Distinguishing generality and context specificity in personality is a one of the grand challenges of psychology. Extant research attempts to tackle this challenge by examining the agreement (or, consensus) between informants who rate targets’ personality traits in different contexts (e.g., the consensus between family and friends), but this literature is highly fragmented. Accordingly, we present a new theoretical framework that synthesizes theories of person-situation interaction into three parameters whereby contexts influence personality expression and perception: Adherence (i.e., generality), adaptation (i.e., context specificity), and acuity (i.e., perceptual accuracy). We then test this framework by examining cross-context consensus among informant ratings of Big Five personality traits in a meta-analysis (k = 43 samples, Ntargets = 6,363) spanning four contexts (i.e., family, friends, colleagues, strangers) and a primary sample (Ntargets = 6,120) spanning four workplace roles (i.e., supervisors, peers, subordinates, clients). Across traits and contexts, cross-context consensus is moderate among informant ratings of personality (mean r = .24). Consensus is stronger when informants rate extraversion or when they are well-acquainted with targets (i.e., family, friends, colleagues), but it is relatively homogenous across workplace roles. Surprisingly, the primary obstacle to consensus is not inconsistent behavior by targets, but informants who are error-prone in their personality ratings. After correcting for this error, we find that approximately 80% of targets’ personality expressions generalize across contexts and 20% are context specific. We conclude by discussing contributions and implications of findings, as well as limitations and future research directions.
