1994 Volume 65 Issue 5 Pages 389-394
In a typical study of implicit personality theory, correlation coefficients among personality-trait ratings were computed across several stimulus persons. The purpose of this study was to suggest that it would be more effective to isolate each stimulus person from such data, and then obtain correlations between traits across subjects for each stimulus person. The present study examined, with female subjects, the comparability of structures in personality perception for three types of stimulus persons: (1) combined data from two stimulus friends of her own sex, one each of whom she likes or dislikes, (2) a friend of her own sex whom she likes, and (3) herself. Results yielded highly similar structures in factor solutions for data from the self and a friend of her own sex whom she likes. Furthermore, “agreeableness” and “social desirability”, presumably the two component factors of the “evaluation” dimension of the semantic differential, had a positive and low correlation. On the other hand, these two factors had a positive and high correlation when the combined data of (1) were used. This high correlation can be explained as a result of combining two completely different distributions for ratings of the persons liked and disliked.
