showing how much people change their personality traits according to situations) was significantly connected with specific personality domains, revealing a potential marker of personality disturbance.

PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE

We recruited 80 participants (40 women) to complete the five situation-version (family, work, friends, romantic partner, and hobbies/leisure) of the Big Five Inventory to measure whether personality traits significantly changed across these situations. In addition, we ran a network analysis to reveal how the ASV is related to personality traits.

RESULTS

The findings showed that all traits significantly changed across the situations, except openness, which remained stable. The network analysis revealed that the ASV variable was especially connected with conscientiousness (in romantic partner and family situations).

CONCLUSIONS

Most personality traits were flexible, showing how important it is to consider the role of situations in the study of personality. Openness appeared to be particularly stable and understanding its nature represents a challenge for future studies. Finally, the network analysis demonstrated that the ASV shows specific connections with conscientiousness and might be a potential psychopathology marker.

Personality traits, self-efficacy, and friendship establishment: Group characteristics and network clustering of college students' friendships

Friendship establishment was analyzed using constructs from social cognitive theory (self-efficacy and personality traits) and social network theory (reciprocity and triad closure). In further studies, we investigated the effect of personality traits, interpersonal self-efficacy, and network structure on the establishment of friendships. In this study, we used social network analysis method and exponential random graph model (ERGM). The following findings are reported. First, the friendship network of college students had small group characteristics, and the formation of this small group was more based on personality complementarity than similarity. The homogeneity hypothesis of personality was not tenable. Secondly, individuals with dominance or influence personality traits and high interpersonal self-efficacy were more likely to be in the center of the friendship network. Furthermore, personality traits and interpersonal self-efficacy may have interactive effects on the formation of friendship networks. Popularity and activity effects existed in friendship networks, but the reciprocal relationship based on personality traits was not verified. The balance structure can easily explain the agglomeration of friendships in a small range, indicating that small groups of friendships prefer a two-way circular close relationship. Finally, the formation of a friendship network includes the comprehensive process of individual characteristics and endogenous tie formation, which helps us to understand the social population structure and its process over a wider range.

The relational regulation of within-person variation in personality expression

There is renewed interest in how people express different levels of personality across situations or times (within-person variation). However, within-person studies typically do not focus on the specific relationship partners that are linked to the expression of personality. To remedy this, we applied relational regulation theory (RRT) to the study of within-person variation. RRT states that specific relationship partners are important social contexts for understanding within-person variation and describes how people regulate their affect, action and thought through interacting with or thinking about specific partners. In three studies of students (Ns = 136, 349, 110), participants rated their levels of six- or five-factor personality dimensions when with or thinking about different relationship partners. Personality expression was strongly consistent across partners. Yet, in each study, there were also strong effects whereby more extraversion, agreeableness and openness were expressed when with some partners but not others. In each study, when a recipient saw a relationship as supportive, the recipient expressed more extraversion, agreeableness, and openness. Effects for emotionality and conscientiousness were less consistent. Theoretical implications for RRT and within-person variation in personality were discussed.

A survey of Big Data dimensions vs Social Networks analysis

The pervasive diffusion of Social Networks (SN) produced an unprecedented amount of heterogeneous data. Thus, traditional approaches quickly became unpractical for real life applications due their intrinsic properties: large amount of user-generated data (text, video, image and audio), data heterogeneity and high speed generation rate. More in detail, the analysis of user generated data by popular social networks (i.e Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/), Twitter (https://www.twitter.com/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/)) poses quite intriguing challenges for both research and industry communities in the task of analyzing user behavior, user interactions, link evolution, opinion spreading and several other important aspects. This survey will focus on the analyses performed in last two decades on these kind of data w.r.t. the dimensions defined for Big Data paradigm (the so called Big Data 6 V's).

Assessing Personality–Situation Interplay in Personnel Selection: Toward More Integration into Personality Research

Over the years, the personnel selection field has developed methods to assess trait expression in particular situations, but these approaches have evolved mostly outside the field of personality psychology. In this article, I review available personnel selection evidence regarding two such approaches: (i) situational judgement tests that present short scenarios and ask job candidates how they would handle the situations and (ii) assessment centre exercises requiring candidates to display behaviour in specified interactive situations. I describe these approaches and discuss their relations with personality research. I posit that adapting these approaches to personality research creates methodological diversity to address key research themes related to within–person variability, trait–behaviour links, personality disorders, and personality expression and perception. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology