Consensus Analysis for the Measurement and Validation of Personality Traits

The authors apply the cultural consensus model to the domain of personality and investigate (1) the level of consensus among informants’ judgments on two traits, sociability and responsibility, and (2) the extent to which their judgments are veridical in that they measure differences among people that correspond to independent and external criteria. Two scales, responsibility and sociability from the California Personality Inventory (CPI) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) extraversion scale, were the external criteria used. Results show that informants exhibit consistent consensus in judging both traits for people they know. Similar to previous studies, informants tended to overrate rather than underrate themselves. Personality test scores in part support the validity of the peer ranking results. The responsibility consensus ranking and the CPI responsibility scale showed moderate association, whereas the associations between the sociability consensus ranking and the EPQ extraversion scale were moderate to weak. There was at best a weak association between the sociability consensus ranking and the CPI sociability scale.