Experimental Investigations of Personality Judgments

So far we have made occasional references only to the enormous wealth of experimental literature bearing on judgments of emotions, motivation and personality qualities by naive observers — i.e. by psychologically untrained persons such as most employment interviewers, teachers, fellow-students, etc. Useful accounts of personality ratings and other methods of assessment can be found in many books, e.g. those by Cronbach (1960), Anastasi (1961), Freeman (1955), Allen (1958), Guilford (1959) and Vernon (1953). Our aim here is to summarize the present position, and to draw attention to a few trends of importance in current research.