Behavioral signatures at the ballpark: intraindividual consistency of adults’ situation-behavior patterns and their interpersonal consequences

Behavioral signatures of adults in naturally occurring social situations have yet to be established using reliable behavior observations, nor have they been related to the reactions of other people. In the present study, youth baseball coaches’ behaviors were unobtrusively assessed in vivo across a variety of game situations, and situation–behavior variations were related to athletes’ attitudes toward the coaches. Most coaches exhibited stable and idiographically distinctive situation–behavior patterns in both their supportive and instructional behaviors across winning, losing, and tied/close half-innings. Although overall rates of supportive, punitive, and instructional behaviors accounted for little variance in athletes’ liking for the coach, specific situation–behavior contingencies (e.g., if winning, then supportive; if losing, then punitive) were significantly related to children’s attitudes towards these coaches, whereas others (e.g., punitive while winning, supportive while losing) were not. Consistent with theoretical expectations based on Mischel’s cognitive social learning reconceptualization of personality, contextualized behaviors were stable and more highly related to the interpersonal liking variable than were decontextualized behavior aggregates.