A personality dimension of consistency versus variability without the use of self-reports or ratings.

34 university students enacted scenes in which they portrayed junior high school mathematics teachers giving a short "lesson." Ss portrayed the teachers in 3 different ways: natural, extraverted, and introverted. Objective measures of time talking, eye contact time, and total lesson time were employed to construct cross-trial variability scores. The relationships between these cross-trial variability scores were highly significant, suggesting that an individual difference measure of intraindividual behavioral variability may be constructed without resort to ratings. Behavioral variability was also related to variability in self-ratings. (11 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)