Objective And Background: How do targets shape consensus in impression formation? Targets are known to play an outsized role in the accuracy of first impressions, but their influence on consensus has been difficult to study. With the help of the recently developed extended Social Relations Model, we explore the structure and correlates of individual differences in consensus (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis research aims to further our understanding of the processes of metaperception formation and meta-accuracy by introducing the positivity-specificity model to metaperception, which can be used to disentangle two components of trait metaperceptions: metapositivity (attitudes) and trait-specificity (substance). In two North American samples (Sample 1, = 547; Sample 2, = 553), we used the positivity-specificity model to investigate five important aspects of metaperceptions, namely the extent to which (a) metaperceptions reflect metapositivity versus trait-specificity, (b) metapositivity reflects attitudes about the self, (c) the effects of metapositivity and trait-specificity vary across traits and acquaintances, (d) metapositivity helps or hurts meta-accuracy, and (e) metapositivity and trait-specificity are accurate independent of self-perceptions. Overall, participants' ideas about how they were seen included attitudes and substance, but the relative contribution of each depended on the trait being judged and on how well they knew an acquaintance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOrganizational scientists have historically assessed personality via self-reports, but there is a growing recognition that personality ratings from observers offer superior prediction of job performance compared to targets' self-reports. Yet, the origin of these differences remains unclear: do observers show predictive validity advantages (a) because they have a clearer lens into how targets' thoughts, feelings, and desires translate to their behaviors (), (b) because they infer personality from how targets characteristically adapt their behaviors to situations (), or (c) because they omit targets' unexpressed, internal aspects of personality ()? With a sample of 422 cadets at a highly selective military educational institute in South Korea, we applied (McAbee & Connelly, 2016) Trait-Reputation-Identity (TRI) Model to decompose consensus and discrepancy in multirater personality data. The variance associated with reputations (the unique personality insights held by observers) dominated the prediction for conscientiousness and agreeableness in predicting all criteria.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-report questionnaires are the most commonly used personality assessment despite longstanding concerns that self-report responses may be distorted by self-protecting motives and response biases. In a large-scale meta-analysis ( N = 33,033; k = 152 samples), we compared the means of self- and informant reports of the same target's Big Five personality traits to examine the discrepancies in two rating sources and whether people see themselves more positively than they are seen by others. Inconsistent with a general self-enhancement effect, results showed that self-report means generally did not differ from informant-report means (average δ = -.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPersonality and social psychology have historically been divided between personality researchers who study the impact of traits and social-cognitive researchers who study errors in trait judgments. However, a broader view of personality incorporates not only individual differences in underlying traits but also individual differences in the distinct ways a person's personality is construed by oneself and by others. Such unique insights are likely to appear in the idiosyncratic personality judgments that raters make and are likely to have etiologies and causal force independent of trait perceptions shared across raters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThough unlikely virtues scales have a long history in personality, clinical, and applied psychology for detecting socially desirable responding, using such social desirability (SD) scales has generally failed to improve the validity of personality measures. We examined whether this is because (a) response distortion itself has minimal impact on personality's validity, (b) SD scales are ineffective at assessing response distortion, or (c) SD scales are conflated with substantive trait variance. We compiled a meta-analytic multitrait multimethod matrix consisting of multirater personality traits, SD scales, and performance outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this introduction to the Special Section on Openness to Experience, we review the historical background of the construct and its measurement. We also provide a meta-analytically based review of its broader nomological net. Specifically, we review relationships with other individual differences constructs, including personality traits, interests, and cognitive ability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn employee selection and academic admission decisions, holistic (clinical) data combination methods continue to be relied upon and preferred by practitioners in our field. This meta-analysis examined and compared the relative predictive power of mechanical methods versus holistic methods in predicting multiple work (advancement, supervisory ratings of performance, and training performance) and academic (grade point average) criteria. There was consistent and substantial loss of validity when data were combined holistically-even by experts who are knowledgeable about the jobs and organizations in question-across multiple criteria in work and academic settings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExisting taxonomies of Openness's facet structure have produced widely divergent results, and there is limited comprehensive empirical evidence about how Openness-related scales on existing personality inventories align within the 5-factor framework. In Study 1, we used a critical incidents sorting methodology to identify 11 categories of Openness measures; in Study 2, we meta-analyzed the relationships of these categories with global markers of the Big Five traits (utilizing data from 106 samples with a total sample size of N = 35,886). Our results identified 4 true facets of Openness: aestheticism, openness to sensations, nontraditionalism, and introspection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmerging studies have shown that observers' ratings of personality predict performance behaviors better than do self-ratings. However, it is unclear whether these predictive advantages stem from (a) use of observers who have a frame of reference more closely aligned with the criterion ("narrower scope") or (b) observers having greater accuracy than targets themselves ("clearer lens"). In a primary study of 291 raters of 97 targets, we found predictive advantages even when observers were personal acquaintances who knew targets only outside of the work context.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThough most personality researchers now recognize that ratings of the Big Five are not orthogonal, the field has been divided about whether these trait intercorrelations are substantive (i.e., driven by higher order factors) or artifactual (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe bulk of personality research has been built from self-report measures of personality. However, collecting personality ratings from other-raters, such as family, friends, and even strangers, is a dramatically underutilized method that allows better explanation and prediction of personality's role in many domains of psychology. Drawing hypotheses from D.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe authors review criticisms commonly leveled against cognitively loaded tests used for employment and higher education admissions decisions, with a focus on large-scale databases and meta-analytic evidence. They conclude that (a) tests of developed abilities are generally valid for their intended uses in predicting a wide variety of aspects of short-term and long-term academic and job performance, (b) validity is not an artifact of socioeconomic status, (c) coaching is not a major determinant of test performance, (d) tests do not generally exhibit bias by underpredicting the performance of minority group members, and (e) test-taking motivational mechanisms are not major determinants of test performance in these high-stakes settings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInsight into applicant intentional distortion on personality measures was obtained by comparing individual responses provided in an organizational context with high motivation to distort (selection) and those provided in an organizational context with low motivation to distort (development). An assessment firm database containing responses to the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) was searched for within-subject data. Seven hundred and thirteen individuals were identified as having completed the CPI twice: once for selection purposes and once for development purposes or twice for the same purpose.
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