Differentiation in personality descriptions of the self and others

Abstract Previous studies of the tendency to describe one's own personality or the personality of another in a differentiated, nuanced way have assessed differentiation in terms of number of ascribed traits. Findings have been inconsistent and conclusions compromised by failure to consider a key component of differentiation—the relationships between attributed characteristics. In the two studies reported in this article, the magnitude of the correlations between personality scale descriptions of a target was taken as an inverse indicator of differentiation. In both Study 1, which employed scales from the Personality Research Form (Jackson, 1974), and Study 2, which employed scales from the NEO PI-R (Costa and McCrae, 1992), participants showed greater differentiation in descriptions of themselves than of others and greater differentiation in descriptions of liked than of disliked persons. Participants also revealed a tendency to describe familiar persons in a less differentiated way than persons whom they knew less well. This pattern of findings is well-accommodated by Berscheid et al.'s (1976) ‘outcome dependency’ formulation which proposes that the more vulnerable our welfare to another person's influence, the greater our motivation to construe that person's behavior in dispositional terms.