Looking for performance in personality inventories: The primacy of evaluative information over descriptive traits

Abstract

Three experiments were designed to demonstrate that job performance inferences from personality inventories rely more on the agentic or communal value conveyed by the items compared with the Big-Five traits they are supposed to describe. In the first two experiments, the participants had to predict the job performances of fictitious job applicants based on their responses to a personality inventory. In Experiment 1, the information on personality was held constant, such that the applicants' responses varied solely on their agentic, communal, or purely descriptive orientation. In Experiment 2, the social value of the responses again varied as well as the information about the applicants' personality (agreeable vs. conscientious). The results showed that the agentic profiles were the most predictive of the performance, regardless of the personality factors. In Experiment 3, we reversed the procedure. The participants filled out a personality inventory in the place of a more or less successful employee. The results here showed that the information about the performance had the greatest impact on the agentic items, independent of the personality factors measured. These results confirm the relevance of social judgment models in personality research.

The persistence of welfare stigma: Does the passing of time and subsequent employment moderate the negative perceptions associated with unemployment benefit receipt?

“…literatures on the perceived laziness of welfare recipients (McKay, 2014;Schofield & Butterworth, 2015;Stuber & Schlesinger, 2006), the perceived lack of deservingness of welfare recipients (Jensen & Petersen, 2016;Larsen, 2008), and the SCM (Fiske et al, 2002). While we would suggest the conscientiousness results linked to current benefit receipt clearly reflect stereotypes of laziness (Jackson et al, 2010) and incompetence (Abele & Wojciszke, 2014;Caruana, Lefeuvre, & Mollaret, 2014;Kervyn, Fiske, & Yzerbyt, 2013), we are less confident about the interpretation of the unpredicted extraversion effects. High levels of extraversion are typically seen as positive and desirable (Bäckström, Björklund, & Larsson, 2009), in contrast to the unfavorable view of low conscientiousness.…”

How Do People Evaluate Themselves in Terms of Assertiveness and Ability After Having Failed or Succeeded: The (Economic) Consequences Matter!

“…Indeed, the more people gain status and success in their professional careers, the more they report agency traits (Abele, 2003). This specificity of agency also explains why it is preferred in employee selection or promotion settings (Caruana, Lefeuvre & Mollaret, 2014;Dubois & Aubert, 2010;Wojciszke, Bazinska & Jaworski, 1998). Moreover, agency is linked to status, which also refers to success on a societal level (Carrier et al, 2014).…”