The Judgment of Personality: An Overview of Current Empirical Research Findings

Abstract

This article presents an overview of the current state of knowledge in personality judgment research. We address (1) the words and phrases that people use to describe one another and themselves, (2) research in the “variable-centered” tradition, which investigates judgments of targets by perceivers on single traits, and (3) research investigating judgments of targets by perceivers on whole profiles of traits. Our focus is on inter-rater agreement, accuracy, and bias. We also provide (4) an outlook regarding important research questions that remain to be answered in this field. Although we consider our attempt to jointly identify the most robust evidence in the field to be largely successful, we acknowledge that the process of consensus building was fairly difficult. Thus, we close with a number of concrete suggestions for making such collaborative-writing processes as constructive as possible.