Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the generality of dimensions in personality perception. That is, we aim to analyze the dimensional stability through the various stimulus persons and the subjects' sex. Ss were 324 undergraduates: 212 males and 112 females. Eight stimulus persons were presented: father, mother, siblings, friend, teacher etc. 57 personality traits were selected from Aoki (1972). Transforming a similarity measure between any two traits into a distance measure, Carroll & Chang (1970) ′s INDSCAL was applied. Five dimensions were chosen as final solution.
The major results obtained were as follows:
(1) Among 5 dimensions, the dimension similar to “evaluation” and the one similar to “potency” were included, but no one similar to “activity”.
(2) Each dimension was substantially independent of each other.
(3) As to the relative importance among 5 dimensions, the one of “evaluation” was the highest, and the one of “potency” was the next.
(4) With all stimulus persons combined, there was found a sexual difference of the variance in the way of employing the 5 dimensions: the type of persenality perception in male Ss was more multi-dimensional than the one in female Ss.
(5) Of 5 dimensions, only 2 or 3 were relevant for each stimulus person: “evaluation” and “potency” were among those which were employed most commonly for all stimulus persons.
(6) Relevant dimensions for Ss were more heterogeneous for various stimulus persons among male than among female Ss.
