The Elusive General Factor of Personality: The Acquaintance Effect

Abstract

A general factor (gp) at the apex of personality has been suggested to account for the correlations between the Big Five. Although the gp has received ample support from monomethod studies, results from studies incorporating different methods have remained rather ambiguous; some have identified a gp across different informants, whereas others have not. It was hypothesized that these divergent findings are a result of varying lengths of acquaintance between raters. To this end, the current study presents a multitrait multi‐informant meta‐analysis (total N = 11 941) that found weak support for a gp as a substantive trait of personality. Evidence for a gp was susceptible to the length of acquaintance between informants. Although a gp could be identified for short‐term acquaintances, it remained elusive at long‐term acquaintance. Thus, the gp in other ratings more likely reflects normative ratings of an average individual rather than ratings of the specific target person. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology

Sexual assault victimization and psychopathology: A review and meta-analysis

“…Effects with studentized deleted residuals ≥ 2 were considered to be outliers (Viechtbauer & Cheung, 2010). Following Gnambs (2013), these outliers were truncated to the upper bound of the 95% confidence interval of the true effect for the applicable domain of psychopathology, which was calculated by computing unconditional models using a dataset from which the outliers had been removed. Thirteen effects were identified as outliers, which is in the expected range for a meta-analysis of this size (Viechtbauer & Cheung, 2010).…”

Why are moderators of self-other agreement difficult to establish?

“…Nevertheless, from both theoretical and practical viewpoints, an increase in agreement ∆r = .01 for every 10 years of acquaintance does not seem very meaningful. If there is an improvement with length of acquaintance, then it happens in the very early stages of acquaintance, after which a plateau is reached (cf., Biesanz et al, 2007;Gnambs, 2013;L. Schneider, Schimmack, Petrican, & Walker, 2010).…”

“…Although acquaintance length increases accuracy in personality judgment, there is evidence that familiarity may also have a negative effect on self-other agreement (Kenny & West, 2010). The effect of length of acquaintance is neither very consistent nor large (Bernieri, Zuckerman, Koestner, & Rosenthal, 1994;Biesanz, West, & Millevoi, 2007;Gnambs, 2013;Kenny, 2004;Kurtz & Sherker, 2003;Story, 2003). This means that observing the target acting in hundreds or even thousands of similar situations improves judgement accuracy only marginally (Kenny, 2004).…”

Disclosure of sensitive behaviors across self-administered survey modes: a meta-analysis

“…Using the studentized deleted residual (Viechtbauer & Cheung, 2010), three effects were identified as outliers (α = .01), less than 1 % of all available ORs. To reduce the impact of these outliers, we followed the approach in Gnambs (2013) and truncated the respective effect sizes to the lower or upper bound of the 90 % credibility interval of the true effect calculated from a dataset from which the outliers had been removed.…”