Are personality traits contextualised? Effects of situational characteristics on the manifestation of trait expressions

Abstract

Personality traits are the main currency of the field of personality psychology. However, historically there has been much confusion concerning the conceptualization of traits in relation to context, which remains unclear to date. Some personality psychologists have proposed that traits are internal and decontextualized dispositions that account for consistency in behaviour and experience across time and situations, whereas others have argued that traits are patterns of behaviour and experience that are contextualized and require appropriate eliciting stimuli for manifestation. Although there is a long history of research on the interplay of traits and situations, the contextualized view has..