Notwithstanding a recent flurry of organizational research on the construct of "situational strength," research on the other side of the coin-"personality strength"-has rarely been conducted in organizational settings, has been scattered across multiple disciplines, has been called different things by different researchers, and has not yet been used to test theoretical propositions paralleling those in recent organizational research on situational strength. In the present review, drawing from several disparate research literatures (e.g., situational strength, personality states, traitedness, cross-situational consistency, scalability, appropriateness, selfmonitoring, interpersonal dependency, hardiness, attitude strength, and self-concept clarity), we (a) define personality strength and contrast it with personality trait, personality strengths (plural), and layperson conceptualizations of the terms "strong personality" and "weak personality," (b) briefly discuss the history of research related to personality strength, (c) identify a common prediction, emanating largely independently from several literatures, regarding the interactive effect of personality traits and personality strength on behavior, (d) articulate three novel predictions regarding the impact of personality strength on within-person situational and

The notion that individual differences (e.g., personality traits) predict behavior and relevant outcomes in “weak” situations (i.e., when people are left to their own devices to determine what to do) but not in “strong” situations (i.e., when situations provide people with unmistakable cues about what to do) is often treated as a truism among psychologists (Cooper & Withey, 2009). Although many studies support this general idea, its intuitive appeal may have dissuaded researchers from treating situational strength as a meaningful construct in its own right. This chapter attempts to remedy this state of affairs by (a) proposing a formalized theory of situational strength that outlines this construct’s functional mechanisms, (b) demonstrating how this knowledge can be used to develop testable hypotheses (e.g., pertaining to the criterion-oriented validity of individual differences), and (c) exploring several theoretical and practical implications of this theory for both science and practice.

Substantial research has been dedicated to examining and combating respondent misrepresentation (i.e., “faking”) on personality assessments. Two approaches to combat faking that have garnered particular attention include: (a) designing systems to identify likely fakers and (b) developing difficult-to-fake measures. Consistent with suggestions to combine these strategies, the present article examines a new faking detection system specifically designed for a difficult-to-fake measure (i.e., the Conditional Reasoning Test for Aggression; CRT-A). Four studies (a) help elucidate the conditions under which the CRT-A is fakeable, (b) provide initial construct validity evidence for the faking detection system developed here, (c) examine the effects of faking and faking detection on the CRT-A’s criterion-oriented validity, and (d) show that participants identify CRT-based faking detection items at worse-than-chance levels even when they are fully informed about how these items work. Taken together, these studies reinforce the importance of maintaining the indirect nature of CRTs but also show that the faking detection system developed here represents a promising method of identifying those who may have used inside information to manipulate their scores.

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