Implicit personality theory: Is it illusory?1

Abstract

AbstractSeveral studies have found a substantial association between subjects' judgments about the co‐occurrence of personality items and the items' actual co‐occurrence, lending support to the validity of implicit personality theory. This work has recently been called into question by an investigation of Mirels (1976) that reported a nonsignificant relationship between judged probabilities of item pairs and the pairs' empirical coendorsement probabilities (actually calculated conditional probabilities) derived from self‐report responses. Using Mirels' data as well as new data, an appreciable and highly significant association between judgments of behavioral co‐occurrence and empirical coendorsement was found, when the latter was measured by correlational‐type indexes instead of conditional probability. This outcome indicates that the divergent results in the Mirels investigation were due to its use of the conditional probability index as a measure of empirical coendorsement. These findings add to the accumulating body of evidence pointing to the validity of implicit personality theory.