Ratings and Judgments of Personality

THE object of the rating method is to draw on the knowledge that a person's associates have acquired about him, and to turn this into numerical estimates of his standing on various personality traits. Let us look first at the acquisition of such knowledge. As soon as we meet a person we jump to conclusions about him. We interpret his features and expressive movements, and any actions we see or words we hear, and arrive at a kind of picture or schema of his personality as a whole. Our further contacts, observations, and conversations, help to fill in and extend, sometimes to modify, this schema. But when we are asked to rate him and give him, say, a high mark for Sociability or a low mark for Dependability, it is not so much because we have observed any particular pieces of behaviour which are representative of these traits, as because we generalize from our total impressions. Sometimes certain observations stand out in our minds and influence our judgments: he may have failed to carry out some commission, so we call him undependable. But usually a whole conglomeration of more or less unanalysed recollections and emotional reactions is bound up in any judgment. Earlier conclusions about him considerably affect later observations; once the schema has been formed we tend to interpret what we see of him to fit in with it. Thus the schema is not an objective portrait or summary of the person. Although it may embody visual images and verbal descriptions, it also involves an emotional attitude or sentiment towards him. Landis ¹ has studied the reasons given by raters for their judgments, and pointed out that good or bad reasons have little effect on accuracy. They tend to be rationalizations, in the psychoanalytic sense, of whose real origins the rater is largely unaware.