Are traits useful? Explaining trait manifestations as tools in the pursuit of goals.

Traits and motivation mainly have been treated separately for almost a century.The purpose of these studies is to test the proposal that traits and motivation are intricately linked.Specifically, that 1 explanation for traits, at least in terms of their descriptiveness of what people actually do, is the goals people pursue.Study 1 used experience-sampling methodology to show that almost half the variance in extraversion and conscientiousness manifestation was explained by goal pursuit differences.Both why people enacted more of extraversion and/or conscientiousness than others, and why people enacted extraversion and/or conscientiousness at any given moment were explained by the goals people were pursuing at those moments.Study 2 used experimental methodology to show that extraversion and conscientiousness enactment was in fact caused by the goal pursuit.Study 3 employed observer ratings to show that the goal-dependent enactments of traits were observer-verified actual behaviors.In all 3 studies, different goals affected different traits discriminatively.Thus, these findings provided strong evidence for 1 explanation of traits, that they are useful for accomplishing goals.These findings provided 1 answer to long-standing questions about the conceptual relations between traits and motivation.And these findings clarified the meaning and nature of extraversion and conscientiousness by revealing part of what these traits are for.