Personality, Construal, and Social Outcomes

The present study demonstrates a novel way of exploring the relationship between personality and social outcomes by examining an understudied intermediate step: situational construal. Construal is assessed in terms of the degree to which one’s description of a situation agrees with others’ descriptions of the same situation (normativity) and the degree to which the description is positively valenced. Participants (N = 256) provided information about their personality and subsequently used the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ) to describe their construal of three inlab interactions with unacquainted others. A measure of positive behavioral social outcomes was constructed from observer ratings of the video-recorded interactions. Extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism (negatively) were related to positive behavioral social outcomes, as well as to normativity and positivity of construal. Additionally, normativity and positivity of construal were related to positive social outcomes. However, mediation analyses did not confirm that construal mediates the relation between personality and positive behavioral outcomes.