Abstract
It is argued that if we compute self-other agreement on some personality traits then we possess no or very little information about the individuals who are the targets of this judgment. This idea is largely based on two separate ways of computing self-other agreement: trait agreement (rT) and profile agreement (rP), which are typically associated with two different trait-centered and person-centered approaches in personality research. Personality traits of 4115 targets from Czech, Belgian, Estonian, and German samples were rated by themselves and knowledgeable informants. We demonstrate that trait agreement can be partialled into individual contributions so that it is possible to show how much each individual pair of judges contributes to agreement on a particular trait. Similarly, it is possible to decompose agreement between two personality profiles into the individual contributions of traits from which these profiles are assembled. If normativeness is separated from distinctiveness of personality scores and individual profiles are ipsatized, then mean profile agreement rP becomes identical to mean trait agreement rT. The views that trait-by-trait analysis does not provide information regarding accuracy level of a particular pair of judges and profile analysis does not permit assessment of the relative contributions of traits to overall accuracy are not supported.
Highlights
Personality judgments may reflect the traits by which a specific target individual can be distinguished from other targets and stereotypes, biases, and method-specific variance (Cronbach and Gleser, 1953; Cronbach, 1955)
We demonstrate in the Appendix A in Supplementary Material that standardization of personality scores makes the difference between mean trait agreement rT and mean profile agreement rP predictably smaller
When distinctiveness was separated from normativeness, profile agreement dropped by 0.16 points, on average
Summary
Personality judgments may reflect the traits by which a specific target individual can be distinguished from other targets and stereotypes, biases, and method-specific variance (Cronbach and Gleser, 1953; Cronbach, 1955). Since between-rater agreement on personality trait ratings allows us to separate some of the different components of ratings, the use of multiple informants has become one of the most valuable tools in personality research (McCrae, 1994; Funder, 1999; Kenny et al, 2006; Vazire, 2006; Borkenau and Zaltauskas, 2009; Kandler et al, 2010; De Los Reyes et al, 2013). It has even been claimed that other-ratings are a more valid source of information than self-ratings when it comes to the relationship between personality traits and some external validity criteria (Kolar et al, 1996; Connelly and Ones, 2010). Agreement is necessary for the accuracy of judgments of personality traits
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
