CONSENSUS IN INTERPERSONAL PERCEPTION - ACQUAINTANCE AND THE BIG-5

Consensus refers to the extent to which judges agree in their ratings of a common target. Consensus has been an important area of research i n social and personality psychology. In this article, generalizability theory is used to develop a percentage of total variance measure of c onsensus. This measure is used to review the level of consensus across 32 studies by considering the role of acquaintance level and trait di mension. The review indicates that consensus correlations ranged from zero to about .3, with higher levels of consensus for ratings of Extra version. The studies do not provide evidence that consensus increases with increasing acquaintance, a counterintuitive result that can be ac counted for by a theoretical model (D. A, Kenny, 1991, in press). Prob lems in the interpretation of longitudinal research are reviewed.