PONE-D-24-00924Putting situational affordances in an intervention context: Personality as a moderator of intervention effectsPLOS ONE

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Review of PONE-24-00924: “Putting situational affordances in an intervention context: Personality as a moderator of intervention effects”

Many thanks for the opportunity to review this manuscript, which contains an interesting dataset based on state-of-the-art technology. Overall, the paper is well-written, and the analyses are performed competently. However, there are some problems with the theoretical and design-technical parts of the part, which I’ll explain below.

1. The introduction focuses on the effects of interventions on the expression of individual differences, i.e., that – depending on the intervention – some people may show stronger intervention-related outcomes based on their personality. However, the hypotheses, noted in the section on ‘The present study’ are about the ‘moderating role’ of personality on the intervention – outcome relation, which is something different. That is, the situational affordances framework argues that situations may moderate personality – criteria relations; here it is argued that personality moderates the situation – criteria relations. I know that – technically – this may entail the same analysis, but conceptually it is a different thing. Please make sure that you remain consistent through the manuscript which conceptualization is used.

2. Related to the above, it is unclear whether direct effects of personality and/or the situation were expected. Based on the absence of these direct effects in the preregistration, one would almost assume that no direct effects are hypothesized, but it would be highly unusual to expect pure moderator effects, so some direct effects are to be expected. There is some indication that the researchers expected a direct effect of the intervention in that FutureU ‘aims to strengthen people’s identification with their ‘future self’ in order to increase their future-oriented thinking and behavior’. Maybe it would be good to clearly state what the direct effects are in ‘The present study’ (although the authors might make a footnote in which they note that this wasn’t preregistered). Even less clear in the introduction is whether personality was expected to have a direct effect (which is actually the case in this study). It would be good to also make clear to the reader whether such direct effects were to be expected.

3. Although I appreciate the broad introduction on interventions and affordances, the sudden content shift to the ‘first test of this affordance-based intervention framework’ is large and is hard to follow for an unacquainted reader. I would either like to see – at the very beginning – a starting paragraph which introduces the central question and variables of this study before introducing the theoretical framework, or I would like the authors to make a better connection between the first (intervention and affordances) part and the second (FutureU) part. I prefer the first option. It also would be good to use some headers to help the reader navigate through the introduction because it contains a lot of different information.

4. Table 1 helps, but I would make sure that it is ordered in terms of the personality traits. Note that the outcome variable of interest is future self-identification; the authors might like to feature this in the table (or its heading) as well.

5. What I miss in the introduction, in Table 1, and in the methods section is how the FutureU intervention differs from the control condition in terms of the situational affordances. This is the most important variable of this study, and it is not clear from the introduction and beyond how the intervention is supposed to afford the expression of these three traits more than the control condition. Please explain. The control condition – or at least the kinds of situations that the control condition offers – might be featured in the Table 1 as well.

6. Interventions are usually targeted at behaviors, skills, and/or attitudes, and I understand from the introduction that the ultimate goal is to help participants to better set – and adhere – to goals. I also gather from the introduction (although it is not clearly stated as such) that future self-identification is thought to act as a mediator or moderator of the relation between the intervention and the ultimate goal of the intervention (i.e., more (future) goal-directed behaviors). To the reader, it is not clear how strong the evidence is that future self-identification indeed helps goal-directed behaviors and in what way (i.e., as a mediator or moderator). What kind of evidence can be brought to support the authors line of reasoning and how strong is this evidence (i.e., how ‘necessary’ is the variable future self-identification for the ultimate criterion)? Why didn’t the authors directly investigate the effect of the (interaction between the) intervention and personality on whether the participants set (more future-oriented/better) goals and/or whether they adhered to these goals?

7. Interaction effects – that are usually small – are notably difficult to find and replicate, so I wondered about the statistical power of the analyses, especially of the three-way interaction. Can the authors provide a power analysis?

8. As a reader, I prefer to first see a table with all correlations and descriptives (including M, SD, and reliabilities), containing (at least) gender, age, condition, personality variables, and (T1 through T4) criteria variables. In the supplement, this same table is preferably split in two (one for control condition, one for experimental condition). I especially wondered about the relations between the three criteria variables. What does factor-analysis show? Are these indeed independent factors, or might it be useful (and more parsimonious) to conduct the analyses on a higher-order (general) factor?

9. The effect of the intervention on vividness from T1 to T2 seems especially due to the high scores on vividness in T1 in the control group, so it is questionable whether this is actually due to the intervention, because there may be a ceiling effect for the level of vividness that participants experience. The sentence in the discussion that ‘The main effects … indicated that … FutureU … may be a promising intervention for stimulating future self-identification’ is too strong given the (lack of) evidence.

10. In general, my suggestion is to rewrite the manuscript by focusing on the intervention as a moderator of the personality – future self-identification relation (instead of personality as a moderator). This may help putting more in the foreground the important finding that Conscientiousness and Extraversion are (strong) personality predictors of future self-identification, something that – as far as I know – has not been studied before. I realize that this doesn’t strictly align with the preregistration, but I don’t see a problem with clarifying this in the manuscript (e.g., using a footnote). Good luck with the manuscript!

Reviewer #2: Thank you for the opportunity to review the manuscript (PONE-D-24-00924), entitled "Putting situational affordances in an intervention context: Personality as a moderator of

intervention effects." In their article, the authors suggest a theoretical framework for conceptualizing interventions as situations affording the expression of personality traits. The article has notable strengths, like the study design (RCT) and the empirical test of said framework. However, some issues could be addressed. Please find my comments below, I hope they help improving the article.

1. My first remark refers to the interpretation of results. In the preliminary results, the authors found an intervention effect for vividness but not for valence or relatedness. However, this finding was not discussed (apart from further optimizing the intervention). How could the intervention be optimized? Could one assume that people simply have a clearer image of themselves (i.e., more vividness) due to the presentation of their older avatar? If so, which adjustments would be possible to also address valence and relatedness?

2. The primary results revealed that there was only one significant interaction (for Extraversion), in contrast to their assumptions based on the framework. In the discussion, the authors mentioned that the lack of moderation could be explained by the control condition, which might have afforded certain traits as well. How could the intervention be modified so that the control condition does not afford the same trait? What would be the next steps?

3. Was a correction for multiple testing applied? If not, could the authors explain the rationale behind it?

4. Furthermore, I was thinking about alternative explanations for the results. Situational affordances are categorized as environmental variables that can clearly influence behavior, but person variables (like need or goals) also play an important role. Maybe it is not only about situational affordances but more about person situation fit (cf. Rauthmann, 2021)? And what about individual situation perception? Shouldn’t situation characteristics be included in the future to better understand whether the intervention actually affords the expression of certain traits? I think this could be discussed.

5. The authors state that open data were available and provide a link to an online platform, OSF. However, data were not openly available. The link to the data and code didn’t work. I guess this was due to a typo (“il” in the link instead of “io”, 295): However, even changing this typo does not solve the issue. Please add a View-only link in a potential revision of the article.

6. Concerning the figures, I was wondered if it would be possible to display the three groups (six trajectories) into one panel/graph? This way it would be easier to directly recognize the effects and compare them across groups. I would also recommend using confidence intervals around the point estimates (if possible). Finally, I would suggest mentioning the range of the y-axis in the note of the figure as it is truncated.

7. Generally, I think the limitations section could be more specific. The authors said, for instance, that the sample size was rather small for personality research (469). What would be a possible consequence of this? Why should it be a much larger sample for personality, and is the effect likely overestimated or underestimated?

Additional comments:

- The order of authors differs on the manuscript and on the completed form. Perhaps the authors would like to check this again.

- For vividness, the authors mentioned that items were answered on a 7-point Likert scale (228). Please consider this as a suggestion (I’m aware that many people use this wording), but I would recommend writing rating scale instead, as technically a Likert scale is a combination of items (cf. Likert, 1932).

References:

Likert, R. (1932). A technique for the measurement of attitudes. Archives of Psychology, 22 140, 55.

Rauthmann, J. F. (2021). Capturing interactions, correlations, fits, and transactions: A Person-Environment Relations Model. In The Handbook of Personality Dynamics and Processes (pp. 427–522). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-813995-0.00018-2

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Putting situational affordances in an intervention context: How the interaction between personality and intervention situations can help us explain differential intervention responses

PONE-D-24-00924R1

Dear Dr. van Gelder,

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Frantisek Sudzina

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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