On the Psychological Significance of the Euclidean Representation of Implicit Personality Theory

The overall purpose of the present study was to investigate the psychological significance of the Euclidean representation of implicit personality theory (IPT) by testing the predictive usefulness of this representation. Multidimensional scaling analyses of 18 subjects' estimates of assumed trait co-occurences (IPT) gave Euclidean trait-distance matrices which were used to predict the subjects' trait-to-trait inferences. The results showed that: (1) The Euclidean representations of subjects' IPTs can be used to predict ( p < 0.10) most subjects' (14 of 18) trait-to-trait inferences; (2) The similarity between the Euclidean representation of subjects' IPTs was positively correlated (r_s = 0.43, p < 0.001) with the similarity between subjects' trait-to-trait inferences. These results suggest that the Euclidean representation of IPT has some predictive value, and thus, may at least to some extent, be justified and considered as psychologically significant.