Personality–place transactions: Mapping the relationships between Big Five personality traits, states, and daily places.

Abstract

People actively select their environments, and the environments they select can alter their psychological characteristics in the moment and over time. Such dynamic person–environment transactions are likely to play out in the context of daily life via the places people spend time in (e.g., home, work, or public places like cafes and restaurants). This article investigates personality–place transactions at 3 conceptual levels: stable personality traits, momentary personality states, and short-term personality trait expressions. Three 2-week experience sampling studies (2 exploratory and 1 confirmatory with a total N = 2,350 and more than 63,000 momentary assessments) were used to provide the first large-scale evidence showing that people’s stable Big Five traits are associated with the frequency with which they visit different places on a daily basis. For example, extraverted people reported spending less time at home and more time at cafés, bars, and friends’ houses. The findings also show that spending time in a particular place predicts people’s momentary personality states and their short-term trait expression over time. For example, people reported feeling more extraverted in the moment when spending time at bars/parties, cafés/restaurants, or friends’ houses, compared with when at home. People who showed preferences for spending more time in these places also showed higher levels of short-term trait extraversion over the course of 2 weeks. The findings make theoretical contributions to environmental psychology, personality dynamics, as well as the person–environment transactions literature, and highlight practical implications for a world in which the places people visit can be easily captured via GPS sensors.

Investigating the Relationships between Mobility Behaviours and Indicators of Subjective Well–Being Using Smartphone–Based Experience Sampling and GPS Tracking

“…Moreover, our results speak directly to the substantive body of research highlighting the important role of social interactions and social support for subjective well–being and happiness (e.g. Pavot, Diener, & Fujita, 1990; Turner, 1981), as well as a resilience factor for mental health problems (e.g. Cobb, 1976).…”

“…Other types of data that can be considered part of the broader dataset from this course project have been published in prior work and include studies of personality sensing (Harari et al, 2020), the relationships between personality traits, states, and place visits (Matz & Harari, in press), longitudinal change in students' physical activity behaviours and their well‐being correlates (Kroencke, Harari, Katana, & Gosling, 2019), individual differences in students' sociability behaviours and their relationship to personality traits (Harari, Müller, & Gosling, 2018), and studies of students' interest in and compliance with self‐tracking of their lifestyle behaviours and psychological experiences using mobile sensing apps and experience sampling surveys (Harari et al, 2017).…”

Computational Personality Assessment - An Overview and Perspective

“…Dynamic personality theories focus on the importance of momentary changes in personality states (Horstmann & Ziegler, 2020) as a function of environmental and situational influences (Matz & Harari, 2020), which may be reflected in biological markers (Roberts & Jackson, 2008). To test and refine dynamic personality theories, it is necessary to assess atomic, transient expressions of personality.…”

“…Here, the comparatively well-understood self-reports of personality states provided evidence that the other-rated state reports capture "the natural experience" of the participant. Another example is a recent study by Matz & Harari (2020) showing that the current self-reported location of a participant is related to their self-rated personality states (e.g., feeling more extraverted in bars than at home). In both examples, knowledge about the validity of state-self reports lends credibility to the validity of the new method (i.e., other-reports or the coding of places that are psychologically meaningful).…”

Personality-Informed Intervention Design: Examining How Trait Regulation Can Inform Efforts to Change Behavior

“…There also have been many attempts to identify associations between behaviors and certain situational cues (i.e., the objective conditions, such as where one is and who one is with), classes (i.e., the category or type of situation, as in the distinction between work and home), and characteristics (i.e., the psychological conditions, such as how the objective conditions are being perceived or interpreted; Rauthmann et al, 2015). For instance, people tend to behave more aggressively when temperatures are higher (a situational cue; Anderson, 1989), they tend to act more extraverted when at restaurants than at home (situational classes; Matz & Harari, 2020), and they tend to be more conscientious in situations they perceive to be important (situational characteristic; Parrigon et al, 2017). Accordingly, personality theorists have long adopted an interactionist perspective that suggests behavior is jointly determined by both dispositional and environmental influences, as well as by how they interact with one another (e.g., DeYoung, 2015;Lewin, 1935;Tett & Burnett, 2003;.…”