A core assumption of personality is that individuals are characterized by q
ualities that are relatively invariant across situations and over time. His
torically, this led to a search for evidence of high consistency in a perso
n's behaviour across diverse situations. Empirical studies have shown, howe
ver, that, at least for behaviours of interest to social and personality ps
ychologists, cross-situational variability, rather than consistency, is in
fact the norm, creating years of debates and crises regarding the nature of
personality consistency. Our goal has been to resolve these crises by show
ing that people have stable 'behavioural signatures' visible in patterns of
cross-situational variability rather than consistency, and by suggesting a
n alternative conception of personality coherence based on the emerging gen
eral model of cognitive-affective processing of social information. In this
conception, an individual is characterized by the cognitions and affects t
hat are accessible, and the features of situations that activate them. The
personality system, however, is not just a list of such accessible thoughts
and feelings, but, rather, a dynamic network of functional relations that
guides and constrains their activation. The present paper shows how such a
system will produce a characteristic, and stable, pattern of variation of i
ts behavioural output as a function of specific features of situations, and
how these signatures of personality reflect the stable system that generat
es them. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.