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.