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Wood, D., Tov, W., & Costello, C. (2015). What a _____ thing to do! Formally characterizing actions by their expected effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108, 953-976. Abstract A number of personality frameworks assume that traits describe central tendencies of action – for instance: calling someone assertive indicates they have a tendency to perform assertive actions. But what makes it appropriate to characterize an action by terms like assertive? We propose that actions are characterized by terms such as assertive, kind, and honest in large part by having expected effects on the environment which match particular conceptual templates. In the present studies, we attempt to better identify the expected effects which perceivers seem to utilize to make action characterizations related to the Big Five and HEXACO personality dimensions. First, we identified a number of expected effect dimensions which may be central to socially important action concepts. Next, a set of 150 situation-action scenarios were generated from actions suggestive of conscientiousness-related characteristics (Study 1), and characteristics in other HEXACO domains (Study 2). Participants then characterized each scenario on a range of dimensions (e.g., as dependable vs. undependable; assertive vs. submissive). A separate group of raters coded the extent to which the actions were expected to result in 21 different effects (e.g., increase effort expenditure; advance career goals; fulfill commitments). Action characterizations were highly predicted by expected effect dimensions in ways that matched provisional hypotheses and were consistent across studies. Further, actions characterizations tended to be highly diagnostic of self-reported individual differences in the same characteristics. We discuss implications for a range of phenomena, such as understanding the relations between behaviors and traits, integrating of trait models and decision-making models of action, and understanding the effect of situations on personality traits.[Download PDF] |