Personality Judgment

A Realistic Approach to Person Perception

David C. Funder, David C. Funder

• Verlag: Academic Press
• Jahr: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780080492063
• Thema: Psicología
• Thema: Psicología cognitiva y cognición

Accuracy in judging personality is important in clinical assessment, applied settings, and everyday life. Personality judgments are important in assessing job candidates, choosing friends, and determining who we can trust and rely on in our personal lives. Thus, the accuracy of those judgments is important to both individuals and organizations.

In examining personality judgment, Personality Judgment takes a sweeping look at the field's history, assumptions, and current research findings. The book explores the construct of traits within the person-situation debate, defends the human judge in the face of the fundamental attribution error, and discusses research on four categories of moderators in judgment: the good judge, the judgeable target, the trait being judged, and the information on which the judgment is based.

Spanning two decades of accuracy research, this book makes clear not only how personality judgment has come to its current standing but also where it may move in the future.

• Covers 20 years worth of historical, current and future trends in personality judgment
• Includes discussions of debatable issues related to accuracy and error. The author is well known for his recently developed theoy of the process by which one person may render an accurate judgment of the personality traits of another

Chapter 1

Approaching Accuracy

This is a book about accuracy in personality judgment. It presents theory and research concerning the circumstances under which and processes by which one person might make an accurate appraisal of the psychological characteristics of another person, or even of oneself.

Accuracy is a practical topic. Its improvement would have clear advantages for organizations, for clinical psychology, and for the lives of individuals. With accurate personality judgment, organizations would become more likely to hire the right people and place them in appropriate positions. Clinical psychologists would make more accurate judgments of their clients and so serve them better. Moreover, a tendency to misinterpret the interpersonal world is an important part of some psychological disorders. If we knew more about accurate interpersonal judgment, this knowledge might help people to correct the kinds of misjudgments that can cause problems. Most important of all, if individuals made more accurate judgments of personality they might do better at choosing friends, avoiding people who cannot be trusted, and understanding their interpersonal worlds (Nowicki & Mitchell, 1998). This last-named advantage—improving interpersonal understanding—is the worthiest justification for doing research on accuracy and the most powerful reason why people find the topic interesting.

CURIOSITY AND ITS FULFILLMENT

When George Miller (1969) urged researchers to “give psychology away” to the wider public, the gifts he described were the ways in which psychological knowledge might be used to create more useful instruments for aircraft cockpits, allow more accurate selection of qualified employees, and ensure racial harmony, world peace, and increased sales of soap. Psychology can—to a greater or lesser degree— do all of these things, and these accomplishments help to justify its existence. Moreover, it certainly can be useful to predict what another person will do, or even to know what another person is thinking, and our interest in these matters is heightened when we feel a need to control what is going on (Swann, Stephenson, & Pittman, 1981).

But its practical accomplishments are not the primary reason that psychology exists, and our everyday interest about other people goes beyond pragmatic considerations. People are intrinsically interested in each other. How else can we explain the vast amount of otherwise pointless gossip that occupies so much of our time, gossip that consists largely of highly speculative judgments about why some other person is doing what he or she is doing, what he or she is thinking, and what he or she is likely to do next. How else can we explain the frequency of sidewalk cafes, confessional television programs, and telescopes in the windows of high-rise apartment complexes, all of which provide the opportunity to watch other people who, with any luck, you need never encounter nor be directly affected by in any other way. And how else, indeed, can we explain the existence of the highly paid occupation of “celebrity,” the function of which seems to be to give everybody on earth a few individuals in common that they can all gossip about?

Psychology arose to institutionalize, formalize, and satisfy the intrinsic curiosity people have about each other and about themselves. To paraphrase a comment by Sal Maddi (1996), if all of psychology were abolished tomorrow and all memory of its existence erased, before very long it would have to be reinvented, because some questions simply will not go away. If the reader of this book is a psychologist or graduate student in psychology, chances are that a burning interest in one or more of these questions is the reason the reader got into the field in the first place (Funder, 1998).

The fundamental questions people have about each other have two foci. The job of a local television news reporter is to satisfy the curiosity, sometimes morbid, of his or her viewers. When interviewing the person who just survived a plane crash or whose house has burned to the ground, the reporter invariably asks, “How did it feel? What were you thinking?” And when interviewing the surviving postal workers after one of their coworkers has gone on yet another murderous rampage, the reporter inevitably asks, “What kind of person was he? What was he like?”

In other words, included among the fundamental questions that underlie psychological curiosity are the ones that ask what people are thinking and feeling, and what they are like. The first concerns what Ickes (1993) has called “empathic accuracy,” defined as the ability to describe another person’s thoughts and feelings (see also Ickes, 1997). The second question concerns judgments of personality, of traits such as extraversion, honesty, sociability, and happiness. The two topics are relevant to each other. What one is thinking and feeling surely offers a clue as to the kind of person that he or she is. And different kinds of people no doubt think and feel differently, even in the same situation. The two topics are therefore not completely separable, and it will become apparent as we go along that the research findings concerning one of these topics is highly relevant to (and generally consistent with) the findings from the other (Colvin, Vogt, & Ickes, 1997). But this book is primarily about the latter topic. This is a book about how people make judgments of what each other is like, the degree to which these judgments achieve accuracy, and the factors that make accuracy in personality judgment more and less likely.

WHAT IS ACCURACY?

Accuracy is a topic that has only recently come back into acceptance, if not fashion, in research psychology (Funder & West, 1993). For the better part of four decades (1950–1990) psychologists were prone either to ignore accuracy or to redefine it out of existence. The reasons for this state of affairs range from the daunting methodological issues that confront the study of accuracy to the infiltration of deconstructionist philosophies into social psychology. The infiltration of these philosophies has had the subtle but unmistakable effect of causing many psychologists to be uncomfortable with the idea of assuming, defining, or even discussing the nature of social reality.

So at the outset it should be said that when this book talks about accuracy, the term is used advisedly yet in the most disingenuous possible way. Herein, accuracy refers not to any sophisticated reconstructionist, deconstructionist, or convenient operational definition of this very loaded word. Rather, it refers to the relation between what is perceived and what is.

This definition raises a large number of issues. The most central as well as the most daunting is the criterion issue, which concerns how reality—especially, psychological reality—can ever be known so that judgments can be compared with it to assess their accuracy. Other issues, only slightly less central and slightly less daunting, include the nature of personality, the quality of human judgment, and a host of methodological complications that arise in the study of personality and person perception.

These are all worthy issues. They deserve to be addressed directly. The topic of accuracy is too important to be ignored, sidestepped, or operationally redefined out of existence. The goal of this book, therefore, is to confront this topic, and these issues, as directly as possible.

CHAPTER ORGANIZATION

The remainder of this introductory chapter is in four parts. The first discusses in detail the reasons why the topic of accuracy in personality judgment is so important. These reasons are practical, theoretical, and even philosophical. The second part introduces the basic orienting assumptions of the particular approach to accuracy that will be taken in this book. Three seemingly simple but sometimes controversial assumptions entail an approach to accuracy that trespasses across the otherwise welldefended, traditional border between social and personality psychology. The third part of this chapter outlines some of the differences (and sometimes antagonisms) between social and personality psychology, and proposes a rapprochement. The need for the reintegration of personality and social psychology is a direct implication of the present approach to accuracy research, and is a persistent theme throughout this book. The fourth part of this chapter describes the historical roots of the Realistic Accuracy Model and outlines its research agenda and the overall plan of the remainder of the book.

THE IMPORTANCE OF ACCURACY

The accuracy of personality judgment touches on many areas of life. It is important for reasons that are practical, theoretical, and intrinsic.

Practical Considerations

Accuracy in personality judgment has important practical implications for people living their daily lives as well as for psychologists attempting to do work that has a positive effect on individuals and society.

Daily Life

A moment’s reflection will confirm that personality judgment is an important part of daily existence. Conversations about what other people are like fill our waking hours, and our impressions of others’ personality attributes drive decisions about who to trust, befriend, hire, fire, date, and marry. This process is formalized in the “letter of recommendation,” a common vehicle for one person to describe his or her impressions of another. “The candidate is cheerful, hard-working, resourceful, energetic, cooperative …” Trait terms like these abound in such letters and presumably are intended to mean something to, and to influence decisions made by, those who read them.

The sum total of the judgments made about you by everybody who knows you is your reputation. And as Robert Hogan has noted, your reputation may be your most important possession (Hogan, 1982; Hogan & Hogan, 1991). The care and maintenance of one’s reputation is the business of much if not all of social life, and how this endeavor turns out has large implications. People will kill to maintain their reputations and will sometimes kill themselves if their reputations are sufficiently and irreparably damaged. As Shakespeare’s Casio lamented,

Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!¹

Why is reputation seen as so important? There are at least three reasons. First, many doors in life are opened or closed to you as a function of how your personality is perceived. Someone who thinks you are cold will not date you, someone who thinks you are uncooperative will not hire you, and someone who thinks you are dishonest will not lend you money. This will be the case regardless of how warm, cooperative, or honest you might really be. Second, a long tradition of research on expectancy effects shows that to a small but important degree, people have a way of living up, or down, to the impressions others have of them. Children expected to improve their academic performance to some degree will do just that (Rosenthal, 1994), and young women expected to be warm and friendly tend to become so (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977).²

There is another important reason to care about what others think of us: They might be right. To learn the state of one’s health, one consults a medical expert. To learn whether one’s car is safe, one consults a mechanical expert. And if you want to learn what your personality is like, just look around. Experts surround you. The people in your social world have observed your behavior and drawn conclusions about your personality and behavior, and they can therefore be an important source of feedback about the nature of your own personality and abilities. This observation is not quite equivalent to the symbolic interactionist “looking glass self-hypothesis” that claims we cannot help but think about ourselves as others do (e.g., Mead, 1934; Shrauger & Schoeneman, 1979).

Rather, the idea is that looking to the natural experts in our social world is a rational way to learn more about what we are really like.

In an important sense, a reputation has a life of its own and operates and can be studied separately from the person who happens to own it. But that is not what will be done here. The present concern with the accuracy of personality judgment leads to a focus on the degree to which one’s reputation might be among the indicators of what a person is really like.

Applied Psychology

Accurate personality judgment is important to a large segment of applied psychology as well. For example, consider the long-term consequences of traumatic events. It has been suggested that sexually abused children grow up with lowered selfesteem, an impaired sense of control and competence, and an increase in negative emotions (Trickett & Putnam, 1993). These are important consequences. How do we know they occur? Only because somebody has somehow made a personality judgment. Accurate judgment of personality is required to even begin to study how people are affected by important life events. More broadly, any assessment by a counselor, probation officer, or clinical psychologist involves one person trying to accurately judge some attribute of the personality of another.

Recall the reader of those le...