A More Complete Picture of Personality

Abstract

Personality profiles describe individual persons’ locations on multiple trait dimensions and enable calculation of profile similarity indices for individual persons and dyads. They are easily misinterpreted, however, unless two components are distinguished: a normative component comprising the sample means of the variables and a distinctive component reflecting the given individual’s deviations from those means. These two profile components provide different kinds of information. Focusing on person-perception research, we review predictors of the similarity of individual profiles to the normative profile (i.e., profile normativeness) and of the agreement between distinctive profiles. We also provide some suggestions for future research.

Cardiac vagal flexibility and accurate personality impressions: Examining a physiological correlate of the good judge

“…Thus, in the current studies, a good judge was defined as someone who can determine a target's unique self-reported profile of traits, such as whether he or she is more talkative than creative and more kind than anxious, relative to other people. Such a profile approach to assessing accuracy provides a holistic index of whether the perceiver understands the target by examining the extent to which he or she has developed a valid impression of the target's overall patterning traits (see Borkenau & Leising, 2016, for a review). Further, this indicator of accuracy controls for the normativity of impressions (Biesanz, 2010;Cronbach, 1955;Furr, 2008), the extent to which a perceiver views targets as similar to the average personality profile.…”

Self–other agreement in personality traits and profiles across cultures: A multirater, multiscale study in Blacks and Whites in South Africa

“…The estimation of profile agreement is based on the profile that each individual has in self-and other-ratings across a number of traits (Borkenau & Leising, 2016;Furr, 2008). For example, a person may rate him-or herself as high on helpfulness, intermediate on achievement orientation, and low on talkativeness; if an external rater provides the same relative ratings of the target on these traits, agreement will be high.…”

“…Apart from the insight into the contribution of normativeness to agreement, an important benefit of profile agreement analysis is that it provides agreement estimates at the level of the individual, which can be linked with various individual-level correlates. Although profile analysis has a long history, it has only recently seen widespread use in personality research (Borkenau & Leising, 2016). Crosscultural research on profile agreement is scant.…”

“…More visible traits, such as extraversion, tend to be rated more accurately, and family and partners tend to provide more accurate ratings (Connelly & Ones, 2010;Funder, 2012). These moderators have mostly been examined in trait agreement analyses, but the same effects generally hold for profile agreement (Borkenau & Leising, 2016).…”

“…De Vries (2010) found that using a personality questionnaire results in higher consensus among raters than is typically found with short adjective lists. The use of broad and stable versus narrow and variable characteristics has also been identified as a frontier topic in research on profile agreement (Borkenau & Leising, 2016). A relevant theoretical framework can be found in the linguistic category model (Semin & Fiedler, 1991): Adjectives are generally perceived as conveying more abstract and stable information about a person than behaviors.…”