Personality Judgments

Why Do We Make Personality Judgments?

• Social prediction is necessary for interaction (Tamir et al., 2018).
• We try to anticipate others’ thoughts, feelings, and actions to guide interactions.
• Social knowledge about people is used to make predictions about behavior.
• Snap judgments can be formed rapidly and influence cognitive and behavioral outcomes.

How Do We Establish “Accuracy”?

• Not a binary notion of truth; several referents for accuracy:
  • Consensus/interjudge agreement (how similar judgments are across judges).
  • Self–other agreement (how well judgments align with a target’s own report).
  • Behavioral prediction accuracy (how well judgments predict actual behavior or outcomes).
• Limitations:
  • A target may appear to possess a trait but self-report or objective data may diverge.
  • Self–other agreement has limitations because targets may lack complete self-knowledge or others may misinterpret signals.

What Cues Are Used?

• Facial characteristics (Tabak & Zayas, 2010; Rule & Ambady, 2008).
• Body movements and mannerisms (Rule et al., 2012).
• Tone of voice and verbal cues (Kufner et al., 2010).
• Body scent (Roberts et al., 2011; Gaby & Zayas, 2017).
• Clothing style, jewelry, piercings (Bardack & McAndrew, 1985).
• Music preferences (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006).
• Room decor (Gosling, 2002).
• Facebook profiles (Gosling et al., 2007).
• Explicit statements (Funder & Colvin, 1988).

Snap Judgments: What Gets Judged Quickly?

• Attractiveness ( Olson & Marshuetz, 2005 ).
• Ethnicity (Quanty, Keats, & Harkins, 1975).
• Sexual orientation (Rule & Ambady, 2008).
• Socioeconomic status (Rule et al., 2017).
• Extraversion (Borkenau et al., 2009).
• Trustworthiness (Todorov, 2008).
• Competence (Todorov et al., 2005; Willis & Todorov, 2006).

Are Snap Judgments Accurate?

• For several traits the initial snap judgments show accuracy patterns:
  • Attractiveness, Ethnicity, Sexual orientation, SES, Extraversion, Trustworthiness, Competence are commonly assessed quickly with noted accuracy patterns (see above list).
• Across studies and measures, accuracy is not uniform or uniformly high; some judgments align better with real traits than others.
• “Accuracy” here also includes consensus and the degree to which a trait guess matches broader judgments, not only ground truth.

When Forming Impressions, Which Traits Are Inferred First?

• Warmth (friendliness, helpfulness, sincerity, trustworthiness, morality) tends to be inferred early and reliably.
• Competence (intelligence, skill, creativity, efficacy) also emerges early but with different reliability patterns.
• These two dimensions often guide initial impressions more than others.

Warmth and Competence: The Core Two Dimensions

• Warmth vs Cold; Competence vs Incompetence (Wojciszke, 2005; Wojciszke & Klusek, 1996).
• Warmth includes: friendliness, helpfulness, sincerity, trustworthiness, morality.
• Competence includes: intelligence, skill, creativity, efficacy.
• These two dimensions capture primary impressions from faces and behavior.

Mapping Warmth/Competence onto the Big Five

• Warmth maps onto Agreeableness (positive warmth) and its opposite, Disagreeableness.
• Competence maps onto Conscientiousness (and its opposite, Impulsiveness).
• Openness and Conventionality map to openness/conventional traits, illustrating how impressions align with broader trait taxonomies.

Reading Sexual Orientation from Faces: Methods and Conditions

• Stimuli: Facebook photographs; target groups: men (g or s) and women (g or s);
  • Photos shown for 50 ms; standardized; emotionally neutral cues; no cultural context.
  • Participants judged 96 photos per gender.
• Result: Overall average accuracy around
  • $60\%$ (p < $0.001$).
• Interpretation: 60% is better than chance but far from perfect; rapid appearance-based judgments rely on facial cues and may reflect learned associations, not definitive information.

Interpreting Results: What Do the Numbers Mean?

• A 60% accuracy rate is significantly above chance, but does not imply high proficiency in trait reading.
• P-values show that the result is unlikely due to random chance, but practical significance requires caution when applying to real-world decisions.
• The rapid judgments may capture cue-consensus patterns rather than accurate character readings.

Should You Be Impressed by Snap Judgments?

• Minimal information is enough to extract relevant cues quickly.
• Intuitive responding to faces can be automatic, fast, and efficient, often outside conscious control.
• Judgments can be uncontrollable and have downstream consequences regardless of accuracy.

The “Beauty” Principle: How Much Is the Judge or the Target Responsible?

• The proverb “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” captures the interpretive bias in judgments.
• Both the target (the judged person) and the perceiver (the judge) contribute to impressions.
• This leads to the idea that judgments are co-constructed by target cues and perceiver expectations.

What Factors Affect How We Judge Someone?

• Social Relations Model (SRM): a framework for partitioning sources of behavior into:
  • Target effects (traits/qualities of the person being judged),
  • Perceiver effects (traits of the judge),
  • Perceiver × Target interaction effects (unique matchups between judge and target),
  • Unexplained residual (noise).
• All components sum to 100% of variance in judgments.

Target Effects

• Target effects refer to qualities of the person being judged that influence judgments (actual or perceived).

Perceiver Effects

• Perceiver effects refer to qualities of the person making the judgment (biases, experiences) that influence judgments.

Perceiver × Target Effects (Interaction Effects)

• Perceiver × Target interaction captures idiosyncratic preferences: e.g., you may rate one specific target much more favorably than others, relative to others.

Estimating the Source of Judgments

• Studies analyze how signals of age, happiness, or anger in faces influence judgments.
• Findings suggest that some trait judgments rely on facial features resembling emotional expressions (e.g., friendliness reflects emotion cues).
• Other traits (e.g., creativity) show less agreement about which facial features convey them, indicating more reliance on perceivers’ prior knowledge.
• A useful interpretation is that trait judgments can be mapped in two conceptual spaces:
  • Content-based space (e.g., warmth–competence, trustworthiness–dominance).
  • Source-based space (how much perceivers bring to bear vs. how consistently the target displays cues).
• These approaches can be integrated to understand impression formation.

Dimensions Underlying Person Perception (Analysis 1 & 2) and Large-Scale Findings

• Foundational work: Two core dimensions underlie face judgments: trustworthiness and dominance (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008).
• Broader stimuli across age show a third dimension: youthful/attractive (Sutherland et al., 2013; Wolffhechel et al., 2014).
• In large, heterogeneous samples, youthful/attractive is included to reflect broader target variation.
• Example descriptions in the analyses:
  • Example target stimuli and figure showing relative contributions of perceiver-ICC, target-ICC, and residual to trait impressions (Analysis 1).
  • Analysis 2 identifies core dimensions (trustworthiness, dominance, youthful/attractive).

How Much Do Perceiver vs Target Characteristics Contribute?

• Analysis 3 extends to perceiver–target interactions (interaction-ICC).
• Key patterns observed:
  • Dominance remains relatively target-led but shows large perceiver–target interaction variance, meaning different judges interpret dominance from faces differently.
  • Youthful/attractiveness becomes highly target-led in some analyses (more influenced by target than perceiver).
  • Trustworthiness falls between target-led and perceiver-led depending on the analysis.
• The magnitude of perceiver variation (perceiver-ICC) can be substantial for some traits (e.g., creativity shows high perceiver ICC).
• Unique judgments constitute a large share of variance (roughly ~40% in some analyses).
• Different stimulus conditions (e.g., emotionally neutral vs emotional expressions) can shift the relative contributions of target vs perceiver effects.

Do These Judgments Predict Real-Life Outcomes?

• Rapid judgments of competence based on brief exposure predicted election outcomes:
  • About $68.6\%$ of gubernatorial races and $72.4\%$ of Senate races in the studied sample (Ballew & Todorov, 2007).
• Consequences do not require perfect accuracy; snap judgments can steer decisions and actions (e.g., voting, hiring) even when not fully accurate.

Do Portrait Impressions Predict Liking After Real Interactions?

• Studies compare liking based on a photograph to liking after a real interaction.
• Findings show that initial photo-based liking can predict subsequent liking after live interactions, though effects vary by context and trait.

Mechanisms Linking Photo Judgments to Live Interactions

• Mechanisms explored include:
  • Behavioral confirmation / self-fulfilling prophecy: initial beliefs influence behavior, which shapes the target’s behavior to confirm those beliefs.
  • Social feedback loops where initial impressions guide interaction, reinforcing the original judgment.

Halo Effect and Related Biases

• Halo Effect: positive impressions in one domain (e.g., attractiveness) generalize to other traits (e.g., perceived social skills, intelligence).
• Liking judgments from photos can color more objective personality judgments, persisting after live interactions, with exceptions for certain traits (e.g., extraversion may update with actual interaction).

RAM: Realistic Accuracy Model (Achieving Personality Accuracy)

• RAM posits that accurate judgments occur only when four conditions are met:
  • Relevance: behavioral information relevant to the trait is available.
  • Availability: the information is available to the judge.
  • Detection: the judge detects the relevant information.
  • Judgment: the judge utilizes the information correctly to form an impression.
• Core idea: readiness for accuracy depends on both information and the judge’s processing, not on a universal mechanism.
• Important caveat: RAM does not predict what typically happens in everyday settings; it highlights the four steps that must align for accuracy to be achieved.

RAM Components in Detail

• Relevance: Does the observed behavior actually reflect the trait of interest?
• Availability: Is the relevant information accessible to the observer (e.g., in a given situation or time frame)?
• Detection: Does the observer notice or attend to that information?
• Judgment: Is the information correctly interpreted and integrated into a final impression?
• The model emphasizes that accuracy can vary across traits and contexts depending on how these steps align.

Self–Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA)

• Question: Who knows you best, you or your parents? Or you vs. others?
• No single group is universally more accurate overall.
• Some traits are more observable (e.g., talkativeness) while others are more unobservable (e.g., anxiety).
• Some traits are evaluative (e.g., attractiveness, intelligence) where self or others may be biased differently.
• The SOKA framework accounts for why different sources outperform others for different traits.

Practical Implications and Ethical Considerations

• Snap judgments can be consequential (e.g., hiring, dating, voting) even if not highly accurate.
• Understanding SRM and RAM can help in designing better interpersonal assessments, reducing bias, and improving accuracy where possible.
• Ethical considerations include avoiding unfair discrimination based on rapid, appearance-based judgments and recognizing the limits of what can be inferred from appearance alone.

Key Takeaways

• Humans routinely make personality judgments using a mix of cues, with warmth and competence as primary early dimensions.
• Accuracy is nuanced and context-dependent, often assessed via consensus, self–other agreement, and predictive validity.
• The SRM framework partitions variance into target, perceiver, and interaction effects, illustrating that both who is judged and who judges matter.
• Underlying dimensions of impression formation include trustworthiness, dominance, and youthful/attractive traits; both target and perceiver characteristics shape impressions.
• Realistic Accuracy Model identifies four necessary steps for achieving accurate judgments, highlighting that accuracy depends on information and processing, not just smart judging.
• Self–other knowledge asymmetry explains why different sources (self vs. others) excel at judging different traits; there is no single best source for all traits.
• While quick impressions can predict some real-world outcomes, they should be interpreted with caution due to biases and the halo effect.