Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception

238 Pages·1999·1.06 MB·English

by  David C. Funder

Preface
It is difficult for me to believe that I have been doing research on accuracy in
personality judgment for 20 years. This work has taken various forms, including
investigations of the relations between personality judgments and behavior and the
conditions under which personality judgments are made with more and lesser ac-
curacy. Most recently, I attempted to develop a theoretical approach, called the
Realistic Accuracy Model, that might be sufficient to account for some of what is
now known about accuracy and to suggest directions for further research (Funder,
1995a).
Over the years my colleagues and I have managed to publish a fair number of
journal articles and chapters that present data relevant to accuracy, survey bits of the
literature on behavioral consistency and on judgmental error, and attempt to justify
our theoretical approach. However, this varied material has never been brought
together into one place. Of course, it might be possible for a dedicated reader to go
to the library and find for himself or herself nearly everything�both theoretical
and empirical�that is presented on the following pages. But it has lately dawned
on me that few readers are sufficiently motivated to do a PsychLit search under my
name and to study everything that pops up. Thus, if I hope for anyone to be able to
understand the entire range of interpretations of the literature, theoretical develop-
ment, and empirical findings that underlie the Realistic Accuracy Model, the job
of pulling this material together is one that I must do myself.
That is the purpose of this book. It draws on nearly all of the research that has
come out of my lab so far (actually three labs, at Harvard, Illinois, and Riverside),
and most of the major publications of my graduate students, collaborators, and
myself. Indeed, parts of this book were, for the first draft, taken verbatim out of
prior publications, although over the course of revision most of these passages have
been substantially changed. Of some relevance to the reader is that�in case you
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xiv Preface
have read some of this prior work�passages in this book here and there may sound
familiar. This is not merely de´ja` vu.
As might be expected, I found myself saying both more and different things on
a large number of subjects than before. I also managed to bring in a fair amount of
work from other investigators in laboratories�not enough to do them justice,
probably, but enough to illustrate that accuracy in personality judgment is a reborn
topic of research with many different approaches and participants around the world.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Academic Press, the American Psychological Association, and
the American Psychological Society (via Blackwell Publishers) for permission to
reuse some material previously published under their copyright.
I have been fortunate in the students and colleagues with whom I have collabo-
rated over the years and, of course, the most fun occurs when a student, over time,
turns into a full collaborator and finally becomes someone on whom you rely for
ideas and wisdom. Dr. C. Randall Colvin of Northeastern University did this, and
I thank him for all his help, which over the years has ranged from collating Q-sort
decks to sharply criticizing some of my conceptual blunders. Research on the
‘‘accuracy project,’’ as we call it, has also been greatly assisted by Melinda Blackman,
Alex Creed, Kate Dobroth, Leslie Eaton, Robert Fuhrman, R. Michael Furr, David
Kolar, Carl Sneed, and Jana Spain, all of whom have developed or are developing
into significant psychological researchers in their own right. Our lab has also been
assisted by an army of undergraduate research assistants, too numerous to list, at
Harvey Mudd College, Harvard University, the University of Illinois, and the Uni-
versity of California, Riverside. I do have to give special mention to Doretta Mas-
saro and Robert Eblin, my first two undergraduate assistants at Harvard. Bob was
the first to say to a subject, ‘‘You can talk about anything you like and I’ll be back
in about 5 minutes.’’ Doretta was the first to explain to an undergraduate how to
do a Q-sort. Both were important in getting this project off the ground and both
went off to great careers outside of psychology. I also need to acknowledge Mary
Verdier, who organized the first army of videotape coders at the University of
Illinois, and Rayanne Notareschi, who did the same thing at Riverside.
The bulk of the writing of this book was completed while I was on a sabbatical
visit holding an Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury in Christ-
church, New Zealand. Canterbury provided a stimulating and supportive academic
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xvi Acknowledgments
atmosphere and a truly superb, computer-based library of the psychological litera-
ture. New Zealand is a wonderful country and Christchurch is a lovely city. Garth
Fletcher both made my Erskine fellowship possible and was a most hospitable as
well as intellectually stimulating host, ably assisted by his then-student, Dr. Geoff
Thomas. I also enjoyed and learned from long conversations about philosophy of
science with Dr. Brian Haig.
At Academic Press, Nikki Levy was a consistently supportive and encouraging
editor. Rebecca Orbegoso patiently shepherded the final draft through production.
My wife, Patti, was supportive and helpful during the whole process of writing
this book. This project is just one of the many things I could not have done without
her. To Patti, I dedicate this book.
C H A P T E R 1
Approaching Accuracy
This is a book about accuracy in personality judgment. It presents theory and
research concerning the circumstances under which and processes by which one
person might make an accurate appraisal of the psychological characteristics of
another person, or even of oneself.
Accuracy is a practical topic. Its improvement would have clear advantages for
organizations, for clinical psychology, and for the lives of individuals. With accurate
personality judgment, organizations would become more likely to hire the right
people and place them in appropriate positions. Clinical psychologists would make
more accurate judgments of their clients and so serve them better. Moreover, a
tendency to misinterpret the interpersonal world is an important part of some
psychological disorders. If we knew more about accurate interpersonal judgment,
this knowledge might help people to correct the kinds of misjudgments that can
cause problems. Most important of all, if individuals made more accurate judgments
of personality they might do better at choosing friends, avoiding people who cannot
be trusted, and understanding their interpersonal worlds (Nowicki & Mitchell,
1998). This last-named advantage�improving interpersonal understanding�is the
worthiest justification for doing research on accuracy and the most powerful reason
why people find the topic interesting.
1
2 Chapter 1 Approaching Accuracy
CURIOSITY AND ITS FULFILLMENT
When George Miller (1969) urged researchers to ‘‘give psychology away’’ to the
wider public, the gifts he described were the ways in which psychological knowl-
edge might be used to create more useful instruments for aircraft cockpits, allow
more accurate selection of qualified employees, and ensure racial harmony, world
peace, and increased sales of soap. Psychology can�to a greater or lesser degree�
do all of these things, and these accomplishments help to justify its existence. More-
over, it certainly can be useful to predict what another person will do, or even to
know what another person is thinking, and our interest in these matters is height-
ened when we feel a need to control what is going on (Swann, Stephenson, &
Pittman, 1981).
But its practical accomplishments are not the primary reason that psychology
exists, and our everyday interest about other people goes beyond pragmatic consid-
erations. People are intrinsically interested in each other. How else can we explain
the vast amount of otherwise pointless gossip that occupies so much of our time,
gossip that consists largely of highly speculative judgments about why some other
person is doing what he or she is doing, what he or she is thinking, and what he or
she is likely to do next. How else can we explain the frequency of sidewalk cafes,
confessional television programs, and telescopes in the windows of high-rise apart-
ment complexes, all of which provide the opportunity to watch other people who,
with any luck, you need never encounter nor be directly affected by in any other
way. And how else, indeed, can we explain the existence of the highly paid occu-
pation of ‘‘celebrity,’’ the function of which seems to be to give everybody on earth
a few individuals in common that they can all gossip about?
Psychology arose to institutionalize, formalize, and satisfy the intrinsic curiosity
people have about each other and about themselves. To paraphrase a comment by
Sal Maddi (1996), if all of psychology were abolished tomorrow and all memory of
its existence erased, before very long it would have to be reinvented, because some
questions simply will not go away. If the reader of this book is a psychologist or
graduate student in psychology, chances are that a burning interest in one or more
of these questions is the reason the reader got into the field in the first place (Funder,
1998).
The fundamental questions people have about each other have two foci. The job
of a local television news reporter is to satisfy the curiosity, sometimes morbid, of
his or her viewers. When interviewing the person who just survived a plane crash
or whose house has burned to the ground, the reporter invariably asks, ‘‘How did
it feel? What were you thinking?’’ And when interviewing the surviving postal work-
ers after one of their coworkers has gone on yet another murderous rampage, the
reporter inevitably asks, ‘‘What kind of person was he? What was he like?’’
In other words, included among the fundamental questions that underlie psy-
chological curiosity are the ones that ask what people are thinking and feeling, and
What Is Accuracy? 3
what they are like. The first concerns what Ickes (1993) has called ‘‘empathic
accuracy,’’ defined as the ability to describe another person’s thoughts and feelings
(see also Ickes, 1997). The second question concerns judgments of personality, of
traits such as extraversion, honesty, sociability, and happiness. The two topics are
relevant to each other. What one is thinking and feeling surely offers a clue as to
the kind of person that he or she is. And different kinds of people no doubt think
and feel differently, even in the same situation. The two topics are therefore not
completely separable, and it will become apparent as we go along that the research
findings concerning one of these topics is highly relevant to (and generally consis-
tent with) the findings from the other (Colvin, Vogt, & Ickes, 1997). But this book
is primarily about the latter topic. This is a book about how people make judgments
of what each other is like, the degree to which these judgments achieve accuracy,
and the factors that make accuracy in personality judgment more and less likely.
WHAT IS ACCURACY?
Accuracy is a topic that has only recently come back into acceptance, if not fashion,
in research psychology (Funder & West, 1993). For the better part of four decades
(1950–1990) psychologists were prone either to ignore accuracy or to redefine it
out of existence. The reasons for this state of affairs range from the daunting meth-
odological issues that confront the study of accuracy to the infiltration of de-
constructionist philosophies into social psychology. The infiltration of these
philosophies has had the subtle but unmistakable effect of causing many psycholo-
gists to be uncomfortable with the idea of assuming, defining, or even discussing
the nature of social reality.
So at the outset it should be said that when this book talks about accuracy, the
term is used advisedly yet in the most disingenuous possible way. Herein, accuracy
refers not to any sophisticated reconstructionist, deconstructionist, or convenient
operational definition of this very loaded word. Rather, it refers to the relation
between what is perceived and what is.
This definition raises a large number of issues. The most central as well as the
most daunting is the criterion issue, which concerns how reality�especially, psy-
chological reality�can ever be known so that judgments can be compared with it
to assess their accuracy. Other issues, only slightly less central and slightly less daunt-
ing, include the nature of personality, the quality of human judgment, and a host of
methodological complications that arise in the study of personality and person
perception.
These are all worthy issues. They deserve to be addressed directly. The topic of
accuracy is too important to be ignored, sidestepped, or operationally redefined out
of existence. The goal of this book, therefore, is to confront this topic, and these
issues, as directly as possible.
4 Chapter 1 Approaching Accuracy
CHAPTER ORGANIZATION
The remainder of this introductory chapter is in four parts. The first discusses in
detail the reasons why the topic of accuracy in personality judgment is so important.
These reasons are practical, theoretical, and even philosophical. The second part
introduces the basic orienting assumptions of the particular approach to accuracy
that will be taken in this book. Three seemingly simple but sometimes controversial
assumptions entail an approach to accuracy that trespasses across the otherwise well-
defended, traditional border between social and personality psychology. The third
part of this chapter outlines some of the differences (and sometimes antagonisms)
between social and personality psychology, and proposes a rapprochement. The
need for the reintegration of personality and social psychology is a direct implication
of the present approach to accuracy research, and is a persistent theme throughout
this book. The fourth part of this chapter describes the historical roots of the
Realistic Accuracy Model and outlines its research agenda and the overall plan of
the remainder of the book.
THE IMPORTANCE OF ACCURACY
The accuracy of personality judgment touches on many areas of life. It is important
for reasons that are practical, theoretical, and intrinsic.
Practical Considerations
Accuracy in personality judgment has important practical implications for people
living their daily lives as well as for psychologists attempting to do work that has a
positive effect on individuals and society.
Daily Life
A moment’s reflection will confirm that personality judgment is an important part
of daily existence. Conversations about what other people are like fill our waking
hours, and our impressions of others’ personality attributes drive decisions about
who to trust, befriend, hire, fire, date, and marry. This process is formalized in the
‘‘letter of recommendation,’’ a common vehicle for one person to describe his or
her impressions of another. ‘‘The candidate is cheerful, hard-working, resourceful,
energetic, cooperative . . .’’ Trait terms like these abound in such letters and presum-
ably are intended to mean something to, and to influence decisions made by, those
who read them.
The sum total of the judgments made about you by everybody who knows you
is your reputation. And as Robert Hogan has noted, your reputation may be your
The Importance of Accuracy 5
most important possession (Hogan, 1982; Hogan & Hogan, 1991). The care and
maintenance of one’s reputation is the business of much if not all of social life, and
how this endeavor turns out has large implications. People will kill to maintain their
reputations and will sometimes kill themselves if their reputations are sufficiently
and irreparably damaged. As Shakespeare’s Casio lamented,
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal
1
part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!
Why is reputation seen as so important? There are at least three reasons. First, many
doors in life are opened or closed to you as a function of how your personality is
perceived. Someone who thinks you are cold will not date you, someone who
thinks you are uncooperative will not hire you, and someone who thinks you are
dishonest will not lend you money. This will be the case regardless of how warm,
cooperative, or honest you might really be. Second, a long tradition of research on
expectancy effects shows that to a small but important degree, people have a way of
living up, or down, to the impressions others have of them. Children expected to
improve their academic performance to some degree will do just that (Rosenthal,
1994), and young women expected to be warm and friendly tend to become so
2
(Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977).
There is another important reason to care about what others think of us: They
might be right. To learn the state of one’s health, one consults a medical expert. To
learn whether one’s car is safe, one consults a mechanical expert. And if you want
to learn what your personality is like, just look around. Experts surround you. The
people in your social world have observed your behavior and drawn conclusions
about your personality and behavior, and they can therefore be an important source
of feedback about the nature of your own personality and abilities. This observation
is not quite equivalent to the symbolic interactionist ‘‘looking glass self-hypothesis’’
that claims we cannot help but think about ourselves as others do (e.g., Mead,
1934; Shrauger & Schoeneman, 1979). Rather, the idea is that looking to the
natural experts in our social world is a rational way to learn more about what we
are really like.
In an important sense, a reputation has a life of its own and operates and can be
studied separately from the person who happens to own it. But that is not what will
be done here. The present concern with the accuracy of personality judgment leads
1
Perhaps Casio was overreacting. To this speech, Iago replied, in part, ‘‘Reputation is an idle and
most false imposition, oft got without merit, and lost without deserving’’ (Othello, Act 2, Scene 3).
2
Lee Jussim (1991, 1993) has persuasively argued that these impressions in most real-life cases are
accurate to begin with, and so ‘‘expectancy effects’’ include both accurate prediction and behavioral
influence. Moreover, expectancy effects tend to work only about aspects of a person about which he or
she is unsure. When people are certain about their self-conceptions to begin with, they tend to maintain
them while perceivers eventually abandon discrepant expectancies (Swann & Ely, 1984). But the behav-
ioral influence component, while perhaps smaller than once thought, is real (see also Madon, Jussim &
Eccles, 1997; Rosenthal, 1994).
6 Chapter 1 Approaching Accuracy
to a focus on the degree to which one’s reputation might be among the indicators
of what a person is really like.
Applied Psychology
Accurate personality judgment is important to a large segment of applied psychol-
ogy as well. For example, consider the long-term consequences of traumatic events.
It has been suggested that sexually abused children grow up with lowered self-
esteem, an impaired sense of control and competence, and an increase in negative
emotions (Trickett & Putnam, 1993). These are important consequences. How do
we know they occur? Only because somebody has somehow made a personality
judgment. Accurate judgment of personality is required to even begin to study how
people are affected by important life events. More broadly, any assessment by a
counselor, probation officer, or clinical psychologist involves one person trying to
accurately judge some attribute of the personality of another.
Recall the reader of those letters of recommendation. In organizational settings,
people often must decide who they should hire, train, or promote. A member of an
admissions committee reading a packet of letters of recommendation, a personnel
officer reading an employment file, and a supervisor filling out a performance
appraisal are all trying to judge general aspects of a person. The accuracy of the
judgment is crucial to the quality of an important decision that will affect both the
3
individual and the organization.
Theoretical Considerations
The accuracy of personality judgment is also important for several issues within
theoretically oriented psychology, including sources of data, the relations between
personality and behavior, and the conceptualization of individual differences.
Source of Data
The human judge has long been an important data-gathering tool for personality,
developmental, and clinical psychology (Funder, 1993a). In the typical application,
a judge becomes acquainted with a subject, watches a subject’s behavior, or peruses
a file of information and then renders judgments of various personality attributes.
A widely used technique, the California Q-sort, requires the judge to rate 100
attributes such as ‘‘Is critical, skeptical, not easily impressed,’’ ‘‘Has a wide range of
interests,’’ and ‘‘Is a genuinely dependable and responsible person’’ (Block, 1978/
3Accordingly, even while so-called mainstream social psychology ignored accuracy issues for almost
three decades, industrial/organizational psychology maintained a steady interest (Funder, 1987; Jackson,
1982; Kane & Lawler, 1978; Lewin & Zwany, 1976.).