A social relations analysis of agreement in liking judgments.

Abstract

Using a round-robin design in which every subject served both as judge and target, subjects made liking judgments, trait ratings, and physical attractiveness ratings of each other on each of 4 days. Although there was some agreement in the liking judgments, most of the variance was due to idiosyncratic preferences for different targets. Differences in evaluations were due to at least 2 factors: disagreements in how targets were perceived (is this person honest?) and disagreements in how to weight the trait attributes that predicted liking (is honesty more important than friendliness?) When evaluating the targets in specific roles (as a study partner), judgments showed much greater agreement, as did the weights of the trait attributes. A 2nd study confirmed the differential weighting of trait attributes when rating liking in general and the increased agreement when rating specific roles.

Multirater assessment of creative contributions to team projects in organizations

“…The consensual assessment technique in psychological studies typically generates moderate average interrater correlation coefficients among the experts, on the order of r _ ¼ .3 (Amabile, 1982(Amabile, , 1996. This figure is in line with estimates of consistency among raters for a wide range of judgements, including interpersonal liking (Park & Flink, 1989) and behaviours manifested during social interactions (see review by Kenny, Mohor, & Levesque, 2001).…”

Interpersonal Perception in Internet Chat Rooms

“…By their very nature, personality traits are highly evaluative (Hampson, Goldberg, & John, 1987), and as bipolar constructs, one pole of a trait is typically seen as very desirable while the other is often seen as undesirable. Individuals who are extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, stable, and open tend to be liked more than do individuals who do not possess such characteristics (Cartwright, 1997;Park & Flink, 1989). In addition, in face-to-face interactions, physically attractive individuals tend to be liked better than do less attractive individuals (Cash, Begley, McCown, & Weise, 1975;Light, Hollander, & Kayra-Stuart, 1981).…”

“…While the likability of a target tends to be largely idiosyncratic (Malloy & Albright, 1990;Park & Flink, 1989;Wright, Ingraham, & Blackmer, 1985), there are some general trends in who is popular. By their very nature, personality traits are highly evaluative (Hampson, Goldberg, & John, 1987), and as bipolar constructs, one pole of a trait is typically seen as very desirable while the other is often seen as undesirable.…”

Do observer ratings validate self-reports of intergroup contact?: A round-robin analysis

“…Kenny and Albright (1987) suggested that research should focus on employing participants as both judges and targets in this manner, and the method has been used to great effect in personality and social psychology research since (e.g., De Paulo, Kenny, Hoover, Webb, & Oliver, 1987;Kwan, Gosling, & John, 2008;Robins, Mendelsohn, Connell, & Kwan, 2004;Vazire, 2010). Kenny and Albright (1987) also suggested that research should focus on when and how, rather than whether, observer-judgements agree with self-judgements (for examples see Flink & Park, 1991;Park & Flink, 1989) and our first study focused on a moderator of self-other agreement that we thought would be especially important for research on intergroup contact. Vazire's (2010) self-other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model hypothesised, and found, that self-reports should be more accurate (as judged against a criterion) than other-reports for traits that are low in observability.…”