Science Can Guess Your Behavior

How do people think, feel, and behave? This is not exactly an easy question to answer, but it's central to personality and social psychology. Researchers are working hard to understand how persons (e.g., our individual traits, motivations, goals), situations (e.g., our moment-to-moment everyday experiences), and behavior affect one another. Decades of research has been dedicated to understanding how individuals differ from each other and how they behave, but less research has examined the impact of people's daily situations. To that end, this site was developed to advance our knowledge of how individuals perceive their everyday situations.

So, how does this site predict behavior?

We measure an individual's personality and their perception of their situation and compare these results to another sample of participants that reported their personality, situations, and how they behaved. It is our hope that this site will be used to collect more situations from participants so that we can become more accurate in our predictions.

Measuring personality

We're using the HEXACO-PI-R (Lee & Ashton, 2004) to measure individual's personality. The HEXACO model of personality proposes that there are six major dimensions of personality: Honesty/Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness. If you've heard of the "Big Five" -- it is very similar to that, but with a few differences (the most notable being the addition of the Honesty/Humility factor).

Measuring situations

To measure situations, we are using items from the recently developed Comprehensive Situations Items Pool (CSIP). Unlike the decades of research dedicated to developing tools to measure personality, a measure of situations did not exist until only recently-- the Riverside Situational Q-set (RSQ; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). The RSQ is an 89-item questionnaire developed to measure the psychological properties of situations. The CSIP was designed in part to build on the research conducted using the RSQ, and to compile the largest set of items to measure situation characteristics.

Relevant publications

Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2004). Psychometric properties of the HEXACO personality inventory. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 39,329-358.

Rauthmann, J. F., Gallardo-Pujol, D., Guillaume, E. M., Todd, E., Nave, C. S., Sherman, R. A., Ziegler, M., Jones, A. B., & Funder, D. C. (2014). The situational eight DIAMONDS: A taxonomy of major dimensions of situation characteristics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107, 677-718.

Sherman, R. A., Nave, C. S., & Funder, D. C. (2010). Situational similarity and personality predict behavioral consistency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99,330-343.

Wagerman, S. A., & Funder, D.C. (2009). Situations. In P. J. Corr and G. Matthews (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Personality (pp.27-42). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.