Personality traits are characteristics of individuals that predict patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior over time. Research focusing on accuracy of judgments of the traits of others has found that certain traits are more easily judged than others. Traits such as extraversion tend to be judged with high levels of accuracy, while other traits such as neuroticism and openness to experience are more difficult to judge. Several factors play a role in these findings, such as the observability and ratability of traits, favorability and evaluativeness of traits, and the types of situations and relationships in which judgments are made. In this chapter, research investigating how these factors are related to accuracy of judgments for different traits is described, potential ways to improve accuracy of less easily judged traits are proposed, and directions for future research are identified.

Information quantity is an important moderator of personality judgment accuracy. Some evidence suggests that the amount of available information is positively related to accuracy. The current study utilized the social accuracy model to investigate the effects of differences in thin slices of information quantity on the distinctive accuracy and normativity of personality trait judgments. It was hypothesized that distinctive accuracy and normativity would increase as information quantity increased. Participants were 431 individuals who participated in an online study that varied the length of stimulus target observations (30 seconds, 1 minute, 3 minutes, and 5 minutes), after which judges rated targets using other-report measures of the Big Five personality traits. For all traits combined, significant levels of accuracy were found for all observation lengths, but distinctive accuracy and normativity did not increase as video length increased. Findings varied for individual traits. For distinctive accuracy, there was a linear increase with information quantity for Extraversion and a non-linear relationship for Conscientiousness, while there was a linear decrease for Openness. For normativity, there was a linear increase with information quantity for Agreeableness and a non-linear relationship for Conscientiousness. There are important differences in how observation length affects distinctive accuracy and normativity for different personality traits.

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