Self-other agreement in personality and affectivity: The role of acquaintanceship, trait visibility, and assumed similarity

Self- and other-ratings on the Big Five and a comprehensive inventory of tr ait affect were obtained from 74 married couples, 136 dating couples, and 2 79 friendship dyads. With the exception of Surprise, all scales showed sign ificant self-other agreement in all 3 samples, thereby establishing their c onvergent validity. Consistent with the trait visibility effect, however, t he Big Five consistently yielded higher agreement correlations than did the affectivity scales. Conversely, the affective traits consistently showed s tronger evidence of assumed similarity (i.e., the tendency for judges to ra te others as similar to themselves) than did the Big Five. Cross-sample com parisons indicated that agreement was significantly higher in the married s ample than in the other 2 groups: however, analyses of 3 potential moderato rs in the dating and friendship samples failed to identify the source of th is acquaintanceship effect.