Friends and strangers: acquaintanceship, agreement, and the accuracy of personality judgment.

We examined the effect of acquaintanceship on interjudge agreement in personality ratings. Approximately 150 undergraduates described their own personalities using the Q-sort. They were also described by two close acquaintances and by two "strangers" who knew them only via a single, spontaneous interaction viewed on videotape. The effect of acquaintanceship was powerful: Judgments by close acquaintances agreed with each other and with subjects' self-judgments much better than did judgments by strangers, even though strangers' judgments agreed with each other and with subjects' self-judgments beyond a chance level. This result implies that agreement among acquaintances' judgments must derive at least partly from experience with and observation of the person who is judged. The same traits that yielded better agreement among acquaintances also yielded better agreement among strangers and tended to be rated higher in subjective visibility, suggesting that people are intuitively knowledgeable about the traits they can judge with more and less agreement.

[1]  D. Funder,et al.  Profiting from controversy. Lessons from the person-situation debate. , 1988, The American psychologist.

[2]  Daniel T. Gilbert,et al.  Influence and inference: What the active perceiver overlooks. , 1987 .

[3]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  Accuracy of person perception: do people know what kinds of impressions they convey? , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[4]  D. Funder,et al.  Differences between traits: properties associated with interjudge agreement. , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[5]  P. Costa,et al.  Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[6]  D. Funder,et al.  Errors and mistakes: evaluating the accuracy of social judgment. , 1987, Psychological bulletin.

[7]  D. Funder,et al.  On the several facets of personality assessment: The case of social acuity. , 1986, Journal of personality.

[8]  Paul T. Costa,et al.  Evaluating comprehensiveness in personality systems: The California Q‐Set and the five‐factor model , 1986 .

[9]  J. S. Wiggins,et al.  Personality Assessment via Questionnaires , 1986 .

[10]  M. Rothbart,et al.  On the confirmability and disconfirmability of trait concepts. , 1986 .

[11]  J. M. Digman,et al.  Further specification of the five robust factors of personality. , 1986 .

[12]  Berndt Brehmer,et al.  New directions in research on decision making , 1986 .

[13]  Peter Borkenau,et al.  The Trait Concept: Current Theoretical Considerations, Empirical Facts, and Implications for Personality Inventory Construction , 1986 .

[14]  Ralph B. Taylor,et al.  Words, People, and Implicit Personality Theory , 1985 .

[15]  P. Costa,et al.  Updating Norman's "Adequate Taxonomy": intelligence and personality dimensions in natural language and in questionnaires. , 1985, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[16]  Douglas N. Jackson,et al.  Construct validity and the predictability of behavior. , 1985 .

[17]  C. Woodruffe.  Consensual validation of personality traits: Additional evidence and individual differences. , 1985 .

[18]  Daniel J. Ozer,et al.  Correlation and the coefficient of determination , 1985 .

[19]  W. Revelle,et al.  Personality traits: fact or fiction? A critique of the Shweder and D'Andrade systematic distortion hypothesis. , 1984, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[20]  W. Swann,et al.  Quest for accuracy in person perception: a matter of pragmatics. , 1984, Psychological review.

[21]  Mark Cook,et al.  Issues in Person Perception , 1984 .

[22]  Robert M. Hamm,et al.  The Relative Efficacy of Intuitive and Analytical Cognition: A Second Direct Comparison , 1984 .

[23]  W. Mischel.  Convergences and challenges in the search for consistency. , 1984 .

[24]  S. Andersen.  Self-knowledge and social inference: II. The diagnosticity of cognitive/affective and behavioral data. , 1984 .

[25]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  The Social Relations Model , 1984 .

[26]  Ralph L. Rosnow,et al.  Essentials of Behavioral Research: Methods and Data Analysis , 1984 .

[27]  D. Funder.  The "consistency" controversy and the accuracy of personality judgments. , 1983, Journal of personality.

[28]  D. Funder,et al.  Delay of gratification: Some longitudinal personality correlates. , 1983 .

[29]  D. Funder,et al.  On the nature and accuracy of attributions that change over time , 1983 .

[30]  D. Funder,et al.  Behavior as a function of the situation. , 1983 .

[31]  J. Cheek.  Aggregation, moderator variables, and the validity of personality tests: A peer-rating study. , 1982 .

[32]  David C. Funder,et al.  On the Accuracy of Dispositional Versus Situational Attributions , 1982 .

[33]  Robert R. McCrae,et al.  Consensual validation of personality traits: Evidence from self-reports and ratings. , 1982 .

[34]  D. Funder.  On assessing social psychological theories through the study of individual differences: Template matching and forced compliance. , 1982 .

[35]  J. Harackiewicz,et al.  Accuracy of Person Perception , 1982 .

[36]  Donald B. Rubin,et al.  A Simple, General Purpose Display of Magnitude of Experimental Effect , 1982 .

[37]  D. Moskowitz,et al.  Validity comparison of behavior counts and ratings by knowledgeable informants. , 1982 .

[38]  Teresa M. Amabile,et al.  When Self-Descriptions Contradict Behavior: Actions Do Speak Louder Than Words. , 1982 .

[39]  L. Cohen.  Can human irrationality be experimentally demonstrated? , 1981, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[40]  R. Hogarth.  Beyond discrete biases: Functional and dysfunctional aspects of judgmental heuristics. , 1981 .

[41]  A. L. Edwards,et al.  Significant Others and Self-Evaluation , 1981 .

[42]  L. Ross,et al.  Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. , 1981 .

[43]  D. Funder.  On seeing ourselves as others see us: Self–other agreement and discrepancy in personality ratings. , 1980 .

[44]  D. Funder.  The “trait” of ascribing traits: Individual differences in the tendency to trait ascription☆ , 1980 .

[45]  R. Festinger.  Retrospections on Social Psychology , 1980 .

[46]  Douglas T. Kenrick,et al.  Personality traits and the eye of the beholder: Crossing some traditional philosophical boundaries in the search for consistency in all of the people. , 1980 .

[47]  A. Tversky,et al.  On the interpretation of intuitive probability: A reply to Jonathan Cohen , 1979, Cognition.

[48]  D. Weiss.  The effects of systematic variations in information on judges' descriptions of personality. , 1979 .

[49]  D. Weiss,et al.  How relevant is a semantic similarity interpretation of personality ratings , 1979 .

[50]  D. Jackson,et al.  Nonverbal trait inference. , 1979 .

[51]  Edward E. Jones,et al.  Person perception 2nd ed. , 1979 .

[52]  David C. Funder,et al.  Predicting more of the people more of the time: Assessing the personality of situations. , 1978 .

[53]  John Cotton,et al.  Fundamental statistics in psychology and education. 6th ed. , 1978 .

[54]  Richard A. Shweder,et al.  How relevant is an individual difference theory of personality? , 1975, Journal of personality.

[55]  Daryl J. Bem,et al.  ON PREDICTING SOME OF THE PEOPLE SOME OF THE TIME: THE SEARCH FOR CROSS-SITUATIONAL CONSISTENCIES IN BEHAVIOR , 1974 .

[56]  D. Jackson,et al.  An evaluation of forced-choice and true-false item formats in personality assessment , 1973 .

[57]  D. Mcclelland.  Opinions predict opinions: so what else is new? , 1972, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[58]  L. R. Goldberg,et al.  Comparative validity of different strategies of constructing personality inventory scales. , 1967, Psychological bulletin.

[59]  W. T. Norman,et al.  Raters, ratees, and randomness in personality structure. , 1966 .

[60]  W. T. Norman,et al.  A universal conception of personality structure? , 1966, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[61]  R. Taft.  Accuracy of empathic judgments of acquaintances and strangers. , 1966, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[62]  J. S. Wiggins,et al.  SOCIAL REPUTATION AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR: A FURTHER VALIDATION OF THE PEER NOMINATION INVENTORY. , 1964, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[63]  W. T. Norman,et al.  Toward an adequate taxonomy of personality attributes: replicated factors structure in peer nomination personality ratings. , 1963, Journal of abnormal and social psychology.

[64]  Jack Block,et al.  The Q-sort method in personality assessment and psychiatric research , 1964 .

[65]  E. A. Haggard,et al.  Intraclass Correlation and the Analysis of Variance , 1958 .

[66]  J. P. Guilford,et al.  Fundamental statistics in psychology and education, 3rd ed. , 1956 .

[67]  L. Cronbach.  Processes affecting scores on understanding of others and assumed similarity. , 1955, Psychological bulletin.

[68]  R. Taft,et al.  The ability to judge people. , 1955, Psychological bulletin.

[69]  L. Cronbach,et al.  Construct validity in psychological tests. , 1955, Psychological bulletin.

[70]  A. H. Hastorf,et al.  A caution respecting the measurement of empathic ability. , 1952, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[71]  D. W. Fiske.  Consistency of the factorial structures of personality ratings from different sour sources. , 1949, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[72]  Q. Mcnemar.  Note on the sampling error of the difference between correlated proportions or percentages , 1947, Psychometrika.

[73]  J. Guilford,et al.  Fundamental statistics in psychology and education , 1943 .

[74]  G. Āllport.  Personality: A Psychological Interpretation , 1938 .

[75]  J. B. Maller,et al.  Studies in the Nature of Character. , 1930 .