Salience, centrality and self-relevance of traits in construing others.

Abstract

Salient traits were hypothesized as having importance for the individual in two respects: (i) because they allow more effective inferences to other traits (centrality); (ii) because they are typically used in characterizing the self, and thus afford self-other comparison (self-relevance). The study reported assessed the differences between salient and non-salient traits on measures of centrality and self-relevance, and found support for both hypotheses. Centrality and self-relevance appeared to be relatively distinct features of salient traits, in that the overlap between them was fairly small. Other aspects of the data are also discussed.