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

Abstract

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.

Cites (3)

1. Construct validity in psychological tests.
   Cronbach, Lee J., Meehl, Paul E. · 1955 · Psychological Bulletin
2. Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers.
   McCrae, Robert R., Costa, Paul T. · 1987 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
3. Note on the Sampling Error of the Difference Between Correlated Proportions or Percentages
   McNemar, Quinn · 1947 · Psychometrika

Show all 3 references

Cited by (13)

1. An Introduction to the Five‐Factor Model and Its Applications
   McCrae, Robert R., John, Oliver P. · 1992 · Journal of Personality
2. A contrarian view of the five-factor approach to personality description.
   Block, Jack · 1995 · Psychological Bulletin
3. On the accuracy of personality judgment: A realistic approach
   Funder, David C. · 1995 · Psychological Review
4. Narcissistic admiration and rivalry: disentangling the bright and dark sides of narcissism.
   Back, Mitja D., Küfner, Albrecht C. P., Dufner, Michael, Gerlach, Tanja M., Rauthmann, John F., Denissen, Jaap J. A. · 2013 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
5. Who knows what about a person? The self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model.
   Vazire, Simine · 2010 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

See all 582