AGREEMENT AMONG JUDGES OF PERSONALITY - INTERPERSONAL-RELATIONS, SIMILARITY, AND ACQUAINTANCESHIP

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.