The Personality of Societal Groups

The present study examines the personality of social situations and provides evidence for the construct validity of the Multivariate Personality Inventory (MPI; Miller & Magaro, 1977 ). A multivariate theory of personality describes five personality styles that reflect individual prototypes sharing similar constellations of needs, beliefs, and values. A variety of occupational and social settings are analyzed and predictions are offered to test the goodness-of-fit between the situation and each of the personality styles. The nine social situations examined were those containing car salespersons, fundamentalist church members, campus nondenominational church members, computer programmers, patrons of a "single's" bar, members of a women's social organization, members of a campus sorority, a women's softball team , and medical technologists . An analysis of variance ( ANOVA ) performed on the personality scales and the nine societal groups yielded a significant scale effect and a significant interaction between the social-occupational groups and their scores on the personality scales. Five of the seven groups about which predictions were made endorsed the predicted personality scale. The value of understanding personality within the context of the person-situation interaction is discussed.