Personality Understanding

Judgments about other people’s personalities and predictions about their typical behavior are not only common in daily life but also constitute a relevant (research) topic in various areas of psychology (e.g., psychological assessment, test construction, and personnel selection). Such judgments and predictions may turn out to be right or wrong. Whether they are right or wrong depends, at least in part, on the judging person’s ability, which primarily involves making correct inferences about other people’s personalities.

Most currently available approaches to assess this ability can be criticized because of issues pertaining to the criteria used to determine whether the personality judgments are correct or not (i.e., the scoring key). This issue parallels the scoring problems in the domain of Emotional Intelligence to some extent.

Our research activities focus on the construction and evaluation of a new maximum performance test using a novel (AcquA) task design. In this test, the target person’s typical behavior is presented first. Following this, the target person is presented in a new situation, and the test takers are then asked to rate possible reactions of the target person. The basic task design has already been successfully used in studies aimed at the assessment of Emotional Understanding. In our current research efforts, we are extending this approach to the domain of personality in order to enrich the extant set of methods for assessing the ability to understand other people's personality traits.

Interested in collaborating with us? Considering a Bachelor or Master Thesis in Psychology or an internship in this area? Great! Please contact us -> Prof. Dr. Ralf Schulze & Dr. Maike Pisters