For many years, the Personality Area faculty have realized that their research and teaching interests extend well beyond what is usually considered to be “personality psychology”—study of the traits of skin-bounded, de-contextualized individuals. For one thing, personality includes other variables besides traits: for example, motives, beliefs, values, self-concept and identity. Personality, moreover, is shaped and channeled by social contexts—both immediate situations and also enduring contexts such as gender, race and ethnicity, social class, institutions, culture, and history. Most area faculty research involves the combinations or “intersections” of personality characteristics with the affordances and barriers of social context. At the same time, several faculty members in the Organizational Area with research and teaching interests in the intersection of the individual and context have decided to join with the Personality faculty to form the Personality & Social Contexts Area.

This new area combines the traditional interests of personality psychology (examination of traits and individual differences) with the traditional focus associated with many organizational psychologists (the impact of the environment and context on individual behavior) into a new approach that examines the intersection of both the individual and the social context. As such, the focus of the Personality and Social Contexts Area is the dynamic nexus between characteristics of the individual and characteristics of the context in which they reside. In order to effectively study this nexus, it is important that we are able to also effectively study the individual and context separately. Thus, the research interests of the faculty in the area range on a continuum from those whose primary focus on individual characteristics to those who primarily focus on the study of contextual characteristics. All area faculty, however, recognize the importance of the nexus of the individual and contexts in the way that they conceptualize their research.