Personality processes– from description to explanation

Abstract Personality processes are central for the entire discipline of psychology. Understanding intraindividual processes and the ways in which they differ interindividually is necessary to explain behavioral differences. Processes explain concrete behavior and they are responsible for individual change and normative development. They are the core of psychological functioning and thus have the potential to unify subdisciplines of psychology. We suggest the Nonlinear Interaction of Person and Situation (NIPS) Process Model as a framework for organizing psychological processes according to the shape of their effect on outcome behavior. The NIPS Process Model proposes four classes of processes: activation (including persons’ threshold and demands of a situation), tendency (including person's bias and alternatives in a situation), inhibition (including person's avoidance and restrictions in a situation), and predictability (including person's variability and selectivity in a situation). A framework such as the NIPS can help to identify connections between areas of research and to detect understudied areas of research.