Perception of Personality Traits in Oneself and Others

ABSTRACT

Personality trait theory suggests that impressions of other people are veridical reports of their individual characteristics, and social perception theory suggests that personality descriptions are merely individuals' attributions, assumptions, and perceptions about others. Prior research has often used fixed adjectives to study personality descriptions and generally neglected the naturalistic study of the personality judgment process. A group of 101 American students listed six free-response adjectives that they felt were descriptive of their personality and six adjectives that they felt were descriptive of someone they knew well. The nature of these trait-descriptive adjectives was then examined, as well as their relationship to behaviors and situations and the manner in which they were expressed. Results indicate support for many of the tenets of the social perception approach—that distortions in the relative descriptions of oneself and others are present. However, many expected biases were not observed, because the free-response methodology yielded trait adjectives with high idiographic relevance to both self and others.