Idiographic Personality Coherence: A Quasi Experimental Longitudinal ESM Study

Abstract

Personality is a study of persons. However, persons exist within contexts, and personality coherence emerges from persons in contexts. But persons and environments bidirectionally influence each other, with persons selecting into and modifying their contexts, which also have lasting influences on personality. Thus, environmental change should produce changes in personality. Alternatively, environmental changes may produce few changes. This paradoxical viewpoint is based on the idea that novel environments have no predefined appropriate way to behave, which allows preexisting personality systems to stay coherent (Caspi & Moffitt, 1993). We test these two perspectives by examining longitudinal consistency idiographic personality coherence using a quasi-experimental design (N = 50; total assessments = 5,093). Personality coherence was assessed up to one year before the COVID-19 pandemic and again during lockdown. We also test antecedents and consequences of consistency, examining both what prospectively predicts consistency as well as what consistency prospectively predicts. Overall, consistency was modest but there were strong individual differences, indicating some people were quite consistent despite environmental upheaval. Moreover, there were relatively few antecedents and consequences of consistency, with the exception of some goals and domains of satisfaction predicting consistency, leaving open the question of why changes in coherence occurs.

Consistency and change in idiographic personality: A longitudinal ESM network study.

“…Along these same lines, changes in broad trait levels are thought to result from prolonged changes in state-level manifestations of the trait (Magidson, Roberts, Collado-Rodriguez, & Lejuez, 2014; Roberts & Jackson, 2008). And indeed, personality trait change follows psychotherapy (Roberts et al, 2017), and state level changes in the Big 5 do reflect trait-level changes over the same period (Beck & Jackson, 2019a). However, these state-level manifestations are typically neither examined simultaneously nor incorporated into developmental models.…”

“…In their view, broad measures of personality miss important information that explains and describes an individual’s unique components of personality. Allport (1937) famously called for an idiographic, person-centered approach to provide insight into personality processes and to account for different structures of personality at the individual level (in addition to, not opposed to, a nomothetic approach; see Beck & Jackson, 2019a). In the present article, when we refer to idiographic assessment, we refer to assessments of individuals that assess the structure or manifestations of an individual’s personality only relative to themselves 1 .…”

“…Much of the early work on idiographic personality assessment hinged on the observation that nomothetic assessments averaged over important sources of variability, both in the temporal manifestations of personality and the contexts in which those manifestations arise (Beck & Jackson, 2019a). This led to two distinct research paths, one of which examined the personality trait structure at the level of the individual using repeated assessments (Block, 1971; Cattell, 1957) and one that specifically targeted interactionism between personality and situation factors (e.g., Bandura, 1977; Endler, Hunt, & Rosenstein, 1962; Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1994; J.…”

“…But graphical VAR is not unique in generating estimates of these relationships. Indeed, the most important question when considering whether representing and understanding data or models from a network perspective concerns the definitions of the nodes and edges (Beck & Jackson, 2019a, 2019c; Piccirillo, Beck, & Rodebaugh, 2019). For example, should the lowest-level measurement unit be items, or should the items be composited into higher-order constructs?…”

“…Perhaps even more important than the definition of the nodes is the definition of the edges, which can represent adjacency (or co-occurrences), correlations, partial correlations, frequencies, individual differences, and more (cf. Beck & Jackson, 2019a). For the purpose of this paper, we study so-called contemporaneous and lagged relationships.…”