Among the structural models of personality architecture proposed so far, the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality traits (i.e., Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism; see Digman, 1990, John & Srivastava, 1999) gained an impressive popularity. In the FFM framework, personality traits are defined as basic individual dispositions reflecting enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors. One of the core assumptions of the FFM is that personality traits are "transcontextual" (McCrae & Costa, 1984), and they display similarly in their observable realizations regardless of the context in which they manifest (situational invariance principle). Despite there is large empirical support for this assumption (see Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman, 2003), some theorists proposed that trait expressions into real life behaviors are shaped by different social contexts (Mischel & Shoda, 1995) and role identities (Wood & Roberts, 2006). Using a "shortitudinal" design involving first-year university students, our research program points to provide preliminary evidence concerning the ontological status of socially defined trait expressions (e.g., henceforth, also "conditional" traits) as stable pieces of self-knowledge independent of the general self-evaluative frame of reference. In doing so, we will frame the assessment of personality traits within three specific social contexts and role identities that permeate students' life: family (me as a son/daughter), friendship/romantic relationships (me as a friend/partner), and university (me as a student). Moreover, we argue that conditional personality traits may provide a unique incremental contribution to explaining academic achievement and relevant dimensions of personal adjustment above and beyond the effects of general basic dispositions. Implications of our research program for theory, personality assessment and practice are discussed in later sections of this proposal.
We believe that our research project may offer several innovative contributions to the extant literature, along with important improvements and recommendations for practitioners.
From a theoretical point of view, our project fits within the person-situation debate in personality psychology (Hogan, 2009; Fleeson & Noftle, 2009), with particular attention to trait theories (e.g., Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman, 2003). Specifically, we argue that although basic individual dispositions provided by the FFM subsume a large part of their cross-situational variability, some of their phenotypic manifestations may not emerge when self-reports rely on a single general frame of reference. This argument is consistent with basic underpinnings of the Neo-Socioanalytic Model of personality (for a review, see Roberts & Nickel, 2017), where the general identity (i.e., the total of cognitively available self-contents) fully mediates the impact of personality traits on actual role behaviors which, in turn, contribute iteratively to accumulate new self-knowledge available at the general identity level. In this vein, a relevant, innovative aspect provided by our research program is the attempt to assign an "ontological" status (see Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & van Heerden, 2003) to conditional manifestations of personality traits across different socially defined roles. Indeed, we expect that our longitudinal assessment with short temporal lags of personality traits (Anusic, Lucas, & Donnellan, 2012) using multiple frames of reference may shed light to the emergence of specific aspects of trait expression, unshared with their general underlining dispositions. If the data will support these expectations, studies from our research project would contribute to extending the Trait Activation Theory (Tett & Guterman, 2000) to a more general framework. Specifically, the emergence of conditional personality traits might be interpreted as specific adaptive patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors activated by socially salient frameworks (and, per extenso, by socially defined contexts), which unfold in presence of meaningful situational cues. With this regard, one may hypothesize that a given individual may be generally extraverted unless s/he attends university classes as a student. In this case, the context in which s/he is embedded activate specific aspects of personal dispositions that are not fully attributable to his/her general Extraversion, and such conditional expressions of personality traits are likely to remain "covert" in absence of salient situational cues. For example, this student may be less talkative with their university colleagues than in other social contexts, because s/he might think that this behavioral pattern is the most adaptive for that social context. In line with our hypotheses and according to this example, we expect that such conditional aspects of trait manifestation will be stable and partially independent from the basic target disposition, and our research design allows to quantify the proportion of conditional traits unshared with the global trait of reference.
From a practical point of view, this research project may constitute a further step in sharpening the assessment procedures of personality traits, especially concerning educational contexts. As argued in previous sections, researchers and applied psychologists used to assess personality traits for different purposes (e.g., test calibration or personnel selection). In doing so, they generally encouraged research participants and candidates to focus on their overall experience rather than framing their self-evaluations within specific frames of references. If the data will not disconfirm our expectations, we will provide some relevant guidelines aimed at tailoring a more informative personality assessment within applied settings. First, practitioners will be encouraged to integrate the classical (general) assessment of personality traits by providing multiple salient FoRs. For example, it might be worth to include one (or more) FoR(s) associated with workplace and organizational contexts when planning personnel selection processes. In doing so, practitioners may obtain relevant information about candidates' self-views by eliciting a specific social context, interpreting contextualized results in light of their general "baseline" trait. Second, our research project aims to demonstrate that providing specific frames of reference for the assessment of personality traits may yield a unique contribution in explaining important outcomes. With regards to educational settings, it might be worth to include specific academic FoRs when administering personality measures in preliminary psycho-attitudinal batteries to better predict future academic achievement and "contextualized" aspects of personal adjustment (e.g., life satisfaction and depression related to university life).