Self-ratings of personality: a naturalistic comparison of normative, ipsative, and idiothetic standards.

The purpose of this research is to examine some of the implicit standards that individuals may use when they rate themselves on personality dimensions. Specifically, we compared ratings based on instructions that specified normative, ipsative, or idiothetic criteria with ratings obtained when subjects used their own (implicit) standards. In a series of three studies, we found that each of the explicit ratings was highly similar to the implicit-standard ratings and that there were substantial individual differences in the relative similarity of each of the explicit ratings to the implicit ratings. However, because the normative instructions elicited less extreme responses than any of the other instructions, there was a small but consistent tendency for them to be less similar to the ratings based on implicit standards than the ipsative or idiothetic ratings. The implications of this research for personality assessment and self-evaluation are discussed.