Be Yourself and Behave Appropriately: Exploring Associations Between Incongruent Personality States and Positive Affect, Tiredness, and Cognitive Performance

Personality traits describe how people typically think, feel, and behave, and personality states describe how people think, feel, and behave in a given moment. In their daily lives, people often behave the way they typically do (they enact trait-congruent personality states), but occasionally behave differently from how they typically do (trait-incongruent personality states). Several theories propose that such incongruent personality states should be associated with undesirable outcomes such as less positive affect or more tiredness, but the current state of evidence is inconclusive and mostly based on one only personality dimension: extraversion. In this study, we contribute to filling important gaps in the literature by examining congruence of personality dimensions other than extraversion, considering characteristics of the situation, and modeling congruence with state-of-the-art response surface analyses. We aimed to manipulate perceived adversity and deception of the situation as well as state honesty-humility and state agreeableness in a prisoner’s dilemma paradigm. However, the manipulations had unexpected effects and were therefore considered unsuccessful. The study thus emphasized the difficulty of manipulating personality states, situation characteristics, and congruence in general. In pre-registered cross-sectional response surface analyses and specification curve analyses, we then examined how trait–state congruence and state–situation congruence were associated with cognitive performance in a numerical Stroop task, positive affect, and tiredness. Neither trait–state congruence nor state–situation congruence were associated with positive affect, tiredness, or cognitive performance. Overall, we therefore concluded that congruence may—if at all—only play a minor role in the associations between personality states and relevant outcomes.