The effects of self-monitoring and self-reported consistency on the consistency of personality judgments made by strangers and intimates

How consistent are strangers' and intimates' judgments of stimulus people's personalities, and how is this interjudge consistency affected by stimulus persons' assessed self-monitoring and self-reported behavioral consistency? To answer these questions, 38 stimulus subjects rated themselves on the personality dimensions of extraversion and anxiety and also rated their cross-situational consistency on these dimensions. Strangers, friends, mothers, and fathers of stimulus persons also rated them on extraversion and anxiety. The results indicated that: For judgments of anxiety there was lower interjudge consistency for high than for low self-monitoring stimulus subjects. For judgments of extraversion there was no difference in interjudge consistency for low and high self-monitoring stimulus subjects. The results also showed that anxiety was a more “private” trait in that intimates' but not strangers' judgments correlated with stimulus subjects' self-reported anxiety (r = .50 and r = .11, respectively), while extraversion was a more “public” trait in that both intimates' and strangers' judgments correlated with stimulus subjects' self-reported extraversion (r = .42 and r = .51, respectively). These results suggest that self-monitoring of stimulus persons affects interjudge consistency of peroonality judgments particularly for “private” traits such as anxiety, which are most subject to expressive control and inhibition.