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Psychologists have proposed two possibilities for these low correlations. One possibility is that
the natural tendency for people to see traits in others leads us to believe that people have stable
personalities when they really do not. In short, perhaps traits are more in the heads of the people
who are doing the judging than they are in the behaviors of the people being observed. The fact
that people tend to use human personality traits, such as the Big Five, to judge animals in the
same way that they use these traits to judge humans is consistent with this idea (Gosling,
2001). [20] And this idea also fits with research showing that people use their knowledge
representation (schemas) about people to help them interpret the world around them and that
these schemas color their judgments of others’ personalities (Fiske & Taylor, 2007). [21]
Research has also shown that people tend to see more traits in other people than they do in
themselves. You might be able to get a feeling for this by taking the following short quiz. First,
think about a person you know—your mom, your roommate, or a classmate—and choose which
of the three responses on each of the four lines best describes him or her. Then answer the
questions again, but this time about yourself.
- Energetic Relaxed Depends on the situation
- Skeptical Trusting Depends on the situation
- Quiet Talkative Depends on the situation
- Intense Calm Depends on the situation
Richard Nisbett and his colleagues (Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Marecek, 1973)[22] had college
students complete this same task for themselves, for their best friend, for their father, and for the
(at the time well-known) newscaster Walter Cronkite. As you can see in Figure 11.3 "We Tend
to Overestimate the Traits of Others.", the participants chose one of the two trait terms more
often for other people than they did for themselves, and chose “depends on the situation” more
frequently for themselves than they did for the other people. These results also suggest that
people may perceive more consistent traits in others than they should.