Personality Self-Representation Change in Circumstances of “Goal — Affordance” Incongruity and Situational Opportunities

The purpose of the current work was to study the influence of incongruence of an individual’s goals and situational affordances on the self-representation in everyday situations. In the course of the study, participants (N = 62) first gave a self-assessment of their personality traits, after which they defined relevant goals in six pairs of situational vignettes on the SAAP scale, then selected adjectives from the list describing their state in situations of congruency (CS) and non-congruency (NCS) with their primary goals. Finally, the valence of self-representation in CS and NCS was determined. The results of the study showed that in all six pairs of compared situations there were changes in goals, from complete or partial replacement of goals to important changes in their significance for the respondents. Multiple regression analysis allowed us to conclude that situational determinants as explanatory variables can better explain the manifestations of agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness and openness in the NCS, compared to stable traits. However, stable traits explain the manifestations of neuroticism in the NCS better than situational characteristics. The results of the study confirm the assumption that changed goals cause the manifestation of traits and states that differ from stable dispositions. The quantitative analysis of adjectives with positive and negative emotional-evaluative meaning showed that in the NCS respondents were 2.57 times more likely to choose attributes with a negative emotional-evaluative meaning compared to the CS, which confirms the hypothesis of the predominance of negative valence of self-representation in the conditions of goal incongruency. The findings indicate that the change in self-representation in the NCS significantly and in the theoretically expected way were associated with a change in goals as a result of change in situational affordances.

Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., Goldberg, L. R. (2004). A hierarchical analysis of 1,710 English personality-descriptive adjectives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87 (5), 707. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.5.707

Baron, R. M., Misovich, S. J. (1993). Dispositional knowing from an ecological perspective. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19 (5), 541–552. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167293195006

Bleidorn, W., Hopwood, Ch. J., Back, M. D., Denissen, J. J. A., Hennecke, M., Hill, P. L., Jokela, M., Kandler, Ch., Lucas, R. E., Orth, U., Roberts, B. W., Wagner, J., Wrzus, C., Zimmermann, J. (2021). Personality trait stability and change. Personality Science, 2, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.6009

Brown, N. A., Neel, R., Sherman, R. A. (2015). Measuring the evolutionarily important goals of situations: Situational affordances for adaptive problems. Evolutionary Psychology, 13 (3), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.6009

Buss, D. M. (2009). How can evolutionary psychology successfully explain personality and individual differences? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4 (4), 359–366.

Cheshire, N., Thomae, H. (1996). Rehabilitation of Self. Consultative Psychology and Psychotherapy, 4 (4), 1–25. (In Russian)

Costa Jr, P. T., McCrae, R. R. (1992). Four ways five factors are basic. Personality and individual differences, 13 (6), 653–665.

Diehl, M., Jacobs, L. M., Hastings, C. T. (2006). Temporal stability and authenticity of self-representations in adulthood. Journal of Adult Development, 13 (1), 10–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-006-9001-4

Diehl, M., Hay, E. L. (2007). Contextualized self‐representations in adulthood. Journal of Personality, 75 (6), 1255–1284. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2007.00475.x

Diekman, A. B., Steinberg, M., Brown, E. R., Belanger, A. L., Clark, E. K. (2017). A goal congruity model of role entry, engagement, and exit: Understanding communal goal processes in STEM gender gaps. Personality and social psychology review, 21 (2), 142–175. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868316642141

Di Sarno, M., Constantini, G., Richetin, J., Preti, E., Perugini, M. (2023). Why are you (un)conscientious? The dynamic interplay of goals, states, and traits in everyday life. Journal of Personality, 91 (4), 977–991. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12701

Fleeson, W. (2007). Situation‐based contingencies underlying trait‐content manifestation in behavior. Journal of personality, 75 (4), 825–886. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2007.00458.x

Fleeson, W., Jayawickreme, E. (2015). Whole trait theory. Journal of research in personality, 56, 82–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.10.009

Greve, W., Wentura, D. (2003). Immunizing the self: Self-concept stabilization through reality-adaptive self-definitions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29 (1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202238370

Grishina, N. V. (2022). Self-change: situational determinants. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Psychology, 12 (2), 172–185. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu16.2022.206 (In Russian)

Heller, D., Komar, J., Lee, W. B. (2007). The dynamics of personality states, goals, and well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33 (6), 898–910. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461 67207 301010

Horstmann, K. T., Ziegler, M. (2019). Situational perception and affect: Barking up the wrong tree? Personality and Individual Differences, 136, 132–139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2018.01.020

Horstmann, K. T., Ziegler, M. (2020). Assessing personality states: What to consider when constructing personality state measures. European Journal of Personality, 34 (6), 1037–1059. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2266

Jonason, P. K., Sherman, R. A. (2020). Personality and the perception of situations: The Big Five and Dark Triad traits. Personality and Individual Differences, 163, 110081. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110081

Kenrick, D. T., Neuberg, S. L., Griskevicius, V., Becker, D. V., Schaller, M. (2010а). Goal-driven cognition and functional behavior: The fundamental motives framework. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 63–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721409359281

Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., Schaller, M. (2010b). Renovating the pyramid of needs: Contemporary extensions built upon ancient foundations. Perspectives on psychological science, 5 (3), 292–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610369469

Kostromina, S. N., Grishina, N. V. (2018). Procedural approach in personality psychology. In: Znakov, V. V., Zhuravlev, A. L. (eds). Psychology of a person as a subject of cognition, communication and activity (pp. 506–512). Moscow, Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences Press. (In Russian)

Markus, H., Kunda, Z. (1986). Stability and malleability of the self-concept. Journal of personality and social psychology, 51 (4), 858. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.51.4.858

Markus, H., Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41(9), 954–969.

Markus, H., Wurf, E. (1987). The dynamic self-concept: A social psychological perspective. Annual review of psychology, 38 (1), 299–337.

McConnell, A. R. (2011). The multiple self-aspects framework: Self-concept representation and its implications. Personality and social psychology review, 15 (1), 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868310371101

Orel, V. E., Senin, I. G. (2008). The experience of adapting a foreign questionnaire: organizational and content aspect. Psychology. Psychophysiology, 33 (133), 71–77. (In Russian)

Quirin, M., Robinson, M. D., Rauthmann, J. F., Kuhl, J., Read, S. J., Tops, M., DeYoung, C. G. (2020). The Dynamics of Personality Approach (DPA): 20 tenets for uncovering the causal mechanisms of personality. European Journal of Personality, 34 (6), 947–968. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2295

Rauthmann, J. F., Horstmann, K. T., Sherman, R. A. (2019). Do self-reported traits and aggregated states capture the same thing? A nomological perspective on trait-state homomorphy. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10 (5), 596–611. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618774772

Rauthmann, J. F., Horstmann, K. T., Sherman, R. A. (2020). 25 the psychological characteristics of situations: Towards an integrated taxonomy. The Oxford handbook of psychological situations (p. 389). Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Roberts, B. W., Wood, D. (2006). Personality Development in the Context of the Neo-Socioanalytic Model of Personality. In: D. K. Mroczek, T. D. Little (eds). Handbook of personality development (pp. 11–39). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Shmelev, A. G. (2002). Psychodiagnostics of personality traits. St. Petersburg, Rech Publ. (In Russian)

Yang, Yu, Read, S. J., Miller, L. C. (2006). A taxonomy of situations from Chinese idioms. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 750–778. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.09.007

Zebrowitz, L. A., Collins, M. A. (1997). Accurate social perception at zero acquaintance: The affordances of a Gibsonian approach. Personality and social psychology review, 1 (3), 204–223. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0103_2

Ziegler, M., Schroeter, T. A., Lüdtke, O., Roemer, L. (2018). The enriching interplay between openness and interest: A theoretical elaboration of the OFCI model and a first empirical test. Journal of Intelligence, 6 (3), 35. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence6030035