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The sharp increase in consumption over the holiday season has important economic implications, yet the psychology underlying this phenomenon has received limited attention. Here, we evaluate the role of individual differences in holiday spending patterns. Using 2 million transactions across 2,133 individuals, we investigate the relationship between the Big 5 personality traits on spending at Christmas. Zero-order correlations suggest holiday spending is associated with conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion; the relationship with neuroticism persists after accounting for possible confounders including income and demographics. These results improve our understanding of how different personality traits predict how people respond to the environmental demands of the holiday season and have broader implications for how personality relates to consumer behavior., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Lievens (2017) makes a case for SJTs in personnel selection, a recommendation with which we agree. In particular, we like the emphasis on branching out from current methodologies and using new techniques such as SJTs not only in I/O or personnel selection research but also in basic personality research. Despite our enthusiasm, we point out some flaws, most notably lack a time dimension to SJTs.

Rauthmann, Sherman and Funder have made a landmark contribution to situation research in the target article of this issue. However, we propose that their work overlooks the need to incorporate a developmental perspective. This includes the separate but related issues of time and change . Situations often unfold over long periods of time, can bleed together, and are not time-delimited in the way traditional laboratory experiments define them. Moreover, individuals systematically change over time (lifespan development) and their reactions to situations, as well as their personality-situation transactions, develop in tandem.