Personality in the context of conversation: Person‐talk scenarios replicated

Abstract

In this study 90 pairs of subjects (N=180) were requested to describe a recent situation in which they had said something about a person. The pairs of subjects were randomly assigned to three conditions differing on the main question, namely whether the subjects had said something about themselves, about their partner, or about a third person. Each person‐talk situation was described from two perspectives, namely from that of the speaker and from that of the addressee. The descriptions of the talk situations were judged separately for the content of the utterances about the persons, and for the intentional activities of the two interlocutors with respect to each other. Redundancy analysis followed by a rotation to the canonical correlation solution was applied on two sets of variables, namely the one describing the speaker's role in the talk situation and the one describing the addressee's role. For each of the two perspectives this analysis produced seven canonical components. Each of the components identifed a person‐talk scenario such as an entertainment scenario, a flirtation scenario, and a gossip scenario. A comparison of the two canonical structures indicated that the person‐talk scenarios obtained under the perspective of the speaker were well replicated in the data obtained under the perspective of the addressee, and vice versa.