WRAPPING IT UP

SUMMARY

The Trait Approach

The trait approach to personality begins by assuming that individuals differ in their characteristic patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. These patterns are called personality traits.

People Are Inconsistent

Classifying people according to traits raises an important problem, however: People are inconsistent. Indeed, some psychologists have suggested that people are so inconsistent in their behavior from one situation to the next that it is not worthwhile to characterize them in terms of personality traits. The controversy over this issue is called the person-situation debate.

The Person-Situation Debate

Situationists, or opponents of the trait approach, argue (1) that according to a review of the personality literature, the ability of traits to predict behavior is extremely limited; (2) that situations are therefore more important than personality traits for determining what people do; and (3) that not only is personality assessment (the measurement of traits) a waste of time, but also many of people’s intuitions about each other are fundamentally wrong.
The rebuttals to the first situationist argument are that a fair review of the literature reveals that the predictability of behavior from traits is better than is sometimes acknowledged; that improved research methods can increase this predictability; and that the putative upper limit for predictability (a correlation of about .40) is more impressive than is sometimes recognized.
The response to the second situationist argument is that many important effects of situations on behavior are no bigger statistically than the documented size of the effects of personality traits on behavior.
The effect of personality on behavior shows up in relative consistency, the maintenance of individual differences; it does not imply that people act the same way regardless of the situation. Behavioral change and consistency can and often are seen in the same data.
The evidence in favor of the existence and importance of personality is sufficiently strong as to disconfirm the argument that people’s intuitions are fundamentally flawed. People perceive personality traits in themselves and others because such perceptions are often valid and useful.
The large number of personality-trait terms also implies that traits are a useful way for predicting behavior and understanding personality.

The Accuracy of Personality Judgment

Research has evaluated the accuracy of personality judgments in terms of consensus and predictive validity. Judgments that agree with judgments from other sources (such as other people) or that are able to predict the target person’s behavior are more likely to be accurate than judgments that do not agree with each other or cannot predict behavior.
First impressions of personality can be surprisingly accurate. However, such judgments are more accurate for some traits than others and tend to become more accurate with more extended acquaintanceship.
Research has examined four variables that seem to affect the likelihood of accurate personality judgment: (1) the good judge (some judges are more accurate than others); (2) the good target (some individuals are easier to judge than others); (3) the good trait (some traits are easier to judge accurately than others); and (4) good information (more or better information about the target makes accurate judgment more likely).
The Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM) of the process of accurate personality judgment describes accuracy as a function of the relevance, availability, detection, and utilization of behavioral cues.
RAM implies that accurate personality judgment is difficult, helps to explain the four moderators of accuracy, and suggests ways in which one might be able to judge others more accurately.

Accurate Self-Knowledge

RAM can also be used to explain the basis of self-knowledge, especially at the relevance, detection, and utilization stages.
Becoming aware of one’s own traits may be difficult because some traits are more visible from the outside than from the inside and because our most characteristic behaviors may become invisible to ourselves.
The most useful way to improve self-knowledge may be to try new things, go new places, meet new people and, above all, allow yourself to be yourself.

Accuracy Matters

Judgments of personality rendered by ordinary people in daily life, including our judgments of ourselves, are more frequent and more important than those made by psychologists, so it matters whether they are accurate.

KEY TERMS

constructivism, p. 106

critical realism, p. 107

convergent validation, p. 107

interjudge agreement, p. 107

behavioral prediction, p. 107

predictive validity, p. 107

moderator variable, p. 109

judgability, p. 112

THINK ABOUT IT

What are the most consistent aspects of the personalities of the people you know? What are the most inconsistent aspects?
Do you use personality traits when describing yourself or other people? Or do you describe yourself and others in some other way? What other ways are there?
Have you ever misunderstood someone’s personality by expecting it to be more consistent than it really is?
The next time you talk with your parents, explain the consistency issue to them and ask whether they think people have consistent personality traits. Then do the same with college friends who have not taken this course. Are their answers different? How?
What situation are you in right now? Is it determining your behavior? What situation were you in at 10:00 a.m. yesterday? How did it affect the way you felt and acted?
During the Nuremberg trials after World War II, some participants in Nazi wartime atrocities defended themselves by saying they were “only following orders.” Is this the same thing as saying that the situation was so strong that their behavior was not determined by their own personal characteristics, so they should not be blamed? What do you think of this defense?
Sociologists point out that criminal behavior is much more likely from people who come from crime-prone neighborhoods, low economic levels, and unstable family backgrounds. These are all situational factors. Does this fact imply that crime comes from the situation and not from the person? If so, how can we hold a person responsible for criminal actions?
How often do you make judgments of the personalities of other people? When you do, are you usually right or wrong? How can you tell?
What did you think about the data on first impressions summarized in this chapter? Have you found that you can judge someone from their facial appearance, tone of voice, or other easily observed clues? What are the potential pitfalls of relying too much on first impressions?
Think of a time when you made a personality judgment of someone that turned out to be wrong. What was the cause of your mistake?
How well do you think most people know themselves? What aspects of oneself are the hardest to know?
Have you taken a course in social psychology? In that course, the topic of this chapter was probably called “person perception” rather than “personality judgment.” How else was the topic treated differently?

SUGGESTED RESOURCES

Funder, D. C. (1999). Personality judgment: A realistic approach to person perception. Academic Press.

A more detailed, somewhat more technical, and now somewhat out-of-date presentation of personality judgment and the issues concerning accuracy that are covered in this chapter.

Kenrick, D. T., & Funder, D. C. (1988). Profiting from controversy: Lessons from the person-situation debate. American Psychologist, 43, 23–34.

A review of the person-situation debate written for a general audience of psychologists (not just for specialists in personality). Kenrick and I attempted to declare the person-situation debate finished; it almost worked.

Letzring, T. D., & Spain, J. S. (Eds.) (2021). The Oxford handbook of accurate personality judgment: Theory and empirical findings. Oxford University Press.

A collection of state-of-the-art chapters covering all topics relevant to accurate personality judgment, going far beyond the material in this chapter.

Mast, M. S., & Hall, J. A. (2018). The impact of interpersonal accuracy on behavioral outcomes. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(5), 309–314.

A succinct summary of the correlates and consequences of the ability to judge people accurately.

Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. Wiley.

The book that launched a thousand rebuttals—this is the volume that touched off the person-situation debate. It is well written and, in its key sections, surprisingly brief.

Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. McGraw-Hill.

A lively and clearly written exposition of the situationist position. Personally, I disagree with just about everything this book says but decide for yourself.

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constructivism: The philosophical view that reality, as a concrete entity, does not exist and that only ideas (“constructions”) of reality exist.
critical realism: The philosophical view that the absence of perfect, infallible criteria for determining the truth does not imply that all interpretations of reality are equally valid; instead, one can use empirical evidence to determine which views of reality are more or less likely to be valid.
convergent validation: The process of assembling diverse pieces of information that converge on a common conclusion.
interjudge agreement: The degree to which two or more people making judgments about the same person provide the same description of that person’s personality.
behavioral prediction: The degree to which a judgment or measurement can predict the behavior of the person in question.
predictive validity: The degree to which one measure can be used to predict another.
moderator variable: A variable that affects the relationship between two other variables.
judgability: The extent to which an individual’s personality can be judged accurately by others.