Perceiver effects as projective tests: What your perceptions of others say about you.

Abstract

In 3 studies, we document various properties of perceiver effects-or how an individual generally tends to describe other people in a population. First, we document that perceiver effects have consistent relationships with dispositional characteristics of the perceiver, ranging from self-reported personality traits and academic performance to well-being and measures of personality disorders, to how liked the person is by peers. Second, we document that the covariation in perceiver effects among trait dimensions can be adequately captured by a single factor consisting of how positively others are seen across a wide range of traits (e.g., how nice, interesting, trustworthy, happy, and stable others are generally seen). Third, we estimate the 1-year stability of perceiver effects and show that individual differences in the typical perception of others have a level of stability comparable to that of personality traits. The results provide compelling evidence that how individuals generally perceive others is a stable individual difference that reveals much about the perceiver's own personality. Keywords: person perception, perceiver effect, perceiver biases, rating biasWe do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.-The Talmud We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make our world.-The BuddhaGiven that observer reports are usually collected to learn about the target rather than the person providing the rating, tendencies for raters to judge the same target differently are generally regarded as perceiver bias, or scale-use bias, and considered nuisance variance to be removed or minimized to the extent possible (Hoyt, 2000). However, we can also invert the usual use of observer reports and see what observer reports reveal about the raters. Indeed, numerous theorists have suggested that raters' perceptions of others are one of the most important determinants of their behavior (e.g.,

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