An Inkblot for the Implicit Assessment of Personality: The Semantic Misattribution Procedure

Abstract

Misattributions people make about their own reaction to ambiguous stimuli can be used to measure personality self‐concepts implicitly. On the basis of a semantic misattribution priming paradigm [semantic misattribution procedure (SMP)], we assessed the implicit personality self‐concept related to three dimensions included in the Big‐Five model: conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion. Across three studies (N1 = 98, N2 = 140, and N3 = 135), the SMP was robustly related, in the expected direction, to individual differences in self‐reported personality questionnaires and managed to predict both self‐reported and objectively measured behaviours. The main advantage of SMP over classical explicit measures of personality is its higher resistance to social desirability tendencies, although its psychometric properties are somewhat lower than those pertaining to explicit measures of personality. Finally, comparisons of our results with studies that used other implicit measures of personality self‐concept indicate that the SMP has higher criterion validity. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Relationships of career adaptabilities with explicit and implicit self-concepts

“…Concerning the construct validity, we tested the convergent and discriminant validities of the CAAS subscales in relation to three of the explicitly measured FFM dimensions (i.e., conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism), and also with explicit self-esteem. We limited our study to the aforementioned three personality factors in order to be consistent with the implicit measures that we used (SMP; Sava et al, 2012). Since van Vianen et al (2012) study has methodological similarities with ours (i.e., a student sample, with similar mean age and comparable gender composition), we based our hypotheses regarding CAAS's associations with the personality constructs on their findings.…”

“…This measure is based on a priming paradigm derived from the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005). Sava et al (2012) research was focused only on conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion and pointed out compelling evidence regarding the SMP's psychometric proprieties, with higher criterion validity as compared to other implicit measures of personality. Moreover, it also provided consistent evidence for convergent validity in relation to explicit measures of the same constructs.…”

“…More recently, Sava et al (2012) have introduced the Semantic Misattribution Procedure (SMP) for the measurement of the implicit personality self-concept. This measure is based on a priming paradigm derived from the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005).…”

“…The Semantic Misattribution Procedure (SMP; Sava et al, 2012) was used to measure implicit conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism. The task was developed precisely as described by Sava et al (2012; Study 2) and consisted of 32 trials for each personality trait.…”

Implicit Social Cognition

“…Such priming effects tend to emerge even when participants receive detailed information about the operation of the task and are explicitly instructed to avoid any potential influence of the primes (Payne et al, 2005). Although the AMP has originally been designed to measure evaluative associations, modified variants of the task have been shown to be amenable for the measurement of semantic associations (e.g., Sava et al, 2012).…”