Personality in the Eyes of the Beholder(s)

Is it my personality or their view of my personality? Which one is more real and truer, my self-perception or their perceptions of me? I am confident that the reader has heard other people ask these questions, especially when something goes wrong. Personality science’s answer is that your spouses, romantic partners, relatives, friends, roommates, and coworkers can report valid perspectives of your personality. Supplementing your personality story with other people’s stories about your personality substantially increases the power to predict consequential outcomes such as your academic achievement or your performance at work (Oh et al., 2011).

Why is that? Why others’ reports on my personality are so valuable? Well, let me use an example to answer this question. John takes a personality test and reports that he is average-to-high on Agreeableness. However, John might have been partially deaf or blind so to say when others have spoken about his Agreeableness. What he calls “critical thinking” is perceived by others as using overtly confrontational and caustic language. And, unsurprisingly, John is not being promoted to manager because his leaders want him to be not only a great engineer but also a great coach and a people leader. As you can see, others’ reports of John’s personality do add substantial information toward his report – that is, even if he is Agreeable, he needs to work on showing it in a way acceptable to others. These incremental effects of others’ reports over our own reports can be observed for all Big Five factors except for Neuroticism whose facets (e.g., anxiety and depression) are more internal and difficult to observe.

What are the limits of others’ accuracy of judgements about our personality? The answer is GREAT. We show different aspects of our personality to different people. To some coworkers John’s crabbiness turns into condescension and satire, whereas to others he is just friendly-crabby – greeting you with “I want this work done by midday” and then sending you smiley emojis and even taking you out for lunch. That is why, to accurately appraise your Big Five factors and their facets we need to ask five to ten people (Connelly & Ones, 2010). And the more these people have seen you in different situations, the better. Take for example Barbara who is John’s nemesis at work. If she saw him donating for a charity, she might not think of his Agreeableness only in terms of his constant squabbling with her at work. Yet John should have told Barbara about his good side. Because Barbara can only detect and utilize for her judgements only what is relevant and made available to her by John. These four steps, as outlined in Funder’s (1999) realistic accuracy model, determine when others’ judgements of the target’s personality are accurate – relevancy, availability, detection, and utilization.

But Barbara has to also have the characteristics of a good judge of other people’s personality as outlined by Colman (2021):

1)???being attentive (i.e., not easily distracted),

2)???being intelligent in general and specifically dispositionally intelligent – understanding the relationships between the target’s behavior, traits, and the situation in which the target is operating (think of it as being a very good observer, almost like a spy),

3)???having good memory to remember what you saw,

4)???being more agreeable (especially empathetic to establish a connection with the target), more conscientious, and less neurotic (having high self-esteem frees one’s attention to turn on others),

5)???being female (this is a bit tentative, and the research is mixed, but there is some research showing women to be better judges of neuroticism and openness to experience, as well as for women to judge women more correctly than men judging men),

6)???having the right skills/behavior – for example having good social skills and using positive language predisposes the target to share more information about their personality.

As the reader can see, being a good judge of personality is difficult. That is why, always more than one judge should be used. Some of the Big Five factors - Conscientiousness and Extraversion - are easier to figure out with about five raters. How many ways one can be punctual at work or go to a busy networking event? Agreeableness and Neuroticism, however, are more internal, they are moods and emotions-related factors and hence up to ten raters are required for accurate judgements. Finally, let us not forget that others’ reports of your personality might be slightly unreliable because each of your raters evaluates you differently based on their impressions and liking of you. This liking factor also depends on the personality trait being rated. For example, if you come to work on time even if I dislike you, I will have to admit that you are Conscientious, whereas your friendliness and cooperativeness (i.e., Agreeableness) toward me is totally for me to decide.

The above arguments lead us to a necessary conclusion. The fullest picture of one’s personality is constructed from multiple observers who are close to the target and see the target in multiple contexts (McCrae et al, 1998). For example, John’s Agreeableness (poor guy John, here I go again with his personality) can be evaluated reliably only if his wife, friends, and coworkers report how nice he is not only in the main contexts they see him (i.e., home, the pub, and at work) but in other contexts. Thus, John needs to be seen by his friends at work, or his wife needs to see him in the pub (God forbid that says John). Also, his observers need to read my blogs to learn how to be good observers of John’s personality.

But let us switch forward now to moments when others are absolutely necessary to appraise one’s personality. For example, in psychiatry and psychopathology the family and friends are frequently interviewed to corroborate the stories of the patient. In some extreme cases as with psychopathic offenders such reports could be the litmus test for truth. This is because psychopaths are masterful charmers and manipulators (Hare, 2003), they effectively use cognitive empathy (Robinson & Rogers, 2015), and they can effectively fool psychiatrists. But for the sake of our sanity, let us stop talking about psychopaths and turn to the narcissists. For example, let us think about counselling someone with narcissistic personality (note that I am not saying disorder on purpose). Such people do not usually ask others for feedback on their behavior, and almost always narcissists do not believe they have a behavioral problem at all. The worst is when such people are in positions of power and are cushioned from the scrutiny of upper leadership and the HR department. In these cases, 360-degree personality feedback (i.e., subordinates reporting on the personality of their manager anonymously) could be very valuable for coaching the narcissist (Lubit, 2002). The latter must be given concrete examples that their actions are NOT OK and the subsequent opposition and wailing let us leave to the psychiatrist to handle, should we?

Before closing this topic, let us have a short philosophical discussion though. If observers can see and appraise better than us some of our traits, then what makes this personality really OURS, why is it not OURS and THEIRS, sorts of a merger of two half-truths? Without going into lessons in the theory of knowledge (i.e., epistemology), let us consider two basic truths I believe you will accept. The first is that we exist, or rather something that thinks exists as Rene Descartes would have said. Thus, that which exists has the attributes of personality – all the factors, traits, motivations, needs, values, cognitive and physical abilities, all these characteristics that make us unique yet comparable to each other. The second is that we are rational and social animals – we use our intelligence to survive and thrive in groups. Therefore, we may have all the personality characteristics and know best who we are (truth 1) but that does not make us more adaptable and hence survive-able in groups (truth 2). We need truth 1 for the validity of truth 2 and vice versa. Our personality is definitely ours, but it is formed, developed, and challenged by interacting with others. Every trait has meaning only in relation to the others. If I am very agreeable and live on a deserted island, does it practically matter that I am agreeable? After all, to be agreeable it is required to interact with others, show them empathy and help them in need. The very conscientious of you will object that after countless hours of toil they would build a little rancho on the island and have greater chances of survival, and that is why Conscientiousness matters without the need for other people. But then I will ask you who taught you carpentry and masonry, wasn’t it another conscientious person with whom you interacted, perhaps your grandfather?

Our personality can be thought of as a device that came to be and exists through our life with others. It is not my identity which only I know of versus my reputation among others. A personality that wants to develop needs to break the limitations of thinking in terms of me vs. the others and accept that these two are co-dependent and compound on each other. Every time you look yourself in the mirror the personality of others looks back at you.

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Colman, D. (2021). Characteristics of the judge that are related to accuracy. In T. Letzring & J. Spain (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of accurate personality judgement (pp. C6–C6.P47). OUP. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190912529.001.0001

Connelly, B. S., & Ones, D. S. (2010). An other perspective on personality: Meta-analytic integration of observers' accuracy and predictive validity.?Psychological Bulletin, 136(6), 1092–1122.?https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021212

Funder, D. C. (Ed.). (1999). Personality judgment: A realistic approach to person perception. London: Academic Press

Hare, R. D. (2003). The hare psychopathy checklist—revised (2nd ed.). Toronto: Multi-Health Systems.

Lubit, R. (2002). The long-term organizational impact of destructively narcissistic managers. Academy of management perspectives, 16(1), 127-138. https://doi.org/10.5465/ame.2002.6640218

McCrae, R. R., Stone, S. V., Fagan, P. J., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1998). Identifying causes of disagreement between self-reports and spouse ratings of personality. Journal of Personality, 66, 285–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6494.00013

Oh, I.-S., Wang, G., & Mount, M. K. (2011). Validity of observer ratings of the five-factor model of personality traits: A meta-analysis.?Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(4), 762–773.?https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021832

Robinson, E. V., & Rogers, R. (2015). Empathy faking in psychopathic offenders: The vulnerability of empathy measures.?Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment,?37(4), 545-552. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-015-9479-9