The Effects Of Trait Properties On The Accuracy Of Personality Judgment

The study of personality judgment has been long concerned by personality andsocial psychology. Of the many factors that affect the accuracy of personalityjudgment, good qualities and its features are important regulator of variables to judgethe accuracy. In a sense, personality judgment is actually a way to judge thepersonality traits. Foreign studies have shown that the observers are easier todetermine a clear, observable trait with high consistency and accuracy. This study isbased on some related abroad research achievement, and selected19students as thetest objects; for each test object, we selected3roommates of him or her asacquaintances test objects, then randomly selected252students as stranger testobjects. Then, according to3independent experimental studies, we investigated theaffection that exerted by characteristics of internal and external traits, and likes anddislikes degree and definition on the consistency of self-assessment, the roommateassessment and the stranger assessment. We also tested how the familiarity of thejudgers and the test target impact the accuracy of assessment. The results show that:1. The impact of characteristics of internal and external traits on the accuracy ofassessment:(1) Self-roommate consistency is highly relevant in almost all the externalcharacteristics ("confident" excluded) assessment, which is the same whenconsidering the results of self-stranger consistency assessment and of theroommate-stranger consistency assessment.(2) Self-roommate, self-stranger and roommate-stranger consistency in almostall intrinsic characteristics ("shamed" excluded) assessment were not significantlyrelated;(3) Of all self-roommate, self-stranger and roommate-stranger assessment, theconsistencies of the external trait are significantly higher than of the intrinsic trait.(4) In both external and intrinsic trait assessment, the consistency range fromhigh to low is self-roommate, roommate-stranger and self-stranger.2. The impact of likes and dislikes of traits on the accuracy of assessment: (1) About the assessment of preferred traits, the self-roommate consistencyshows a significant positive correlation in "responsible, punctual, cheerful, tolerant,friendly, confident" traits, while self-stranger consistency only shows a high positivecorrelation in "confident" and the roommate-stranger in "reliable".(2) Of the assessment of aversion traits, only the consistency of self-roommatein "crafty" shows a significant positive correlation; other pair-wise consistencies ofthe three have no significant correlation in aversion traits.(3) Considering both preferred traits and aversion traits, the assessmentaccuracy of self-roommate is higher than that of the roommate-stranger, and theaccuracy of self-stranger assessment is the lowest.3. The impact of ambiguity traits on the accuracy of assessment:(1) For all the clear traits, there are some significant differences among selfassessment, roommate assessment and stranger assessment. However, for ambiguitytrait, there is little difference if you took a conservative assessment.(2) In the assessment of clear traits, the pair-wise accuracy of the three issignificant in "talkative" and "clean". In the assessment of ambiguity characteristics,only the self-roommate consistency of "mature" and the roommate-strangerconsistency of "sophisticated" are significant.(3) The pair-wise consistency is higher in clear characteristics judgment than inambiguity traits, and the different is much more significant in the consistency ofself-stranger and of roommate-stranger.(4) In both the assessment of clear traits and ambiguity traits, the consistency ofself-roommate assessment is much higher than of self-stranger assessment and ofroom-stranger assessment, meanwhile the last two have no difference.