Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the generality of dimensions in personality perception. Specifically, we aim to analyze the dimensional stability through the subjects developmental stages, and through various stimulus persons used. Grade students and undergraduates served as Ss. Numbers of Ss in each of four age groups were nearly from 100 to 200.
Eight stimulus persons were presented: father, mother, siblings, friend, school teacher etc. Fourty five personality traits selected from results in the preliminary experiment were used. After the similarity data between any two traits were transformed into the distance data, Carroll & Chang's (1970) multidimensional scaling, “INDSCAL”, was applied. Five dimension-solution was chosen.
The major results obtained were as follows:
(1) The content of five dimensions was interpreted as “social evaluation”, “potency”, “personal likability”, “pleasantness”, and “brightness”, respectively. There was partly found a peculiar pattern in the configur tion of latter two dimensions.
(2) Each dimension was substantially independent of one another. The order of five dimensions described in (1) had positive monotonous relationship with relative importance in the sense of weight value.
(3) Analyzing the weights, it was found that “social evaluation” was the most important for all age groups. With increased age levels, the weights in “potency”, “personal likability”, and “brightness” increased, while that in “pleasantness” decreased.
(4) For each stimulus person, the most important was “social evaluation”, the next important was “potency”, and the third important was “personal likability” . For “pleasantness” and “brightness”, there were found considerable differences in importance among stimulus persons.
[Correction] THE JAPANESE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Vol.22 No.1 (1982) pp.93d-93d
