Individual Behavior Consistencies as Interactive Styles: Their Relation to Personality

Two experimental studies were carried out in order to find within-subject consistencies as individual differences in a concurrent choice situation simulating risk-taking. In a first experiment, six adults were exposed to different values of probability and numbers of reinforcement in a task involving betting on two simultaneous horse races displayed on a microcomputer monitor. In the second experiment, two subjects were exposed to a within-session replication of the first experiment. The results in both experiments support the reliability of within-subject consistencies when experimental tasks are built as open contingencies. The conceptual and experimental implications of the data are discussed in relation to the study of personality.