Personality and perceptions of situations from the Thematic Apperception Test

•Theoretical accounts of situation perception are examined.•Individuals display consistent distinct perceptions of situations.•Distinct perceptions of situations are related to personality.•Neuroticism and Openness are characterized by meaningful construal patterns.

Participants (N = 186) viewed three pictures from the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1938) and rated the situations contained therein using a new measure of situations, the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). Results support a two-component view of situation perception: an objective component attributable to the situation being perceived and a subjective component attributable to the person doing the perceiving ( Murray, 1938, Rauthmann, 2012, Sherman et al., 2013 and Wagerman and Funder, 2009). Further, distinctive perceptions of situations were consistent across pictures and were associated with the Big Five personality traits, particularly Neuroticism and Openness, in a theoretically meaningful manner. These results provide support for perception as a core process for how personality traits work.