Predicting Actual Social Skill Expression from Personality and Skill Self-Concepts

Abstract

Social skills are of key importance in everyday and work life. However, the way in which they are typically assessed via self-report questionnaires has one potential downside; self-reports assess individuals’ global self-concepts, which do not necessarily reflect individuals’ actual social behaviors. In this research, we aimed to investigate how self-concepts assessed via questionnaires relate to skill expression assessed via behavioral observations after short interpersonal simulations. For this, we used an alternative behavior-based skill assessment approach designed to capture expressions of predefined social skills. Self- and observer ratings were collected to assess three different social skills: agency (i.e., getting ahead in social situations), communion (i.e., getting along in social situations), and interpersonal resilience (i.e., staying calm in social situations). We explored how these skills were related to self-concepts by differentiating between a classic personality measure (i.e., Big Five Inventory 2; BFI-2) and a novel skill questionnaire (i.e., Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory; BESSI). The results (N = 137) showed that both personality and skill self-concepts predicted self-rated skill expression, with the BESSI showing incremental validity. For both personality and skills self-concepts, the relationships with observer-rated skill expression were significant for agency but not for communion or interpersonal resilience. We discuss these results and highlight the theoretical and practical importance of differentiating between skill self-concepts and actual skill expression.

Going Beyond Traits: Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills Matter for Adolescents’ Success

“…Moreover, brief measures sacrifice reliability and validity for efficiency (Soto & John, 2019). Future work can thus investigate whether full-length measures and alternative assessment methods, such as observer-reports and behavioral tasks, add unique information and predict objectively recorded outcomes other than school grades, attendance, and disciplinary records (for one recent example, see Breil et al, 2022). It can also examine how SEB skills relate with other aspects of personality, such as motives, goals, and values (McAdams & Pals, 2006).…”

Examining SEB skills’ incremental validity over personality traits in predicting academic achievement

“…This shows that while BESSI skills are related to personality traits, they are not identical, and account for different components of the variance in highstakes academic achievement. This finding adds to a recent and growing body of evidence that skills can provide incremental validity over traits in predicting a broad range of consequential outcomes including academic engagement and achievement, occupational interests, social behaviors and relationships, and physical and psychological well-being [6,[20][21].…”

Assessing Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills in Just a Few Minutes: 96-, 45-, and 20- Item Short Forms of the BESSI

“…Second, it has a robust multidimensional structure and exhibits conceptually coherent convergence and divergence from the Big Five and other socioemotional skill measures (Soto et al, 2022a(Soto et al, , 2022b. Finally, the BESSI-192 provides incremental validity over personality traits when predicting outcomes and observed behavior (Breil et al, 2022;Soto et al, 2022bSoto et al, , 2023Yoon et al, 2024).…”