Voters rating politicians' personality: Evaluative biases and assumed similarity on honesty-humility and openness to experience

Abstract

The recent rise in controversial politicians has garnered substantial interest in the assessment of their personality. Observer ratings of politicians' personality, however, may suffer from evaluative and value-related biases. Evaluative biases are likely to differentially affect personality ratings of preferred and non-preferred politicians, whereas value-related biases are likely to affect ratings of honesty-humility and openness to experience of preferred politicians in line with the self-based heuristic or assumed similarity effect. In a stratified sample (final N = 203) of the Dutch population, respondents/voters provided self-ratings and observer ratings of the political leaders of the seven largest political parties on the HEXACO Simplified Personality Inventory (HEXACO-SPI). Findings showed evaluative biases on honestyhumility, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Furthermore, observer ratings of politicians were generally lower than self-ratings on honesty-humility and higher on extraversion, suggesting high perceived politicians' narcissism. Findings on the value-related bias showed that assumed similarity was higher for honesty-humility and openness to experience among politicians of a preferred party than among politicians of non-preferred parties. Additionally, assumed similarity effects were also present for emotionality among preferred politicians and for extraversion and conscientiousness among both preferred and non-preferred politicians, suggesting a self-based prototypicality effect.

HEXACO personality correlates of adolescents' involvement in bullying situations

“…The HEXACO Simplified Personality Inventory (HEXACO‐SPI; De Vries & Born, 2013; De Vries & Van Prooijen, 2019) is a 96‐item self‐report procedure for adolescents' scores on the HEXACO personality domains. The six HEXACO domains are measured with 16 items each, answered on a 5‐point Likert scale ranging from 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 5 ( strongly agree ): (1) Honesty‐Humility, with four items each for the facets sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty; (2) Emotionality, with four items each for the facets fearfulness, anxiety, sentimentality, and dependence; (3) eXtraversion, with four items each for the facets social self‐esteem, social boldness, sociability, and liveliness; (4) Agreeableness, with four items each for the facets patience, forgiveness, gentleness, and flexibility; (5) Conscientiousness, with four items each for the facets organization, diligence, perfectionism, and prudence; and (6) Openness (to Experience), with four items each for the facets aesthetic appreciation, inquisitiveness, unconventionality, and creativity.…”

“…The six HEXACO domains are measured with 16 items each, answered on a 5‐point Likert scale ranging from 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 5 ( strongly agree ): (1) Honesty‐Humility, with four items each for the facets sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty; (2) Emotionality, with four items each for the facets fearfulness, anxiety, sentimentality, and dependence; (3) eXtraversion, with four items each for the facets social self‐esteem, social boldness, sociability, and liveliness; (4) Agreeableness, with four items each for the facets patience, forgiveness, gentleness, and flexibility; (5) Conscientiousness, with four items each for the facets organization, diligence, perfectionism, and prudence; and (6) Openness (to Experience), with four items each for the facets aesthetic appreciation, inquisitiveness, unconventionality, and creativity. The full questionnaire and validity information can be found elsewhere (De Vries & Born, 2013; De Vries & Van Prooijen, 2019; De Vries et al, 2020). Final variables were calculated as the average sum score for all domain items.…”

The missing link: Studying political leadership from the followers’ perspective

“…Political science can also be benefited from nuancing the process of personalisation by follower-centric models. Recent research has shown that people evaluate preferred and non-preferred politicians (De Vries and Van Prooijen, 2019) differently, contributing to negative personalisation (Garzia and da Silva, 2021). Partisanship further complicates this picture.…”

Getting along And/Or Getting Ahead: Differential Hexaco Personality Correlates of Likeability and Popularity among Adolescents

“…We also explored whether masking and cancellation effects occurred in the prediction of likeability and popularity, providing a better understanding of the underlying behaviours involved in becoming likeable and popular. The strength of this study is that we relied on self-ratings of personality among adolescents using the recently developed HEXACO-SPI (De Vries & Born, 2013;De Vries & Van Prooijen, 2019) and on peer nominations of both likeability and popularity, thus providing independent assessments of the key variables in our study.…”

“…One of the reasons for this lack of research has been the fact that-until recently-no instrument was available to measure HEXACO personality among early adolescents. In this study, we will use the recently developed HEXACO Simplified Personality Inventory (HEXACO-SPI;De Vries & Born, 2013;De Vries & Van Prooijen, 2019)-which was constructed to be used among (early and late) adolescents and among adults with lower language proficiency levels-to investigate the differential relations of HEXACO traits with sociometric measures of likeability and popularity among early adolescents. This study adds to previous research by (i) investigating the relations between honestyhumility and both likeability and popularity when controlling for the other five HEXACO personality domain-level traits, (ii) investigating whether gender, agreeableness, and extraversion interact with honesty-humility in the prediction of likeability and popularity, (iii) investigating whether broad traits and facets differentially relate to these two sociometric measures, and (iv) investigating whether masking and cancellation effects occur within HEXACO domains in the facet-level associations with likeability and popularity.…”