Sociability: Personality, social context, and physical setting.

Sociability, measured as amount of participation i n a peer-group conversation, was examined as a function of traits, social context, and physical setting. Samesex quartets of 13- t o 17-year-old students discussed a topic selected b y an outsider and a topic of the group's own choice. Amount of participation was expected t o vary with personality (Affiliation, Defendence, and Dominance), social context (level of Acquaintance and Friendship i n the group), physical setting (Seating Arrangement), and interactions among these. Participants rate was significantly related to Affiliation, level of Friendship, a Person X Setting interaction (Seating Arrangement X Defendence) and a Person X Person interaction (Affiliation X Defendence). These relationships are discussed as they relate to a model of sociability and as they bear on the Person X Situation issue. This study investigates two overlapping problems, one concerned with understanding the conditions that influence differential participation in conversations and a second concerned with person and setting variables as determinants o f social behavior. Although these two problems each have a considerable history, few studies have addressed them jointly. Sociability, measured as participation in a leaderless peer-group discussion, has been studied for a long time (e.g., Mann, 1959). Its correlates have been reviewed and summarized (e.g., Shaw, 1976). The influences on sociability may be classed into three main categories: person-based variables, social context variables, and physical setting variables. Our simple descriptive model states that most of the variance i n sociability may b e accounted for by these three kinds of variables and interactions among them. The evidence concerning traits, a major subcategory o f person-based variables, and conversational participation is relatively clear in suggesting that various measures of dispositional sociability are significantly related to amount of participation i n small groups (Bass, McGehee, Hawkins, Young, & Gebel,