Personality in (Inter-)Action: An Unobtrusive Observation Approach to Studying Conversation-Based Personality Processes
Speaker: Matthias R. Mehl
Institution:
Department of Psychology
University of Arizona
Abstract:
How much time have you spent talking today? Or on the phone? Or arguing with others? How often have you used the words 'I' or 'we' or fillers such as 'like' or 'well'? These seemingly trivial questions are important because they illustrate how little is known about people's natural everyday interactions. Over the last years, I have developed the Electronically Activated Recorder or EAR, a momentary assessment tool that can people's naturally occurring (acoustic) social lives. Technically, the EAR is a PDA-based digital voice recorder that periodically records snippets of ambient sounds while participants go about their normal lives. Conceptually, it is an unobtrusive observation method that produces an acoustic log of a person's social life as it is naturally lived. With the EAR, we can begin to study how aspects of people's everyday conversations such as preferences for certain types of interactions or idiosyncrasies in word choice are related to psychological processes such as personality expression and person perception. This talk gives an overview of a line research that I have developed over the last 6 years. With regard to the basic psychometric properties of people's natural conversations, results from three large-scale EAR projects converge in demonstrating that habitual interaction preferences and linguistic styles are powerful markers of individual differences. The studies further reveal how aspects of people's personalities are expressed in their daily interactions, and how people form impressions of others on the basis of information about their daily interactions. Together, these studies demonstrate how a naturalistic observation approach can conceptually and empirically contribute to understanding conversation-based personality processes.