Abstract
This chapter examines the prospects of the contemporary reprise of person perception accuracy. I identify three components of a paradigm for studying accuracy: a model of social judgment, a model of personality dispositions, and a methodology for examining the relation between social knowledge and behavior. I examine the implications of bounded models of social judgment, then summarize evidence of domain-specific accuracy that supports these models. The role of a conditional model of dispositions in accuracy research is discussed, and criteria for evaluating accuracy are derived from this model. I then describe a “simulated personality” paradigm which combines the strengths of laboratory experiments and observational field studies to permit detailed investigations of the relation between social knowledge and social behavior. Finally, I illustrate how this paradigm has been used to clarify the conditions under which expert clinical judges are more accurate than novices, how the veridical and non-veridical patterning of behaviors across situations influences judgment accuracy, and how observers’ interaction goals influence the accuracy of the impressions they form.
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Wright, J.C. (1989). An Alternative Paradigm for Studying the Accuracy of Person Perception: Simulated Personalities. In: Buss, D.M., Cantor, N. (eds) Personality Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0634-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0634-4_5
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