The relationship of personality to punctuality for a variety of types of appointment

The punctuality with which undergraduate students kept four distinct types of appointment was observed without their knowledge. Ss were asked to record, confidentially, the importance with which they regarded each appointment, using a 7-point scale. A frequency distribution of the proportion of appointments kept punctually approximated to a normal distribution (rather than the bimodal distribution predicted by ‘common sense’). Both punctuality and importance-rating were strongly affected by appointment type. Ss' scores on the P scale of the EPQ were inversely related to the importance they attributed to appointments, but showed little relationship to punctuality. Their scores on the E scale, on the other hand, were inversely related to punctuality for most types of appointment, but were not related to the importance attributed to appointments. Ss' N scores were positively related to punctuality for those appointments that were generally regarded as ‘extremely important’. A small interaction effect between gender of the Ss and type of appointment may have been due to the gender of the majority of the experimenters' collaborators. A principal-components analysis revealed a primary factor on which punctuality, importance-rating, E score and P score all load highly, i.e. a ‘concern for appointments’ factor.