Idiographic personality coherence: A quasi experimental longitudinal ESM study

Abstract

Personality is a study of persons. However, persons exist within contexts, and personality coherence emerges from persons in contexts. But persons and environments bidirectionally influence each other, with persons selecting into and modifying their contexts, which also have lasting influences on personality. Thus, environmental change should produce changes in personality. Alternatively, environmental changes may produce few changes. This paradoxical viewpoint is based on the idea that novel environments have no predefined appropriate way to behave, which allows preexisting personality systems to stay coherent. We test these two perspectives by examining longitudinal consistency idiographic personality coherence using a quasi-experimental design (N = 50; total assessments = 5093). Personality coherence was assessed up to one year before the COVID-19 pandemic and again during lockdown. We also test antecedents and consequences of consistency, examining both what prospectively predicts consistency and what consistency prospectively predicts. Overall, consistency was modest but there were strong individual differences, indicating some people were quite consistent despite environmental upheaval. Moreover, there were relatively few antecedents and consequences of consistency, with the exception of some goals and domains of satisfaction predicting consistency, leaving open the question of why changes in coherence occur.