ABSTRACT
The multiple bodies of knowledge in social and behavioral sciences can be roughly ordered in terms of dependence upon words. Donald W. Fiske has consistently been concerned with method variance, as indicated by the major contribution of the multitrait-multimethod matrix. In analyzing sources of method variance, Fiske concluded that words are a big part of the problem: “Words make a major contribution to procedure specificity, and that specificity severely handicaps research in many areas of social science”. Many researchers have been examining the cognitive processes that underlie how people construe other people; this work directly bears on the psychology of the measuring process, in that observations are at the core of enterprise. This work occurs indistinguishably in personality and social psychology. The sociometric-differential paradigm, examining the impact of subject and target characteristics on feelings and trait construals has been the main paradigm in interpersonal cognition.
