An exploration into personality and situational influences on social behaviour

Abstract

The study was designed to explore main and interactive effects of personality and situation on behaviour in a dyadic setting. A total of 180 XIth and XIIth grade students (90 male, 90 female) was drawn from various schools in Kurukshetra and Karnal towns of Haryana (India). All the participants received NEO Five Factor Inventory-Revised (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Behaviour of the participants was observed through a video recording (with their knowledge) in three dyadic experimental situations, i.e., unstructured, co-operative, and competitive. Thirty-four behavioural characteristics were rated on Riverside Behavioural Q-sort (Funder, Furr & Colvin, 2000) by experimenter. In first two situations the pairs of male and female participants were random, while in third situation the pairs were same as in second situation. Only the behaviours which were endorsed by 25% of the participants were retained for further analysis. Current analysis involved 34 behaviours of low and high scoring cases on N and E personality traits across three situations through 2×3 ANOVA. Results of two-way ANOVA indicated that personality trait N had influence on seven of the thirty-four behaviours while E impacted eight of them. Influence of situation was more persistent than personality factors, nine of the social behaviours differed across situations. In two cases neuroticism-situation interaction was found significantly influencing the behaviour, while extraversion-situation interaction was found significant in one of the behaviours only. Results were discussed in the light of pertinent theoretical models and earlier researches in the field.