Personality-driven situation experience, contact, and construal: How people’s personality traits predict characteristics of their situations in daily life

• Person–environment transactions: situation experience, contact, construal.
• Multi-rater approach to disentangle contact from construal in situation experiences.
• Two studies: Big Five traits predict experience, contact, and construal of Situational Eight characteristics.
• Replicable: Openness–Intellect, Extraversion–Adversity, Agreeableness–Deception, Neuroticism–pOsitivity.
• Implications for personality development and situation management.

In situation perceptions, the objective situation and its unique construal are confounded. We propose a multiple-rater approach where situations are rated by raters in situ (who experienced the situations first-hand) and raters ex situ (who read participants’ factual descriptions of the situations). Two multi-wave studies (Austria: N = 176–179, 3 waves; USA: N = 202, 4 waves), examined associations between personality traits (Big Five OCEAN) and four sources of ratings of situation characteristics (Situational Eight DIAMONDS), namely (a) in situ (situation experience), (b) ex situ (situation contact, conservative), (c) what is shared between in situ and ex situ (situation contact, liberal), and (d) in situ controlled for ex situ (situation construal). Replicable evidence was found that personality is associated with the situations people encounter as well as their construal of them.