Relations between personality traits and self-reports of daily behavior

Abstract

This study investigates relations between personality traits and everyday behavior—an area of research that too often is ignored in contemporary personality assessment. Participants completed personality questionnaires and for 2 weeks kept daily records of behaviors related conceptually to 1 of 3 traits: aggression, exhibitionism, and impulsivity. Aggregating across time, correlations between 2 measures of trait aggression correlated .51 with behavioral aggression but only .14 and .18 with behavioral exhibitionism and behavioral impulsivity, respectively. Trait exhibitionism and trait impulsivity demonstrated similarly clean convergent/discriminant correlational patterns with the three types of behaviors. Many individual behavioral items also showed significant correlations with corresponding personality traits. Results are discussed in terms of using personality–behavior relations to further understanding of personality.