4 PERSONS, SITUATIONS, AND PERSONALITY JUDGMENT

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A photo shows a top down view of a man bungee jumping from a bridge with a river below.

EVERYDAY LANGUAGE CONTAINS MANY words to describe personality. Some years ago, the trailblazing personality psychologist Gordon Allport sent his loyal assistant, Henry Odbert, to count all the words that described personality traits he could find in an unabridged English dictionary. Weeks later, red-eyed and weary, Odbert staggered back into Allport’s office with the answer: 17,953 (Allport & Odbert, 1936). The words included familiar terms such as arrogant, shy, trustworthy, and conscientious, along with more obscure entries such as delitescent, vulnific, and earthbred.¹ The dictionary contains an amazing number and variety of personality traits, because traits are an important part of how people intuitively think and talk about each other.

As a result, personality psychology and everyday human observation are in some ways not so different. Both seek to characterize people using similar kinds of terms, and it is even possible to compare one approach to the other. Research on accuracy compares everyday judgments that people make of each other to direct observations of behavior and to personality assessments based on research and standardized instruments (Letzring & Funder, 2021).