Social Processes in Daily Life

Michael Roche and his coauthors studied social processes and how they play out in daily life. In their study, college students with a high-dependency or a low-dependency personality reported how agentic (dominant vs. submissive) and communally (friendly vs. unfriendly) they behaved towards others, and how agentic and communally others behaved towards them during a one week period. High-dependency and low-dependency participants were similarly agentic towards interaction partners that were highly communal, but high-dependency participants were much less agentic than low-dependency participants to interaction partners that were less communal. People with a high-dependency personality seem to have trouble asserting dominance with people they perceive as unfriendly, which could lead them to be taken advantage of in some types of interactions. The next step in this research is to use this information to form treatments for helping improve the interactions of people with different types of personalities.