Metatraits and self-schemata: same or different?

Traitedness (Baumeister & Tice, 1988) and self-schemata (Markus, 1977) have each been proposed as factors that moderate the relationship between personality traits and behavior, with traited or schematic individuals being judged more predictable than untraited or aschematic individuals. The purpose of the present study was to compare the similarity of the two types of measures and to test the hypothesis that traited individuals will respond quicker to self-descriptive trait words than untraited individuals (Britt, 1993). A personality inventory was administered to a sample of 389 military recruits. Measures of traitedness were computed based on the variability of item responses, and self-schema scores were computed based on response latencies to the items. The results supported Britt's (1993) hypothesis, insofar as traitedness and self-schema scores were significantly, albeit moderately, correlated. Given the modest evidence for convergent validity between the two types of proposed moderators, future research is proposed to establish their divergent validity.