Comparability of Self‐Reported Conscientiousness Across 21 Countries

In cross‐national studies, mean levels of self‐reported phenomena are often not congruent with more objective criteria. One prominent explanation for such findings is that people make self‐report judgements in relation to culture‐specific standards (often called the reference group effect), thereby undermining the cross‐cultural comparability of the judgements. We employed a simple method called anchoring vignettes in order to test whether people from 21 different countries have varying standards for Conscientiousness, a Big Five personality trait that has repeatedly shown unexpected nation‐level relationships with external criteria. Participants rated their own Conscientiousness and that of 30 hypothetical persons portrayed in short vignettes. The latter type of ratings was expected to reveal individual differences in standards of Conscientiousness. The vignettes were rated relatively similarly in all countries, suggesting no substantial culture‐related differences in standards for Conscientiousness. Controlling for the small differences in standards did not substantially change the rankings of countries on mean self‐ratings or the predictive validities of these rankings for objective criteria. These findings are not consistent with mean self‐rated Conscientiousness scores being influenced by culture‐specific standards. The technique of anchoring vignettes can be used in various types of studies to assess the potentially confounding effects of reference levels. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance‐based pay is fair,particularly when I perform better: differential fairness perceptions of allocators and recipients

We examined in two experiments the impact of the roles that people enact (allocator or recipient) and performance attributions (talent or effort) on fairness perceptions of pay systems (performance‐based pay or job‐based pay). To test the relative effects of the roles that people enact, in the control conditions, participants were asked to evaluate the fairness of both allocation norms from ‘behind a veil of ignorance’ (Rawls, 1971 ). As hypothesized, the results consistently demonstrate that whereas recipients were biased in their fairness perceptions, allocators tended to be non‐biased in their fairness perceptions. The self‐interest bias among recipients was particularly strong when talent rather than effort attributions were imposed on them. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.