Individual response profiles in the behavioral assessment of personality

Abstract

A long‐standing problem in the behavioural assessment of personality is the individual specificity of responses. Often, different persons externalize the same trait in different responses. One solution to this problem is to aggregate many different responses. The paper compares the power of response aggregation for predicting self‐and other‐ratings of personality with two alternative strategies of response selection: the nomothetic strategy of selecting the response with the highest overall predictive power, and the more idiographic strategy of selecting, for each individual, the most extreme response. Seventy subjects were videotaped in a sequence of social situations inducing shyness to various degrees. Five different nonverbal measures of shyness all correlated significantly with the subjects' self‐ or other‐rated shyness, and showed low correlations across subjects and a substantial cross‐situational consistency of response profiles. Response aggregation and both strategies of response selection were found to be equally powerful in predicting the subjects' self‐ and other‐ratings of shyness from the five behavioural responses. Therefore, these findings somewhat dampen the hope often expressed in recent theoretical discussions of personality assessment that more respect for the individual case may improve nomothetic assessment procedures.

Individual differences in situation–behavior profiles: A triple typology model.

“…Responses that are part of the same response channel may be expected to co-occur. Individual differences in response specificity (Asendorpf, 1988) can further be attributed to differences in preferences for distinct response channels. For example, some persons may show a preference for the channel of overt anger b~haviors, whereas others may suppress such behaviors.…”

Personality in the behaviour of great apes: temporal stability, cross-situational consistency and coherence in response

“…This results in a low cross-situational consistency of behaviour, yet situational profiles that are stable across time and distinctive between individuals (Funder & Colvin 1991, Mischel et al 2002. Similarly, a situation can induce a specific behaviour in one kind of individual, and a different behaviour in another, which results in a low coherence between responses within a situation and stable individual response profiles (Asendorpf 1988).…”

“…In fact, the problem of fluctuations in manifest behaviour can only be solved with sufficient aggregation of behaviour scores on a given trait dimension across several trait-relevant situations, or across several observations within the same situation if (and only if) the scores are sufficiently consistent across situations or time (Epstein 1979(Epstein , 1980Asendorpf 1988Asendorpf , 1992Mischel et al 2002).…”

Developing “Personality” Taxonomies: Metatheoretical and Methodological Rationales Underlying Selection Approaches, Methods of Data Generation and Reduction Principles

“…But correlations of individual-specific patterns between functionally similar behaviours are often only moderate or even missing altogether. In adult humans, for example, individual differences in gaze aversion, long pauses in speech, hesitant speaking and restricted gestures in social situations, all commonly interpreted as "shy" behaviours, showed only low to moderate correlations with each other (Asendorpf 1988). Zoo chimpanzees, prior feeding, show various behaviours that indicate arousal (e.g., rocking, vocalising, pacing, scratching), but which of these behaviours an individual frequently shows is highly individual-specific so that stable differential patterns in these behaviours do not inter-correlate on the sample level (Uher 2011b).…”

“…For example, in both humans and nonhuman species, individual-specific patterns in behaviour have repeatedly been shown to be particularly pronounced on the levels of specific behaviours and of specific behavioural situations (as explored, e.g., with the concepts of individual-specific behaviour-profiles and individual-specific situation-behaviour-profiles; Asendorpf 1988;Mischel, Shoda & MendozaDenton 2002;Uher 2011b). Individual-specificity also emerges in the temporal stability of individual patterns over both intermediate and longer periods of time (Caspi & Roberts 1999;Uher et al 2013b).…”