No one sees you quite like I do: The social relations model in personality perception

Abstract

The Social Relations Model (SRM) offers a comprehensive framework for examining how individuals perceive personality traits in others, decomposing personality perceptions into perceiver, target, and relationship effects. These components demonstrate meaningful variation across traits, time, classes of relationships, and levels of acquaintance. Nevertheless, while target and perceiver effects have been well-documented, the relationship effect, capturing idiosyncratic, dyad-specific personality perceptions, remains underexplored despite accounting for substantial variance and predicting meaningful outcomes. Relationship effects are likely shaped by multiple factors, including unique behaviors, unique interpretations by perceivers, unique situations, unique biases, or dyadic fit. Recent developments leading to the extended SRM (eSRM) further enrich the model by introducing the ability to capture individual-level variability in how perceivers utilize SRM components. Importantly, despite practical challenges, including the resource demands of round-robin designs and the statistical complexity of the model, technological and collaborative innovations grounded in open science practices offer pathways to broaden the application of the SRM. This review aims to position the SRM as an increasingly promising and accessible tool for the study of personality perception and to highlight that additional research utilizing the SRM is needed to advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of relationship effects in personality perception.