Charge of the 'right' brigade; the ability to know oneself and others gets a scientific lift - personality appraisal research - Cover Story

Science News, Oct 29, 1994 by Bruce Bower

In 1973, college student David Funder pondered a future as a research psychologist while campus radios blasted out The Who's latest rock anthem, "Can You See the Real Me?" Soon thereafter, Funder became a psychology graduate student at Stanford University, where his instructors championed a highly influential experimental approach that dismissed the British rockers' musical question with the blunt response: "Probably not."

The research tradition emerged 20 years before Funder entered graduate school and remains a dominant presence in social and personality psychology. It emphasizes the power of our beliefs and expectations to shape our judgments of others. Thus, its proponents argue, social situations often act as error magnets, attracting biases and deficiencies in thinking that unwittingly warp our views of everyone from old friends to new acquaintances.

Error research, as it is sometimes called, rarely strays from the experimental laboratory. This allows its practitioners to control critical parts of the social landscape, such as a volunteer's perception of an experimental confederate as outgoing or conscientious. Investigations of this sort have yielded an array of judgmental errors that have entered our cultural vocabulary - for instance, self-fulfilling prophecies and stereotypes.

But Funder, now a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and a growing number of like-minded scientists challenge the methods and findings of error research. Instead, they examine the degree to which people in social groups reach a consensus in their appraisals of others' personalities, as well as the factors that boost the accuracy of judgments about oneself, one's compatriots, and even total strangers.

In this perspective, stereotypes and other decision-making tendencies that commonly bear a psychological "seal of disapproval" may often work quite well in our daily encounters with others.

For example, psychologists have often studied how stereotypes based on skin color and sex fuel prejudice. But the ability of stereotypes based on grooming, facial expressions, and other readily observable features to illuminate underlying personality traits has been underestimated and understudied, Funder argues.

"We're pretty good at judgments of ourselves and others, as a general rule, but we could do a lot better," he says. "Psychologists need to look at what people can actually do in real social situations, instead of wallowing in their errors that deviate from a predetermined standard of perfection."

Until the mid-1950s, psychologists showed great interest in studying how people make accurate personality judgments. At that point, the difficulty of statistically controlling for various extraneous influences on agreement about an individual's personality - such as the possibility that similar people become friends and attribute their own traits to one another - helped put an abrupt halt to so-called accuracy research.

Psychologists then decided to design laboratory situations that elicited a variety of erroneous judgments that might occur in real life (SN: 1/29/94, p.72). But this rich repository of research says nothing about the frequency of such judgment blunders on a daily basis or in different social contexts, Funder asserts. This criticism also applies to a trove of experiments probing the fallibility of memory, he adds (SN: 9/18/93, p.184).

The renewed interest in accuracy research, represented by the work of Funder and others, provides insights into several facets of personality appraisal:

Judging yourself. The ability to accurately size up one's personality and one's esteem in the eyes of others is crucial to developing good mental health, according to data presented in August at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA) in Los Angeles.

The findings contradict a popular theory that psychological adjustment feeds off mildly positive illusions about one's personal qualities, mastery of situations, and prospects for the future.

Three researchers - C. Randall Colvin of Northeastern University in Boston, Jack Block of the University of California, Berkeley, and Funder - analyzed self-descriptions of 51 men and 50 women taking part in a long-term study of psychological development. The researchers then compared these descriptions to personality profiles provided by friends, as well as by clinicians who dealt with the volunteers over several days.

Colvin's group rated participants as "self-enhancing" if they rated themselves significantly more favorably than did their friends and the clinicians - who generally displayed substantial agreement in their assessments of the same people.

Self-enhancers at age 18 showed signs of poor emotional adjustment at age 23, in the judgment of clinicians who had not seen them previously. Men in this group were described as guileful, deceitful, distrustful of others, and emotionally brittle; their female counterparts seemed preoccupied with viewing themselves as physically attractive and expressed a thin-skinned, defensive attitude toward others.