Running head : PERSONALITY JUDGMENT

Researchers seem to believe that accepting the reality of personality traits inevitably leads to a dogma about the incredible complexity of these traits and their judgment. This paper challenges this thesis and its assertion that the accuracy of personality judgment can only be achieved when a “good target” or a “good trait” is being judged using “good information,” and when a “good judge” makes the judgment. It is argued that because trait dimensions are universally applicable to all persons there is no stable ranking of good targets. The independence of major personality dimensions is incompatible with the distinction between good and bad traits. There seems to be no privileged source of information because information is everywhere and its retrieval requires unsophisticated skills. Because of the simplicity of the task, it is usually impossible to determine who a good judge is. A new thesis of simplicity is proposed as a guide through equally plausible personality theories. Keuwords: personality traits; agreement; complexity of judgement; good target; good trait; good information; good judge Page 2 of 53 http://mc.manuscriptcentral. com/jopy Journal of Personality This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Personality judgment 3 The Almost Unbearable Lightness of Personality Challenging the Dogma of Complexity The Incredible Complexity of Personality Judgments Personality psychology is not an exception: like many fields of knowledge, it is often organized by what Francis Crick (1990) called scientific “dogmas. ” These “are speculative and so may turn out to be wrong. Nevertheless, they help to organize more positive and explicit hypotheses. If well formulated, they act as a guide through a tangled jumble of theories. Without such a guide, any theory seems possible” (p. 109). Indeed, it was observed that dogmas help personality research to be guided from indiscrimination towards even mutually exclusive explanations (e.g.; Allik & McCrae, 2002). One of the dogmas, which has successfully guided personality research, is about the exceptional complexity of structure that personality psychologists seek to understand. For example, Gordon Allport, the founder of modern trait psychology, believed that the structure of personality might be difficult to determine: “Since traits, like all intervening variables, are never directly observed but only inferred, we must expect difficulties and errors in the process of discovering their nature. The incredible complexity of the structure we seek to understand is enough to discourage the realist, and to tempt him to play some form of positivistic gamesmanship” (Allport, 1966, p. 3). Unlike molecular biology, the idea of the “incredible complexity” of the structure of personality was not understood as a distinctive theoretical option but as an inevitable complication accompanying a difficult pursuit towards a probable truth (Funder, 1991). However, personality and its structure is difficult to understand, not only for researchers, but also for the layperson. For example, David Funder launching the Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM) – an elaborated version of the Brunswik’s probabilistic lens model (Brunswik, 1952) – Page 3 of 53 http://mc.manuscriptcentral. com/jopy Journal of Personality This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Personality judgment 4 declared that “the accuracy of personality judgment is an extremely complex matter” (Funder, 1995, p. 653), meaning that there is still hope of understanding and explaining this intricate human affair. It is not necessary to assume, as Funder wrote in another place, that the personality judgements are usually accurate, or even often accurate. All that is required is that lay perceivers have ever, even once, achieved accuracy in personality judgement (Funder, 1999, p. 119). This all was to prepare readers for the conclusion that an accurate personality judgment is an unlikely outcome, which happens rarely and only when all favorable conditions are satisfied (cf.; Allik, de Vries, & Realo, 2016). In consequence, for a considerable period psychologists almost completely avoided the accuracy problem of personality judgments (Funder, 2012; Kruglanski, 1989; Swann, 1984). Instead, research focused on putative biases and errors in all kind of judgments (Funder, 1987, 2012). Like any other human judgments, personality ratings are vulnerable to a long list of potential errors and biases (Evans, 1989; Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002). For example, a Wikipedia article about cognitive biases catalogues no less than 166 different tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality, in other words, accurate judgment. 1 It is not surprising that accurate personality judgment was perceived as an unlikely accomplishment that is very difficult if not impossible to achieve. Only relatively recently, models were advanced which had a goal to explain accuracy of personality judgments, which was recognized as an alternative to prevailing concepts of errors and biases (Biesanz, 2010; Funder, 1995, 2012; Kenny, 1994, 2004). The idea of complexity was also endorsed by numerous studies demonstrating that over a large array of clinical judgment tasks, including personality evaluation, simple statistical models or actuarial formulae usually surpassed the performance of clinical experts, with no regard of their professional training (Goldberg, 1968, Page 4 of 53 http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jopy Journal of Personality This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Personality judgment 5 1970; Hoffman, 1960; Meehl, 1996/1954; Wiggins, 1973/1988). There was no reason to expect that the layperson’s judgments of personality are more accurate than a relatively poor accomplishment of professional clinicians who struggled with these tasks. Which Task is Difficult? The thesis of the “incredible complexity” of personality judgments, as I try to demonstrate below, is a presumed cost one needs to pay for the acceptance of the fundamental thesis that personality traits really exist. If anything exists, then be prepared for the possibility that your knowledge could be deficient or even completely flawed. However, this does not mean that knowledge has to be always flawed. Easy tasks may exist where committing mistakes is an exception rather than a rule. If personality judgement is generally an easy task, not one that have achieved only few times in the lifetime, then evidences favoring the thesis of “incredible complexity” are not necessarily convincing. Obviously, an easy task is a task, which is familiar, requires not too heavy information processing, and for which there is not too many equally likely solutions. Difficult tasks, on the contrary, have their own distinctive characteristics. First, a difficult task must be insoluble for a considerable part of general population. For example, in the ability testing the item difficulty is measured by the percentage of respondents who answered a test item incorrectly. However, it is a matter of convention from which percentage to call an item “difficult. ” Some may call, for example, 50% moderately, 75% fairly, and 90% very difficult item. It is obvious that difficulty is not a binary concept; it is gradual with different levels of difficulties. Nevertheless, it makes no sense to call, for instance, an assignment with only about 5% failure rate a difficult task. Second, difficult tasks also imply substantial individual differences: some individuals are systematically good and some other individuals struggle constantly with tough tasks. Normally, these individual differences can be arranged according to Page 5 of 53 http://mc.manuscriptcentral. com/jopy Journal of Personality This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Personality judgment 6 participants’ education, intelligence, dexterity or other sorts of aptitudes. Finally, because difficult tasks require sophisticated cognitive skills it usually takes a considerable time and practice to achieve excellence in solving these complex tasks. Although some critics may say the thesis of complexity is mainly an imagination, there are still many theoretical claims, which assume that achieving accurate judgement of personality is a complicated task. Just as an example, it is claimed that lay judgements of personality typically reach the proportion of correct judgements of about 55% to 70% (Back & Nestler, 2016, p. 104). Accepting these values as true estimates, we are supporting a view that personality judgements are only slightly superior of that a stochastic mechanism could produce a success rate around 50%. This all means that personality judgements are conceptualised as a complicated process in which participants can more likely fail than succeed. How Does Accurate Personality Judgment Happen? Most researchers agree that the RAM formulates the necessary conditions that make accurate judgment possible. The RAM does not describe what always happens in personality judgment, nor does it claim to describe what usually or even often happens (Funder, 2012, p. 178). The RAM describes an obligatory sequence of events that connects a person’s personality trait with a perceiver’s correct judgment of that trait. For an accurate judgment, four things must happen. First, the person being judged must do something relevant to exhibit the trait. Second, the traitrelevant behavior must be available to the judge. Third, the trait-relevant, available behavior must be registered. Fourth, the trait-relevant, available, and detected information must be utilized correctly to make accurate inferences about that trait (Funder, 2012). One critical feature of the RAM is that it is multiplicative in nature, rather than additive (Funder, 1995, 2012; Human & Biesanz, 2013). That is, the utility of each successive stage is Page 6 of 53 http://mc.manuscriptcentral. com/jopy Journal of Personali