Judgments of personality are inferences about characteristic patterns of behavior that are coherent across diverse situations. Such judgments are important in clinical assessment, organizational and medical settings and daily life. The present research assesses the accuracy of personality judgments in terms of their agreement across judges and their ability to predict behavior. Earlier empirical results have been synthesized into a general theory, which states that the accuracy of a personality judgment depends critically upon the relevance and availability of behavioral cues to the desired inference, and the degree to which these cues are detected and optimally utilized in judgment. Therefore, the basis of any moderator of accuracy must be its effect upon the relevance, availability, detection, or utilization of behavioral cues. This conclusion provides a common explanation for diverse moderators demonstrated previously and suggests new moderators that might be. found. The principal activity of the continuation period will be to test implications of this theory against a major new data set which includes personality and ability inventories, self-judgments, and judgments gathered from informants recruited from diverse contexts of the subjects' lives, along with information about the informants themselves including self and peer judgments as well as newly developed measures of social acuity. The new data also include videotaped and """"""""beeper"""""""" reports of their behavior in daily life, which will allow additional analyses that focus on the consistency of behavior across laboratory and real-life contexts. The addition of a collaborator with acknowledged theoretical, statistical and methodological expertise will enhance the development of- the theory of accuracy and its integration with conceptualizations of behavioral coherence, as well as innovative techniques for addressing some of the special issues entailed in analyzing this rich and distinctive data set.
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