Perception of cross-situational consistency.

Eighty-eight undergraduates rated the degree of relation in each of 21 pairs of items that described behavior in the domains of conscientiousness, friendliness, and extraversion. In these three domains, estimates of relations by the average subject correlated, respectively, with actual empirical relations, .63, .58, and .40. Relations corresponding to correlations between .10 to .20 could be significantly distinguished by subjects from relations in the range of .00 to .10 in two of the three domains. The confidence that individuals placed in their perceptions varied directly with the accuracy of their judgments against the empirical criterion. In addition, subjects were more confident of what they perceived to be extreme relations in both directions than of intermediate relations, and they also tended to be more confident of their judgments of strong positive relations than of zero relations. They exhibited an intuitive awareness of the effect of aggregation over occasions and items of behavior on the magnitude of cross-situational relations and the demonstration of traits. They also reported using reasonable strategies in arriving at decisions. Far from being inveterate trait believers, as some have suggested, subjects' intuitions paralleled psychometric principles in several important respects when assessing relations between real-life behaviors.