For decades, a recurring question in person perception research has been whether people's perceptions of others' personality traits are related to how they see themselves on these traits. Indeed, evidence for such "assumed similarity" effects has been found repeatedly, at least for certain characteristics. However, recent research suggests that these findings may be an artifact of individual differences in how positively or negatively perceivers see others in general, irrespective of trait-specific content. Overcoming the limitations of prior studies, the present work provides a critical test of trait-specificity versus global positivity as sources of assumed similarity in personality judgments. In two large studies (Ns = 2,287 and 3,563) with preregistered hypotheses and analyses, perceivers rated 10 targets (strangers) each on the honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience; HEXACO (Study 1) and Big Five (Study 2) dimensions to capture their perceptions of the "average other" (i.e., perceiver effects). We then computed "positivity-corrected" assumed similarity effects using trait-based and profile-based approaches. Although controlling for global positivity considerably reduced the strength of assumed similarity, perceiver effects were still positively related to self-reports. As predicted, these assumed similarity effects occurred foremostly for traits strongly linked to values. Specifically, in Study 1, positivity-corrected assumed similarity was observed only for honesty-humility and openness to experience, albeit meaningful effects merely occurred on one of the two self-report measures. In Study 2, traits' value-relatedness remained a unique moderator of assumed similarity after accounting for traits' positivity (i.e., social desirability). These findings demonstrate that assumed similarity is indeed, to some extent, trait-specific. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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特质特异性与整体积极性：对人格判断中假定相似性的替代来源的批判性测试。

几十年来，个人感知研究中反复出现的一个问题是，人们对他人人格特质的感知是否与他们如何看待这些特质有关。事实上，这种“假定的相似性”效应的证据已被反复发现，至少对于某些特征而言是这样。然而，最近的研究表明，这些发现可能是个体差异的产物，无论特定特征的内容如何，​​人们总体上对他人的正面或负面看法如何。克服先前研究的局限性，目前的工作对特质特异性与整体积极性作为人格判断中假设相似性的来源进行了批判性测试。在两项带有预先登记的假设和分析的大型研究（Ns = 2,287 和 3,563）中，感知者对 10 个目标（陌生人）进行评分，每个目标的诚实谦逊、情绪化、外向性、宜人性、尽责性和开放性；HEXACO（研究 1）和大五（研究 2）维度来捕捉他们对“其他人的平均水平”的看法（即感知效应）。然后，我们使用基于特征和基于配置文件的方法计算了“正校正”假设的相似性效应。尽管控制全局积极性大大降低了假设相似性的强度，但感知效应仍然与自我报告呈正相关。正如预测的那样，这些假设的相似性效应主要发生在与价值观密切相关的特征上。具体来说，在研究 1 中，仅针对诚实谦逊和开放的经验观察到积极校正的假设相似性，尽管有意义的影响仅发生在两个自我报告措施之一上。在研究 2 中，在考虑了特质的积极性（即社会期望）之后，特质的价值相关性仍然是假定相似性的独特调节因素。这些发现表明，假设的相似性在某种程度上确实是特定于特征的。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。