The social consequences and mechanisms of personality: How to analyse longitudinal data from individual, dyadic, round-robin and network designs

Abstract

There is a growing interest among personality psychologists in the processes underlying the social consequences of personality. To adequately tackle this issue, complex designs and sophisticated mathematical models must be employed. In this article we describe established and novel statistical approaches to examine social consequences of personality for individual, dyadic, and group (round-robin and network) data. Our overview includes response surface analysis (RSA), autoregressive path models, and latent growth curve models for individual data; actor-partner interdependence models and dyadic RSAs for dyadic data; and social relations and social network analysis for round robin and network data. Altogether, our goal is to provide an overview of various analytical approaches, the situations in which each can be employed, and a first impression about how to interpret their results. Three demo data sets and scripts show how to implement the approaches in R.Keywords: social relations model, social network analysis, dyadic data, response surface analysis, longitudinal data analysis, mediation ANALYZING THE CONSEQUENCES OF PERSONALITY 3The social consequences and mechanisms of personality: How to analyze longitudinal data from individual, dyadic, round-robin, and network designs Psychologists assume that personality has a number of interesting and wide-ranging consequences for the development and maintenance of social relationships. It is posited, for instance, that agreeable individuals become more popular the longer one knows them (see Selfhout, Burk, et al., 2010) or that narcissists are liked less the more one gets familiar with them (see Back, Schmukle, & Egloff, 2010; Küfner, Nestler, & Back, 2013). Similarly, the agreeableness of a member of a couple is believed to influence the relationship satisfaction of the other couple member (see Dyrenforth, Kashy, Donnellan, & Lucas, 2010). Importantly, however, current theorizing does not only focus on such personality-consequence effects, but also on the processes or mechanisms underlying them. Do agreeable individuals, for example, become more popular because others have more valuable communications with them or do narcissists get less popular due to their aggressive communication style?To answer such sophisticated questions adequately, researchers do not only need longitudinal designs in which multiple measures of personality, process indicators, and indicators of the consequence variable are assessed (see Wrzus & Mehl, 2015), but they also have to employ complex mathematical models to statistically evaluate their research questions. Partially due to this need for more complex statistical models, there has been an explosion of research in the methodological field providing researchers with an ever-growing set of analytic tools. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of the novel statistical approaches that can be used to examine social consequences of personality. We highlight several commonly utilized approaches, briefly discuss their mathematical ...

Do Narcissism and Emotional Intelligence Win Us Friends? Modeling Dynamics of Peer Popularity Using Inferential Network Analysis

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