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A psychological model for the explanation of individual formal voluntary organization (FVO) participation is proposed and tested on two purposive samples of members and matched eligible nonmembers of several FVO's in Chile. The model includes three sets of variables of increasing specificity --personality traits, attitudes relevant to FVO's in general, and attitudes toward the specific FVO. The results strongly support the value of the sequential specificity model, accounting for over 50 per cent of the variance in participation in both samples. In addition, the results indicate that general and specific FVO-relevant attitudes are the more important discriminators of FVO members from non-members, while personality traits aremore important discriminators of high-from low-participating members. This fact is attributed to a two-stage selection process.