In this video I describe the relationship between scores on trait assessments and actual behaviors. As Walter Mischel demonstrated, the correlation between trait scores and behaviors is fairly low, but it’s important to keep in mind that traits describe tendencies, do not operate in isolation, and are also influenced by the situational context. I also describe how techniques such as experience sampling can help us to examine the relationship between traits and behaviors. Lastly I consider that while the trait approach is useful for describing differences it is not particularly helpful in explaining why those differences occur, a topic that we’ll look at in future videos.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to take a look at the relationship between traits and behaviors. So I mentioned in the previous video that trait assessments generally don’t allow us to make predictions about specific behaviors and part of the reason for this is that these assessments are designed to be used by many different people. And so there’s a bit of a trade-off between the level of detail and accuracy that we can get about each individual and how applicable our assessment is to all people.

You could imagine that I could create a very specific assessment that’s for a particular group of people, you know, so they all have the same job, they have similar backgrounds, they’re the same age, etc. And in that case my assessment might allow me to make some more specific predictions about their behaviors, but if I’m assessing something like the Big Five then that’s gonna be very general. As a result, I won’t be able to make specific predictions about people’s behavior based on that assessment.

So we might wonder about these assessments and think well, let’s say somebody scores as being very introverted, right? So we might wonder well, just because somebody scores as being very introverted, what does that tell us about their actual behavior? Can we predict that they actually spend more time alone? Or might that not be the case?

So this brings us back to an idea that I mentioned in the unit on intelligence and this is the idea that we have these three parts. We have this sort of triangle and we have a construct and so this is sort of a hypothetical property that we think exists, and it’s going to be connected to particular behaviors, that’s why we think it exists. So in the case of intelligence that was; intelligence was the construct and we thought well, there’s things like grades in school that we see and those make us think that there’s differences in intelligence. And then we also design assessments like IQ tests and then we look for relationships between these three parts. And so in the case of a personality trait, we might have some construct which we say “okay, I think openness to experience is a, you know, a trait that exists and it’s going to be connected to particular behaviors like trying new things or exposing yourself to new ideas.”

Alright, so I have this connection here between this hypothetical property or trait and actual behavior, and then I have some assessment that also is linked to the general hypothetical property here. I say okay I’ve designed an assessment of openness to experience and then I might wonder well is there a clear relationship between actual behaviors that I think demonstrate this and assessments that claim that they’re measuring this? So this is sort of the section we’re wondering about here. Is there a relationship between the behaviors and the assessment results?

And this brings us to some work by Walter Mischel and in 1968 he published a book called personality and assessment and he looked at the relationship between traits and behaviors. And when looking at single traits and specific behaviors, he found an average correlation of about 0.3 and many people thought this was quite low. And they thought this, I mean, this means that we’re not able to make very good predictions about behavior based on a particular trait, and maybe we shouldn’t bother measuring traits at all. I mean, they’re not really telling us much about actual real-world behavior.

But there’s a few caveats that we should keep in mind when we think about this. This appears to be quite a low correlation but we should remember that traits are about tendencies they’re not about specific behaviors. And so we shouldn’t expect them to make predictions about specific behaviors and, related to this, the idea that when we look at this correlation it’s between single traits and single behaviors but traits don’t operate in isolation. They’re all acting all the time. So just because you’re open to experience that doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing that’s shaping your behavior and so other traits might be influencing you and that’s why we shouldn’t expect to see that, well, just because you’re high in openness we should always see this one particular behavior, right? That certainly isn’t the case. It’s not going to be deterministic like that. Or if you score high on this trait then you always act this way. I mean, we would be actually more surprised to see that be the case. So when we think that way we might realize, well, maybe this correlation isn’t so low.

And then lastly we have the idea that the situation also matters. There’s a situational context and that’s not being taken into consideration here. So just because you are very extroverted doesn’t mean that you’re always going to be around other people. You know, you might still want to be alone sometimes even if you’re very, very high in extraversion. And that’s because there’s certain situations where you might feel the need to be alone regardless of how extroverted you are. And so now I mean that again it wouldn’t perfectly predict your behavior.

Alright, so we should keep this in mind. It doesn’t mean just because we have a lower correlation here that assessing personality traits is useless. Ok, so some other ways that we can look at this relationship between traits and behaviors. One way is what’s called “experience sampling” and so what we do here is we randomly buzz a participant. Initially this was done with pagers but now it’s done with smartphone apps, and the participant simply records what they’re doing or what they’re thinking about at a certain time during the day. They don’t know it’s going to suddenly buzz and say “hey what are you doing?” and what this does is it means we can measure actual behaviors. “Oh, I’m reading this new book” or “I’m you know chatting with my friends I’m in a cafe having a conversation with my friends about whatever”. And so we’re measuring actual behaviors, right? People didn’t know we were going to measure it, they don’t know when it’s going to ask them, and we can then compare that to their actual personality assessments.

Ok, here’s their actual behaviors, here’s their scores on, say, a big five assessment and then we can see how related are these things. So somebody scores high on openness, how often do we see that they’re trying new things or exposing themselves to new ideas, right? That would tell us this relationship between the trait score and their actual behaviors.

Ok, and before we finish talking about traits I want to go to an overall criticism of trait-based assessment. And this is not to say that it’s not useful. But we should keep this in mind and this is that trait based-assessment doesn’t tell us how personality works, right? So it’s not going to be sufficient for really explaining personality differences. It helps us to describe how people differ, but it doesn’t tell us about intrapersonal functioning. So what intrapersonal functioning refers to is the functioning within a person, within an individual. So how does a person process information? How do they make decisions? How do they choose behaviors, right? Labeling traits doesn’t actually explain any of that, right?

And in some ways we could criticize trait-based assessment as using a sort of circular logic. So what do I mean by that? Well, the idea is we’re sort of just labeling things and then saying that those are, that label is the explanation for the things. So for example we could say “okay we have Jill and Jill is very neat and organized.” Ok, so well why is it that Jill is very neat and organized? What’s the explanation for this? And the answer that we have with trait-based assessment is “well Jill is very neat and organized because she is high in conscientiousness”, right? And that seems to be a bit of an explanation. Ok, here’s her behaviors, why are these happening? “Well, she’s high in conscientiousness”. Then we ask “well why is it that Jill is high in conscientiousness?” We say, “well because she’s very neat and organized. She has these behaviors”, right? We say that’s the explanation for why she’s high in conscientiousness, because she’s very neat and organized. And she’s very neat and organized because she’s high in conscientiousness. It’s not really explaining what’s causing her to be very neat and organized, or what’s causing her to be high in conscientiousness? So we might wonder, is it something about her upbringing, something about her socio-cultural context? Is it something about her biology that’s causing this behavior and it’s causing her to be more conscientious than someone else, right?

And so we’re going to need to look at some other perspectives on personality in order to try to address that. And that’s what we’re going to do in some of the following videos. So I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!