Construal and Contact in Person–Situation Relations: Evidence from Controlled and Naturalistic Designs

Personality is increasingly viewed as a dynamic system arising from the interaction between individuals and their situations. Yet, in naturalistic data, within-person links between personality states and situation perceptions often conflate two distinct mechanisms: situation contact—what people objectively encounter—and situation construal—how they interpret these encounters. To disentangle these components, we combined two longitudinal approaches: a standardized laboratory study (N = 189) in which situation contact was held largely constant, and a naturalistic experience-sampling study (N = 1,596) capturing the diversity of everyday contexts. Multilevel models revealed meaningful within-person covariation between Big Five states and situation perceptions in both designs. Cross-study comparison of standardized effect sizes confirmed broad replication, yet revealed dimension-specific divergence: Duty and Mating showed pronounced differences across designs, whereas dimensions such as Positivity and Negativity replicated closely. In the naturalistic study, person–situation associations varied systematically across situation cues — social partner, location, and activity — with some associations reversing direction depending on the situation contact. Together, these findings demonstrate that situation contact shapes which person–situation associations emerge and to what degree, and that its influence differs meaningfully across psychological situation dimensions. Incorporating situational context into experience-sampling research is therefore essential for accurately capturing personality as a context-sensitive, dynamic system.