Be Yourself and Behave Appropriately: Exploring Associations Between Incongruent Personality States and Positive Affect, Tiredness, and Cognitive Performance

Abstract

Personality traits describe how people typically think, feel, and behave. Personality states describe how people think, feel, and behave in a given moment. In their daily lives, people often behave the way they typically do (they enact trait-congruent personality states), but occasionally behave differently from how they typically do (trait-incongruent personality states). Several theories propose that such incongruent personality states should be associated with undesirable outcomes such as less positive affect or more tiredness, but the current state of evidence is inconclusive and mostly based on one personality dimension: extraversion. In this study, we contribute to filling important gaps in the literature by examining congruence of personality dimensions other than extraversion, considering characteristics of the situation, and modeling congruence with state-of-the-art response surface analyses. We aimed to manipulate state honesty-humility and state agreeableness as well as perceived adversity and deception of the situation in a prisoner’s dilemma paradigm. The manipulations mostly had the intended effects but they also had additional unspecific effects on other personality states and situation characteristics. The study thus emphasized the difficulty of manipulating personality states, situation characteristics, and trait–state and state–situation congruence. In pre-registered analyses of variance, response surface analyses, and specification curve analyses, we then examined how trait–state congruence and state–situation congruence were associated with positive affect, tiredness, and performance in a numerical Stroop task. Neither trait–state congruence nor state–situation congruence were associated with positive affect, tiredness, or cognitive performance. However, in light of this study’s limitations, more studies that are carefully designed, carefully operationalized, and well-powered are needed to examine trait–state and state–situation congruence. Because experimental research can advance the understanding of personality dynamics substantially, future research should additionally further aim to develop valid and reliable manipulations of personality states and situation characteristics.