Evaluative and descriptive aspects in personality... : Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (original) (raw)

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

16(4):p 619-626, December 1970.

Investigated the dimensions underlying person perception, with special attention given to the evaluative dimension. Each of 30 undergraduates described approximately 10 individuals he knew by assigning a subset of 60 personality traits to each individual. The traits supplied to the Ss in this trait-sorting task were selected from a trait-inference study by D. Peabody. The 60 traits were scaled by J. B. Kruskal's program, with a cooccurrence measure for each pair of traits serving as input data. Linear multiple regression was then used to locate an axis in the 3-dimensional space for each of 9 independently rated properties of the traits; 3 of these properties are evaluative. The correlations between each of the 9 properties and the trait space are all at least .75 and are all significant beyond the .001 level. A scoring artifact was discovered in Peabody's data analysis, which accounts for the absence of an evaluative dimension in his study. A reanalysis of his data with artifact removed reveals the presence of a strong evaluative dimension, independent of any particular descriptive dimension. The reanalysis is consistent with the trait-sorting results and with previously published findings by other investigators. (15 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)