Abstract
The ability to accurately judge others’ personality and the ability to accurately recognize others’ emotions are both part of the broader construct of interpersonal accuracy (IPA). However, little research has examined the association between these two IPA domains. Little is also known about the relationship between personality judgment accuracy and other socio-emotional skills and traits. In the present study, 121 participants judged eight traits (Big Five, intelligence, cooperativeness, and empathy) in each of 30 targets who were presented either in a photograph, a muted video, or a video with sound. The videos were 30 second excerpts from negotiations that the targets had engaged in. Participants also completed standard tests of emotion recognition ability, emotion understanding, and trait emotional intelligence. Results showed that personality judgment accuracy, when indexed as trait accuracy and distinctive profile accuracy, positively correlated with emotion recognition ability and was unrelated to emotion understanding and trait emotional intelligence. Female participants were more accurate in judging targets’ personality than men. These results provide support for IPA as a set of correlated domain-specific skills and encourage further research on personality judgment accuracy as a meaningful individual difference variable.
Highlights
Humans excel at processing sensorial inputs from their environment and infer various kinds of information from them
Results showed that personality judgment accuracy, when indexed as trait accuracy and distinctive profile accuracy, positively correlated with emotion recognition ability and was unrelated to emotion understanding and trait emotional intelligence
The main goal of the present study is to provide further support for personality judgment accuracy as an individual difference variable by demonstrating that it correlates with accuracy in a different domain of interpersonal perception, namely emotion
Summary
Humans excel at processing sensorial inputs from their environment and infer various kinds of information from them. People quickly form first impressions of others’ personality, group membership, and other characteristics, even when only a few cues are available. Trustworthiness, competence, or aggressiveness based on pictures that they see for merely 100 ms. People quickly assess whether an unacquainted person is warm, naïve, kind (Berry and McArthur 1985), successful, popular (Forgas 2011), assertive, cruel, or vulnerable (Berry 1991), and whether a person is liberal or conservative (Olivola et al 2018). 4) develops early in childhood, with children as young as 3 years old forming similar impressions of trustworthiness, dominance, and competence as compared to adults (Cogsdill et al 2014). Impression formation can even occur without our awareness (Bargh and Chartrand 1999) and from subliminal exposures (Bargh and Pietromonaco 1982)
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