Construal and Contact in Person–Situation Relations: Evidence from Controlled and Naturalistic Designs

Abstract

Personality is increasingly viewed as a dynamic system arising from the interaction between individuals and their situations. Yet, in naturalistic data, within-person links between personality states and situation perceptions often conflate two distinct mechanisms: situation contact—what people objectively encounter—and situation construal—how they interpret these encounters. To disentangle these components, we combined two longitudinal approaches: a standardized laboratory study (N = 189) in which situation contact was held largely constant, and a naturalistic experience-sampling study (N = 1,596) capturing the diversity of everyday contexts. Multilevel models revealed meaningful within-person covariation between Big Five states and situation perceptions in both designs, with effect sizes that were small to medium in magnitude and theoretically coherent across both settings. However, in the naturalistic study, person–situation associations varied systematically across situation cues—social partner, location, and activity—with some associations shifting in magnitude or reversing direction depending on the context. Together, these findings suggest that construal is a primary driver of person–situation associations, but that situation contact shapes which associations emerge, to what degree, and across which situation perception dimensions. Accounting for situation contact may therefore help to more accurately capture personality as a context-sensitive, dynamic system.