Dc. Funder et al., AGREEMENT AMONG JUDGES OF PERSONALITY - INTERPERSONAL-RELATIONS, SIMILARITY, AND ACQUAINTANCESHIP, Journal of personality and social psychology, 69(4), 1995, pp. 656-672
Personality judgments of 184 targets were provided by the self, colleg
e acquaintances, hometown acquaintances, parents, and strangers. Study
1 found that knowing the target in the same context enhanced but was
not necessary for interjudge agreement and that acquaintances who had
never met agreed with each other as well as those who had met. Study 2
found that personality judgments by acquaintances manifested much bet
ter interjudge and self-other agreement than did judgments by stranger
s. Acquaintances were not more similar to their targets than were stra
ngers, and their accuracy derived more from their distinctive judgment
of the target than from assumed similarity. These results rule out ov
erlap, communication, and assumed similarity as necessary bases of int
erjudge agreement and thereby support the simpler hypothesis that inte
rjudge agreement stems from mutual accuracy.