John F. Rauthmann

• PhD
• Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich

Taxonomies of person characteristics are well developed, while taxonomies of psychologically important situation characteristics are underdeveloped. A working model of situation perception implies the existence of taxonomizable dimensions of psychologically meaningful, important, and consequential situation characteristics tied to situation cues, g...

There is currently no consensus on how to study psychological situations, and situation research is still riddled with problems of conceptualization (What is a situation, what is it not?) and measurement (How can situational information be assessed?). This target article formulates three core principles (with corollaries) to provide a foundation fo...

Situation perception represents the fulcrum of a “psychology of situations” because situation ratings are ubiquitous. However, no systematic research program exists so far, particularly because two competing traditions have not been integrated: Objectivist views stress situations’ consensually shared meanings (social reality), and subjectivist view...

Convergent correlations between traits and state-aggregates from experience-sampling cannot fully establish trait-state homomorphy (the extent to which the same constructs are measured). With a nomological vector correlation and lens model approach we test how similar nomological networks of traits and state-aggregates are to each other: A trait an...

To understand personality dynamics, processes, and functioning better, knowledge on the relations between persons and environments needs to advance. First, this chapter outlines basic elements of persons (short-term ℙ as states and long-term 𝕡 as traits) and environments (short-term 𝔼 for situations and long-term 𝕖 for niches) along with their resp...

What is published in personality psychology, and which trends emerge over time? We examined in six major personality–psychological journals (European Journal of Personality, Journal of Individual Differences, Journal of Personality, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, Journal of Research i...

Students’ perceptions of instructional quality (SPIQ) are subjective and time-specific to some extent. Yet, they are mostly aggregated across students and assessed at one time point, neglecting student- and lesson-specific variance. The present study examined the role of students’ personality traits in state SPIQ and their relation to perceived les...

The interplay between persons and situations is central to psychology, and there has been a recent increase in research on psychological situation characteristics. One key issue in situation research concerns the distinction between consensual situation perceptions and subjective situation construal. We examined for the first time whether different...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0296421.].

Psychology is concerned with both general laws of psychological functioning and with the individual person. The debate surrounding nomothetics and idiographics has been brought up repeatedly, but it has never been completely resolved. We therefore aim to provide conceptual clarity on how the terms “idiographic” and “nomothetic” are used and how con...

Consistencies in how and what a person thinks, feels, enacts, and wants (i.e., momentary states) lie at the core of personality definitions and thus at the heart of personality psychology. Unfortunately, the systematic conceptualization and examination of state consistencies has stagnated after the person-situation debate. Moreover, past research h...

Psychology is concerned with both general laws of psychological functioning and with the individual person. The debate surrounding nomothetics and idiographics has been brought up repeatedly, but it has never been completely resolved. We therefore aim to provide conceptual clarity on how the terms “idiographic” and “nomothetic” are used and how con...

What is published in personality psychology, and which trends emerge over time? We examined in six major personality-psychological journals (EJP, JID, JOPY, JPSP:PPID, JRP, PAID) what content – as captured by keywords attached to journal articles (14,227 full articles, with 23,900 unique keywords that attracted a total of 62,578 mentions) – was fea...

The interplay between persons and situations is central to psychology, and there has been a recent increase in research on psychological situation characteristics. One key issue in situation research concerns the distinction between consensual situation perceptions and subjective situation construal. We examined for the first time whether different...

Recent efforts in a range of scientific fields have emphasised research and methods concerning individual differences and individualisation. This article brings together various scientific disciplines—ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour; medicine and psychiatry; public health and sport/exercise science; sociology; psychology; economics and man...

Recent efforts in a range of scientific fields have emphasised research and methods concerning individual differences and individualisation. This article brings together various scientific disciplines—ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour; medicine and psychiatry; public health and sport/exercise science; sociology; psychology; economics and man...

Research on person-situation dynamics has mostly focused on only the person or the situation in isolation in the prediction of outcomes and has relied on single rating sources. The current work examined simultaneously the effects of personality traits, personality states, situation characteristics, and trait × state as well as trait × situation int...

Psychological researchers often identify with psychological disciplines, such as social or clinical psychology. The current study analyzed Google Scholar profiles from 6,532 international scientists who attracted more than 100 citations in 2019 and self-identified with at least one of 10 common psychological disciplines (psychoanalysis; clinical ps...

Common reductionist contractions in thinking or writing about personality and individual differences are to conflate personality, dispositional traits, the Big Five, and self-reports. To avoid conceptual confusions and communicate more effectively, we should bear in mind: (a) Personality is much more than dispositional traits or basic tendencies, (...

There is robust evidence that people with higher incomes tend to have higher self-esteem, but little is known about how changes in income and self-esteem are related within individuals. Some theories predict that increased earnings lead to higher self-esteem, others that increased self-esteem leads to higher earnings, and still others that there sh...

People differ in their reaction to situations, resulting in Person × Situation interactions. These interactions have been emphasized by many theoretical accounts of personality. Nevertheless, empirical progress on Person × Situation interactions has been slow. This is in part attributable to an insufficient distinction of person and situation varia...

With the rapidly growing availability of scalable psychological assessments, personality science holds great promise for the scientific study and applied use of customized behavior-change interventions. To facilitate this development, we propose a classification system that divides psychological targeting into two approaches that differ in the proc...

Recent trends in a range of scientific fields have seen a shift towards research and methods concerning individual differences and individualisation. This article brings together various scientific disciplines—ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour; medicine and psychiatry; public health and sport/exercise science; sociology; psychology; economic...

Personality dynamics have recently revived interest as a subject of systematic investigation in personality science. Personality dynamics theories and research refer to nonstatic phenomena related to personality, such as the regulatory mechanisms and processes involved in the control of behavior and experience related to personality and their inter...

People in economically advantaged nations tend to evaluate their life as more positive overall and report greater well-being than people in less advantaged nations. But how does positivity manifest in the daily life experiences of individuals around the world? The present study asked 15,244 college students from 62 nations, in 42 languages, to desc...

People differ in their reaction to situations, resulting in person × situation interactions. These interactions have been emphasized by many theoretical accounts of personality. Nevertheless, empirical progress on person × situation interactions has been slow. This is in part attributable to an insufficient distinction of person and situation varia...

Contingencies between situational variables and psychological states have been proposed as key individual difference variables by many theoretical approaches to personality. Despite their relevance, the basic properties, nomological correlates, and factor structure of individual differences in contingencies have not been examined so far. We address...

Research on grandiose narcissism distinguishes between self-promotional processes (i.e., narcissistic admiration) and other-derogative processes (i.e., narcissistic rivalry; Back et al., 2013). Moreover, research has begun to assess and investigate narcissistic manifestations in different domains (e.g., communal narcissism). To integrate these two...

Objective: Several personality theories distinguish between rather genetically rooted, universal dispositional traits (DTs) and rather environmentally shaped, more contextualized characteristic adaptations (CAs). However, no study so far has compared different measures of theoretically postulated DTs and CAs regarding their environmental and genet...

The majority of adults (50% to 75%) report that they have had at least once recurring dreams in their lives; most of these recurrent dreams, for example, being chased, are negatively toned. However, systematic research regarding the content of these dreams is relatively scarce. Within the present online survey, 676 participants (545 women, 131 men)...

Students’ perceptions of instructional quality (SPIQ) convey information on teaching effectiveness. However, often indicators confounding subjective and objective SPIQ components are used, complicating a precise examination of different aspects of rating behavior in classroom situations. The present study aims at investigating relations between dif...

Person-situation fit can be operationalized as within-person associations between profiles of personality traits and situation characteristics (trait-situation fit) as well as personality states and situation characteristics (state-situation fit). We provide an initial examination of basic properties (magnitudes, individual differences, reliabiliti...

Previous research indicated that dream variables such as dream recall, dream sharing, and nightmares are related to personality traits. However, the overall number of studies in this field is rather small, and this data set serves as a necessary replication. Overall, 819 persons (636 women, 183 men) with a mean age of 27.47 ± 9.32 years participate...

Im Leitartikel „Replikationskrise, p-hacking und Open Science – Eine Umfrage zu fragwürdigen Forschungspraktiken in studentischen Projekten und Impulse für die Lehre“ werden wichtige empirische Befunde präsentiert, die aufzeigen, inwieweit sich die Weiterentwicklung der psychologischen Wissenschaft aufgrund der Replikationskrise in der deutschsprac...

Based on a perspective on personality coherence as the extent to which personality-relevant characteristics are differentiated and integrated within a person in his or her environment, we propose a synthesis that builds on and harmonizes existing and partly conflicting theories, methodological approaches, and empirical findings. This understanding...

Based on a perspective on personality coherence as the extent to which personality-relevant characteristics are differentiated and integrated within a person in his or her environment, we propose a synthesis that builds on and harmonizes existing and partly conflicting theories, methodological approaches, and empirical findings. This understanding...

Physical activity and sports participation are positively related to physical and mental health as well as to subjective well-being. Various approaches have been used to explain these associations. In our study, we propose that person-environment fit can partly explain the association between sports and subjective well-being. We examined to what ex...

Personality Computing (PC) is a burgeoning field at the intersection of personality and computer science that seeks to extract personality-relevant information (e.g., on Big Five trait levels) from sensor-assessed information (e.g., written texts, digital footprints, smartphone usage, non-verbal behavior, speech patterns, game-play, etc.). Such sen...

The current work examines consistencies of personality state scores across functionally equivalent and non-equivalent situations. We argue that simple consistency, defined as the correlation between state scores without taking people’s straits into account, needs to be distinguished from residual consistency that does account for traits. The existe...

Research on grandiose narcissism distinguishes between self-promotional processes (i.e., narcissistic admiration) and other-derogative processes (i.e., narcissistic rivalry; Back et al., 2013). Moreover, research has begun to assess and investigate narcissistic manifestations in different domains (e.g., communal narcissism). To integrate these two...

The situations people find themselves in and how they experience them is fundamental to a host of life and work outcomes. However, most research has so far only relied on self-reports and is thus not able to disentangle different situation components. The present study therefore examined the dynamics between self- and other-rated situation characte...

The situations people find themselves in and how they experience them is fundamental to a host of life and work outcomes. However, most research has so far only relied on self-reports and is thus not able to disentangle different situation components. The present study therefore examined the dynamics between self- and other-rated situation characte...

During government-implemented restrictions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s everyday lives changed profoundly. However, there is to date little research chronicling how people perceived their changed everyday lives and which consequences this had. In a two-wave study, we examined the psychological characteristics of people’s situation...

The situations people find themselves in and how they experience them is fundamental to a host of life and work outcomes. However, most research has so far only relied on self-reports and is thus not able to disentangle different situation components. The present study therefore examined the dynamics between self- and other-rated situation characte...

This chapter provides an overview of research on dispositional supervisor characteristics as well as specific individual-level antecedents, correlates, boundary conditions, and processes of supervisors who display hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors towards their followers (i.e., abusive supervision). More specifically, empirical research findin...

Introducing the new journal Personality Science (PS) Online-only and full open-access, without author or reader fees Aims to provide a top-quality and multidisciplinary outlet for personality science Seeks to foster diversity and inclusion in the community of personality scientists Implements rigorous guidelines to ensure transparency, openness, an...

The current work examines consistencies of personality state scores across functionally equivalent and non-equivalent situations. We argue that simple consistency, defined as the correlation between state scores without taking people’s straits into account, needs to be distinguished from residual consistency that does account for traits. The existe...

The current work examines consistencies of personality state scores across functionally equivalent and non-equivalent situations. We argue that simple consistency, defined as the correlation between state scores without taking people’s straits into account, needs to be distinguished from residual consistency that does account for traits. The existe...

Abstract What does it mean to be happy? The vast majority of cross-cultural studies on happiness have employed a Western-origin, or “WEIRD” measure of happiness that conceptualizes it as a self-centered (or “independent”), high-arousal emotion. However, research from East�ern cultures, particularly Japan, conceptualizes happiness as including an in...

Personality psychology has long focused on structural trait models, but it can also offer a rich understanding of the dynamics, processes, mechanisms, and functioning of individual differences or entire persons. The field of personality dynamics, which works towards such an understanding, has experienced a renaissance in the last two decades. This...

During government-implemented restrictions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s everyday lives changed profoundly. However, there is to date little research chronicling how people perceived their changed everyday lives and which consequences this had. In a two-wave study, we examined the psychological characteristics of people’s situation...

Personality psychology has long focused on structural trait models, but it can also offer a rich understanding of the dynamics, processes, mechanisms, and functioning of individual differences or entire persons. The field of personality dynamics, which works towards such an understanding, has experienced a renaissance in the last two decades. This...

This is the inaugural editorial for the new online-only open-access journal "Personality Science" (https://ps.psychopen.eu/index.php/ps).

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to changes in people’s private and public lives that are unprecedented in modern history. However, little is known about the differential psychological consequences of restrictions that have been imposed to fight the pandemic. In a large and diverse German sample ( N = 1,320), we examined how individual differences in...

The continuous development and evolvement of sports provide a challenge for researchers who study psychological correlates and consequences of sports, as no single study can include all sports and results cannot easily be generalized across different sports. In this preregistered study, we present a new way of distinguishing sports based on the eig...

The current chapter gives a primer on the conceptualization and measurement of psychological situations. Regarding conceptualization, different ways of defining situational information in terms of cues, characteristics, and classes are sketched. Next, the different realities – physical, social, and personal – upon which situation perception are gro...

Affect and situation perception are intertwined in any given situation, but the extent to which both predict behavior jointly and uniquely has not yet been systematically examined so far. Using two studies with experience sampling methodology (ESM), we examine how trait-like variables (Big Six, trait affect, general situation experience) and state-...

Objective The current exploratory study sought to examine dispositional optimism, or the general expectation for positive outcomes, around the world. Method Dispositional optimism and possible correlates were assessed across 61 countries (N = 15,185; mean age = 21.92; 77% female). Mean‐level differences in optimism were computed along with their r...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to changes in people’s private and public lives that are unprecedented in modern history. However, little is known about the differential psychological consequences of restrictions that have been imposed to fight the pandemic. In a large and diverse German sample (N = 1,320), we examined how individual differences in p...

Over the last few decades, most personality psychology research has been focused on assessing personality via scores on a few broad traits and investigating how these scores predict various behaviors and outcomes. This approach does not seek to explain the causal mechanisms underlying human personality and thus falls short of explaining the proxima...

To understand personality dynamics, processes, and functioning better, knowledge on the relations between persons and environments needs to advance. First, this chapter outlines basic elements of persons (short-term ℙ as states and long-term 𝕡 as traits) and environments (short-term 𝔼 for situations and long-term 𝕖 for niches) along with their resp...

Objective: The current study seeks to replicate and extend principal findings reported in The World at 7:00 (Guillaume et al., 2016), a project that examined the psychological experience of situations in 20 countries. Method: Data were collected from participants in 62 countries (N = 15,318), recruited from universities by local collaborators to c...

Affect and situation perception are intertwined in any given situation, but the extent to which both predict behavior jointly and uniquely has not yet been systematically examined so far. Using two studies with experience sampling methodology (ESM), we examine how trait-like variables (Big Six, trait affect, general situation experience) and state-...

Omnibus assertions whether the Big Five (B5) or HEXACO models are “better” fall short. We argue it is more important to determine their (boundaries of) usefulness and propose a nomological network approach (NNA) to systematically compare trait structure models in a common framework. We illustrate how the NNA can be deployed to address several objec...

Over the past 15 years, research on the assessment of psychological situations has flourished. As a result, many basic questions about psychological situations have been answered. We discuss the theoretical and empirical studies that answered these questions, including what situations are; how they can be characterized, taxonomized, and measured; h...

Personality psychology has enjoyed success with widely accepted and established taxonomies. This cannot be said for a psychology of situations, which has yet to establish a robust taxonomy of major dimensions of psychological situation characteristics across cultures and languages. We present four studies to uncover the dimensionality in the covari...

Sports are typically distinguished in team versus individual sports or ball games versus cue sports. However, these broad distinctions have only limited utility for psychological research on sports and physical activity because they neglect psychologically relevant characteristics. As sports are highly standardized situations following a clear set...

According to an “acting consistently = feeling authentic” hypothesis, people with higher ipsative trait-state consistency (degree to which one's state expressions of personality patterns match one's personality trait patterns) should experience higher experienced authenticity (degree to which one feels authentic). According to a “feeling good = fee...

Hopwood provided an interpersonal situation model and a much-needed treatise of within- and between-situation dynamics towards a more dynamic understanding of pathological and non-pathological personality. My commentary zooms in on how pathology-relevant situations and their characteristics (single or as profiles) as well as pathology-relevant pers...

Using the most comprehensive lexical approach with English adjectives to date, Parrigon et al. (2016) found seven major dimensions of psychological situation characteristics (CAPTION: Complexity, Adversity, Positive Valence, Typicality, Importance, humOr, Negative Valence). Researchers using or studying situations may be interested in how well thes...

We investigated the development of narcissistic admiration (i.e., the assertive or extraverted dimension of narcissism; Back et al., 2013) and Machiavellianism (Mach) in early adulthood. Specifically, we examined (a) mean-level changes in narcissistic admiration and Mach during early adulthood and (b) how studying economics and experiencing any of...

Despite the broad consensus in psychology that human behavior is influenced by the interaction between characteristics of the person and characteristics of the situation, not much is known about the precise shape of this person-situation (P x S) interaction. To address this issue, we introduce and test the Nonlinear Interaction of Person and Situat...

For a long time, leadership research has focused too much on idealized, romantic, and “good” forms of leadership (e.g., transformational, empowering, authentic, and ethical leadership), but neglected the antagonistic part: the dark side of leadership. Current personality and leadership literature suggests that, due to their high need for power and...

Short biography of German personality psychologist Jens B. Asendorpf

Autobiography of German personality psychologist John F. Rauthmann

Situation factors, taken more broadly, may refer to (a) situation cues (objective physical stimuli in an environment), (b) psychological situation characteristics (subjective meanings and interpretations of situations), and (c) situation classes (types or groups of entire situations with similar cues or similar levels or profiles of characteristics...

Lievens presents suggestions for how assessment center exercises can be integrated into personality science, such as developing assessment center exercises based on situational taxonomies to examine trait activation potentials. To reach this goal, I argue that we can use situations, specifically their psychological content characteristics (e.g., DI...

In this comment on Baumert et al.’s target article, I zoom in on personality dynamics and processes sensu how short-term personality states and situational variables are interwoven and transact across measurement points in complex manners. A process-focused personality psychology will have to understand better how people navigate from situation to...

Critique from the person-situation debate that traits are not useful for understanding behavior spawned increased research on interactions between persons, situations, and behaviors. In a statistical sense, person x situation interactions represent how traits moderate situation effects and how situations moderate trait effects. In a conceptual sens...

The Dark Triad Dirty Dozen (i.e., DTDD), Short Dark Triad (i.e., SD3), and the Single Item Narcissism Scale (i.e., SINS) were adapted into Turkish and validated (N = 368). We examined internal consistency, factor structures, and convergent and discriminant validity of the scales using the Mach-IV, LSRP, NPI-16, Rosenberg’s self-esteem scale, and Bi...

Other-ratings of targets’ traits may consist – besides true trait variance (TTV) – of different measurement error sources, particularly due to raters, scales, items, measurement times, and random fluctuations. Using Gnambs’ (2015) and Ones et al.’s (2016) procedures for partitioning variance in scales due to measurement error, available meta-analyt...

The Dark Triad Dirty Dozen (i.e., DTDD), Short Dark Triad (i.e., SD3), and the Single Item Narcissism Scale (i.e., SINS) were adapted into Turkish and validated (N = 368). We examined internal consistency, factor structures, and convergent and discriminant validity of the scales using the Mach-IV, LSRP, NPI-16, Rosenberg's self-esteem scale, and Bi...

Dieses Lehrbuch bietet einen umfassenden, aber dennoch kompakten Überblick über die Vielfalt der Ansätze in der Persönlichkeitspsychologie. Welche Paradigmen, Strömungen und Theorien gibt es in der Persönlichkeitsforschung? Womit beschäftigen sie sich, was zeichnet sie jeweils aus? Wie kann man sie miteinander vergleichen? Sie erhalten durch die Au...