 31. Persons, Situations, and Person–Situation Interactions  675
in that it highlights a stable personality dis -
position that is defined by cross-  situational 
behavioral variability. Understanding the 
personality characteristics that explain such 
differences in peoples’ variability (or skew or 
kurtosis, for that matter; Fleeson, 2001) is 
an important direction for future research.
A second and related way in which per -
sonality psychology has gone beyond a focus 
on idiosyncratic if–then patterns is by identi -
fying consequences of behavioral variability. 
For example, Sadikaj et al. (2015, p. 722) ex -
amined the idea of behavioral “spin,” which 
is akin to behavioral variability and reflects 
“the range and extremity of a person’s inter -
personal behavior around the person’s typi -
cal (i.e., mean) interpersonal behavior that 
unfolds across situations and over time.” 
They recently discovered that among people 
in a romantic relationships, if one person 
exhibits a high degree of spin, then his or 
her partner experiences low relationship sat -
isfaction; that is, extreme behavioral vari -
ability seems to have negative consequences 
for relationships. Apparently, it is difficult 
to live with people whose behavior is erratic 
and unpredictable.
A third way in which personality psy -
chology has gone beyond simply identifying 
idiosyncratic if–then patterns is by seeking 
their dispositional sources; that is, research -
ers are examining whether certain people 
are more or less likely to respond to certain 
classes of situations in particular ways. For 
example, imagine that you are at work, in -
teracting with a coworker. Your coworker’s 
behavior can be seen as an aspect of your  
situation—  a contextual stimulus to which 
you might respond in a variety of ways. How 
do you act when your coworker is warm 
and agreeable—  do you also act warmly 
and agreeably? What if she is cold and 
quarrelsome—  do you behave coldly as well? 
Perhaps not surprisingly, when faced with a 
quarrelsome coworker, the typical person 
acts quarrelsomely, and when in a situation 
with a warm coworker, the typical person 
acts warmly (Yao & Moskowitz, 2015). 
This shows the power of one’s “situation” 
(in this case, the degree of quarrelsomeness 
vs. warmth of another person) on the typical 
person’s behavior; one’s behavior is partially 
contingent on the situation. Also perhaps 
not surprisingly, people who are relatively agreeable (one of the Big Five traits) tend to 
act warmer than people who are relatively 
disagreeable, in general, regardless of the 
situation. This finding shows the power of 
stable personality dispositions (in this case, 
agreeableness) on behavior across situations.
Even more interestingly, not everyone has 
this same pattern of responding to his or her 
coworkers’ quarrelsomeness, or at least not 
to the same degree. Rather, people who are 
relatively agreeable are less reactive to their 
coworkers’ behavior, as compared to people 
who are relatively disagreeable. Put anoth -
er way, the stable personality disposition 
of agreeableness affects or moderates how 
people respond to a particular situational 
stimulus: People low on agreeableness re -
spond more “in kind” to their coworkers’ 
behavior, being quarrelsome when their co -
worker is quarrelsome and warm when their 
coworker is warm. People high on agreeable -
ness respond less “in kind,” with behavior 
that is not as strongly contingent on their 
coworker’s behavior. This moderating effect 
of agreeableness is very much in the spirit of 
person–  situation interaction, and the suite 
of findings reported by Yao and Moskow -
itz (2015) is a nice illustration of the way 
that meaningful “pure” situational effects, 
meaningful “pure” dispositional effects, and 
meaningful person–  situation interactions 
can all happen together.
This third way of going beyond idiosyn -
cratic if–then patterns, as illustrated by Yao 
and Moskowitz (2015) and others (e.g., 
Fleeson, 2007), also illustrates a way of 
reconciling a trait approach and an if–then 
approach. Rather than facing an infinite 
number of idiosyncratic if–then patterns, we 
might identify groupings of patterns that re -
semble each other sufficiently well and clas -
sify people with those patterns as similar in 
some way. For example, the syndrome of 
rejection sensitivity (e.g., Romero-  Canyas 
et al., 2009) characterizes a person who 
manifests the pattern of being kind and sup -
portive in the early stages of a relationship 
but insecure and demanding in the latter 
stages. Perhaps other if–then patterns could 
be identified that are shared by substantial 
numbers of individuals, which would allow 
individual differences to be conceptualized 
in a way that takes account of within-  person 
behavioral variance.