Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you become interested in personality psychology?
A: I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. Personality psychology, and person perception especially, caught my interest even early on as an undergraduate student, but I got fully roped into the field during my bachelor’s thesis: I investigated the meaning systems that people apply when describing others, that is, what actual behaviors people refer to when using a given term such as “sociable”.
The fundamental question this touches on is “What lies behind the impressions we form about people?” This has been a common thread in my research ever since. My work in Dresden during my bachelor, master, and PhD studies in the lab of Daniel Leising was focused on the accuracy, consensus, and consistency associated with person judgments made from behavior observation. During my postdoc in Toronto with Brian S. Connelly, I also started focusing on differences between self- and informant-judgments of personality in terms of their content and underlying processes.
I really enjoy working on these basic but fundamental questions. As person judgments are used to guide decisions in all areas of our lives, it seems essential to understand how they come about and what they reflect.
Q: Can you give us a brief summary of the paper recently published in EJP “What defines traits, reputations, and identity? Personality item content in multi-rater judgments” and what made you study this?
A: This study directly addresses one of those fundamental issues that we must understand to adequately assess and leverage personality judgments: the shared and unique insights behind personality self- and informant-ratings. The literature robustly shows that there is moderate agreement across the two perspectives, mentions factors that in- or decrease that agreement, and even demonstrates the differential predictive value of either perspective for different criteria. But the basic question remains: If we disentangle the shared and unique components of self- and informant-judgments, what types of personality content to they each reflect?
So that is what Brian S. Connelly, Samuel T. McAbee, Ray T. Fang, and I set out to investigate. We used two data sets that contained targets’ self-ratings of their personality along with ratings by informants from the targets’ networks. With latent variable models, we separated the variance that was shared across self- and informant-judgments (Traits), unique to informant-judgments (Reputations), and unique to self-judgments (Identity). Then, we investigated how the personality items contributed to the three factors depending on their item characteristics.
For example, there was stronger self-informant agreement on items that describe observable content or behaviors. Examples of such items would be “yells at people”, which describes a behavior and is also one of the items with the highest observability in our study. Items of primarily affective content like “often feels blue” also had strong self-informant agreement.
In contrast, targets had more unique self-perceptions on less observable content and on cognitive content. For instance, the item “does not like poetry” is not well observable and “is inventive” or “believes that they are better than others” are cognitive items. So, considering affect, behavior, cognition, and desire as content components is definitely relevant. The results for informants’ unique views were less clear. The same was true for the role of the items’ evaluativeness, which reflects how positive/negative versus neutral the item content is (e.g., “intelligent” is positive, desirable trait, “quiet” is more neutral). It is reasonable to assume that informants’ characteristics play a role here. Evaluativeness, for example, could promote self-informant agreement or divergence depending on whether informants’ attitudes toward the target align with the target’s self-directed biases. In any case, considering item characteristics is important when multi-rater perceptions of personality are concerned.
Q: How would you describe this if you were explaining it to a friend at a pub?
The way we see ourselves and the way in which we are seen by others overlap to some degree: On some parts of my personality everyone may agree, but there are also things only I think about myself (my identity) or that only others think about me (my reputation). Our study aimed to define the content of the shared and unique perspectives. We found that self-perceptions aligned more with how informants from our networks perceive us when it came to judging traits that can be observed from the outside, concerning what we do (behaviors), or how we feel (emotions). Our identity centers more around traits that cannot be observed or that concern how we think (cognitions), and our reputations may depend on who the informants are.
In short, we should keep in mind what type of content we are interested in when evaluating self- and other-perceptions. Also, don’t expect others to be able to read your thoughts (even if they are psychologists).
Q: What impact does work like this have on the personality psychology field?
A: For one, as it tackles a rather fundamental topic, it should be of interest to anyone whose work includes assessing traits. Our study demonstrates the relevance of items’ content characteristics in personality judgments. However, they are typically not considered in the development of personality measures, which can result in different imbalances. For example, some content may be underrepresented: Very few of the items reflected primarily desire-related content (e.g., “seeks adventure”) even though this is a content component in various definitions of personality. The various item characteristics may also be associated – in different ways across measures: Whereas in one measure behavioral items were the most evaluative on average, it was affective items in the second measure. Moreover, and specifically relevant to multi-rater judgments, measures are not geared toward assessing a specific perspective but present the same items to targets and informants. Thus, considering item characteristics and designing multi-rater-specific measures may be a valuable advancement.
Additionally, investigations like ours help with successfully leveraging the value of multi-rater judgments. For example, by knowing the content of the shared and unique components in self- and informant-judgments, researchers can decide which perspective constitutes the appropriate predictor in a given context.
Q: Where would you like to see research on this area go next?
A: One of the directions I already mentioned is the development of questionnaires using items specifically geared toward assessing the differentiated insights of targets and informants.
Apart from that I would like to see studies that systematically consider the level of acquaintance and the contexts of the informants (e.g., strangers vs. friends and friends vs. coworkers). This would help clarify at what point and what level coherent reputations are relevant. Additionally, it would be great to connect insights on the content of Traits, Reputations, and Identity with research on their differential predictive value.
Finally, I am also interested to see how the self-other differences that we found in personality ratings (i.e., the result of a judgment process) relate to differences in the prior process of forming the judgments, and how that in turn is affected by the items’ characteristics.
Q: What helped you when you started out as a researcher, that you think may help other early career researchers?
A: That’s a good question, and I may have to reiterate some of what I’ve seen other early career researchers talk about here.
The people around you are really important. Especially as a PhD student you may be quite dependent on your supervisor. I’ve been so lucky with both my PhD and postdoc supervisors in that they not only afforded me the freedom to establish my own working style but were also supportive and focused on doing good research. So, I would suggest to explicitly discuss both the working conditions important to you and the potential supervisor’s expectations to gauge a position’s fit.
Another thing that I found and still find helpful to remind myself of regularly: Don’t rely too much on your future self! By that I don’t mean you need to start preparing your slides earlier than the day before the conference. I mean that you should not trust your future self to remember things you thought or did today. Keep a document where you write down all ideas immediately. And invest time early on to develop a good system of documenting and storing all your research activities.
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