Fact and Fiction in Implicit Personality Theory

Abstract

This article reports two studies, where the accuracy of implicit personality theory (IPT) was investigated using on-line behavior counts as well as retrospective frequency estimates as standards of companson Eight discussion groups, each compnsmg six members, were videotaped Their act frequencies with respect to 16 types of behavior were judged on-line using two coding schemes, each one being applied by two independent raters Five other judges estimated the act frequencies retrospectively Furthermore, judges revealed their IPT by estimating the conditional likelihood of these types of behavior It turned out that (a) retrospective judges perceive different base rates accurately, (b) the correlations among retrospectively estimated and among on-line recorded act frequencies show high correspondences, (c)IPT accurately mirrors the correlations among retrospectively estimated as well as among on-line recorded act frequencies, and (^judges do not appropnately consider perceived base rates when estimating conditional prdjabilities It is concluded that IPT is considerably accurate m those respects that are important for the validity and structural fidelity of personality ratings It IS generally acknowledged that there exist common beliefs about the relationships among traits and behaviors that are usually referred to as implicit personality theory (IPT) If instructed appropnately, subjects express hypotheses and beliefs concenung the covanations among traits

Implicit Personality Theory and the Five‐Factor Model

“…It is more appropriate to include online records of behavior as a more dependable source of information about the actual relations, and to use these on-line records to evaluate the accuracy of both IPT and the correlations among personality ratings. I did this in an earlier study (Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1987b). The results of this study confirmed Jackson and Strieker's (1982) findings, thus corroborating the accuracy of IPT concerning the covariation among variables.…”

“…If the covariations among personality variables are accurately perceived, however, IPT is unlikely to bias the correlations among personality ratings. Moreover, although base rates are hardly considered in the estimation of conditional likelihoods, the base rates themselves are accurately reported (Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1987b;Hasher & Zacks, 1984).…”

Some instantiations of the informational negativity effect: Positive‐negative asymmetry in category breadth and in estimated meaning similarity of trait adjectives

“…In fact, it has been amply demonstrated (a) that high 'meaning overlap' of two trait adjectives goes together with high 'act overlap', i.e. with a high number of shared prototypical behavioural referents (Angleitner and Demtroder, 1988;Borkenau, 1986aBorkenau, , 1988Borkenau and Ostendorf, 1987), and (b) that estimated cooccurrence-probability of two traits and the correlation among memory-based ratings made for these traits are co-determined by the degree of 'act overlap' of both traits (Borkenau, 1986b(Borkenau, , 1988.…”

Inferential structure of the NEO Five-Factor Inventory: Construct validity of the Big Four personality clusters.

“…Generally, the theme within this literature is that when rating others (or even oneself), people will rely on their own implicit personality theories to infer what personality characteristics belong to a person. Other findings demonstrate that perceived personali-ty trait relationships might reflect actual relationships (e.g., Borkenau;Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1987), and thus suggest this ability as an adaptive tendency. Yet people can also be poor judges of co-variation (e.g., Alloy & Tabachnik, 1984;Berman & Kenny, 1976).…”