Department of Criminology.
Department of Psychology.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2023 Apr;124(4):828-847. doi: 10.1037/pspp0000420. Epub 2022 Apr 21.
For decades, a recurring question in person perception research has been whether people's perceptions of others' personality traits are related to how they see themselves on these traits. Indeed, evidence for such "assumed similarity" effects has been found repeatedly, at least for certain characteristics. However, recent research suggests that these findings may be an artifact of individual differences in how positively or negatively perceivers see others in general, irrespective of trait-specific content. Overcoming the limitations of prior studies, the present work provides a critical test of trait-specificity versus global positivity as sources of assumed similarity in personality judgments. In two large studies (s = 2,287 and 3,563) with preregistered hypotheses and analyses, perceivers rated 10 targets (strangers) each on the honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience; HEXACO (Study 1) and Big Five (Study 2) dimensions to capture their perceptions of the "average other" (i.e., perceiver effects). We then computed "positivity-corrected" assumed similarity effects using trait-based and profile-based approaches. Although controlling for global positivity considerably reduced the strength of assumed similarity, perceiver effects were still positively related to self-reports. As predicted, these assumed similarity effects occurred foremostly for traits strongly linked to values. Specifically, in Study 1, positivity-corrected assumed similarity was observed only for honesty-humility and openness to experience, albeit meaningful effects merely occurred on one of the two self-report measures. In Study 2, traits' value-relatedness remained a unique moderator of assumed similarity after accounting for traits' positivity (i.e., social desirability). These findings demonstrate that assumed similarity is indeed, to some extent, trait-specific. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
几十年来，人际知觉研究中一个反复出现的问题是，人们对他人人格特质的看法是否与他们自身对这些特质的看法有关。事实上，已经多次发现了这种“假定相似性”效应的证据，至少对于某些特征是如此。然而，最近的研究表明，这些发现可能是由于感知者对他人的总体看法存在积极或消极的个体差异，而与特定特征的内容无关。本研究克服了先前研究的局限性，对人格判断中假定相似性的特质特异性与整体积极性进行了严格的检验。在两项具有预先注册假设和分析的大型研究（s=2287 和 3563）中，被试者对 10 个目标（陌生人）分别进行了诚实谦逊、情绪性、外向性、宜人性、尽责性和开放性的评价；使用 HEXACO（研究 1）和大五（研究 2）维度来捕捉他们对“平均他人”的看法（即被试者效应）。然后，我们使用基于特质和基于特征的方法计算了“纠正积极偏差的假定相似性效应”。尽管控制了整体积极性，大大降低了假定相似性的强度，但被试者效应仍然与自我报告呈正相关。正如预测的那样，这些假定相似性效应主要发生在与价值观密切相关的特征上。具体来说，在研究 1 中，只有诚实谦逊和开放性体验与纠正积极偏差的假定相似性有关，尽管在两个自我报告测量中仅有一个发生了有意义的效应。在研究 2 中，在考虑到特征的积极性（即社交期望）之后，特征的价值相关性仍然是假定相似性的一个独特的调节因素。这些发现表明，假定相似性在某种程度上确实是特质特异性的。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2023 APA，保留所有权利）。
