Personality and Life
• “Personality matters on more than just theoretical grounds” (p. 133)
• Personality affects and predicts important life outcomes (health, well-being, relationship quality, career success, etc.)
• Over time, a person’s little behaviors that are driven by his/her personality traits will add up to drastically different outcomes

Persons and Situations
• “Personality traits are better for describing how people act in general” (p. 135)
• Relationships and jobs
– Personality predicts number of friends, level of agreement with them, and the extent to which people have successful and nonabusive relationships (low neg. emotionality, high pos. emotionality, and constraint) – Personality predicts how much people will promote the goals of the organization for which they work

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Persons and Situations
• Interactionism
– Interaction: view that persons and situations are constantly interacting with each other to produce behavior
– 3 types:
• The effect of a personality variable may depend on the situation
• Certain types of people go to or find themselves in different types of situations
• People change the situations that they are in

Person X Situation Example
• Yerkes-Dodson Law
– Curvilinear relationship between performance and arousal • Introverts and extroverts differ in physiological measures of arousal at baseline • Therefore, introverts and extroverts should show differences in performance depending upon arousal level From: Revelle, Amaral, &
Turriff (1976)

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Person X Situation Example
• Who would be more willing to volunteer to participate in a study – people who are high on altruism or low on altruism?
• 125 undergrads were assessed for whether they were altruists, receptivegivers, or selfish
• 4-6 weeks later, they were contacted and
asked