Is it all in the eye of the beholder? Examining the affective consequences of direct and indirect measures of counterdispositional extraversion

ESM dataset

Although research on counterdispositional behavior—or behavior that diverges from one’s dispositions—is becoming increasingly popular, findings on its affective consequences are mixed. In the current study we try to explain those inconsistencies by comparing two existing indirect measures of counterdispositional extraversion (one relative to the trait level and one relative to the average state level), while also introducing a novel, direct measure in which people directly rate the extent to which feel they behave differently than they typically do. We collected a large ESM dataset from 187 participants who provided five daily ratings across a period of four weeks (N = 17,547 repeated measurements). Results showed that for the indirect measures of counterdispositional extraversion, higher state levels of extraversion related to higher levels of positive affect (PA) and lower levels of Negative Affect (NA), with people high on average state or trait extraversion experiencing even higher increases in PA. Findings of the direct measure revealed a different story, with people low on trait extraversion experiencing no increase in PA when acting more extraverted, and both introverts and extraverts having higher levels of NA when deviating from their typical behavior. Altogether, our findings show that acting in a more extraverted way is better for one’s well-being, on the understanding that subjective experiences of atypical behavior can be experienced as harmful, which is especially true for introverts.

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