David A. Kenny
April 3, 2021
Chapter 4 of Interpersonal Perception: The
Foundation of Social Relationships, as well as Table 5.1 on page 119 and
Table 5.2 on page and 123.
The degree to which two perceivers rate a target the same way.
Consensus with the is defined within the Social Relations
Model as the target variance divided by the total variance. It may seem odd
that agreement is indexed by a variance, but if perceivers all exactly agree in
their ratings of each target, all of the variance would be due to the targets.
Using Laing notation, consensus is symbolized as A(C) =
B(C).
Research on consensus addresses a fundamental issue in social science.
Social psychologists have looked at consensus to determine if social perception
is more in the head of the perceiver than in reality. Personality researchers
have used research on consensus to justify the existence of personality traits.
Methodologists use consensus to establish inter-rater reliability. Finally,
anthropologists use consensus in judging objects (not persons) to validate a
common culture.
Consensus is a necessary condition before many other questions in person
perception can be asked. Various questions in self-other agreement, target
accuracy, and meta-accuracy require consensus.
There is more consensus for extraversion than for the other Big Five factors. However, if perceivers are well
acquainted with the targets, there is not much difference in consensus between
the the Big Five traits. In general, traits that are more behavioral, external
or observable show more consensus.
The level of consensus is fairly modest, ranging from about .20 at zero
acquaintance to about .40 at long-term acquaintance. Although longitudinal
studies show no increase in consensus as a function of acquaintance, the likely
reason is that most the increase occurs very early in the acquaintance process.
The PERSON Model can explain why the relationship between acquaintance and
consensus is relatively flat. Basically, agreement increases because perceivers
better know the target. However, agreement decreases because the effect of
shared stereotypes and the effect of agreement about inconsistency decrease.
These two effects offset each other to produce essentially a weak relationship
between acquaintance and consensus.
Outcome dependence refers to the increased motivation of the perceiver
to monitor the target’s behavior. In 1991 Cheryl Flink and Bernadette Park
examined the effects of outcome dependence on consensus. They told perceivers
“(T)hey would need to select one of the interviewees [i.e., targets] to teach
them a task to be performed in the second part of the study” (p. 456). They
found that making perceivers dependent on a target did in fact lead to over 25%
more relative target variance. These results are consistent with the prior
theorizing of Stephen Neuberg and Susan Fiske in 1987 that if a person becomes
dependent on a target, that person would then monitor the behavior of the
target more closely, which would presumably lead to greater consensus.
For the Big Five, very short-term stabilities after zero acquaintance appear to
be very high, approaching perfect stability. Even long-term stabilities over
many months have a value of nearly .75. However, the evidence, judgments made
at zero acquaintance show much lower levels of stability of .64 and attraction
judgments show lower stability.
The average correlation of target effects between two Big Five factors is
small, averaging around .10. However, the correlations are larger among
Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability and between
Extraversion and Openness to Experience. Very often the largest correlation is
between Agreeableness and Emotional Stability, averaging only .26.
Alexis Geeza, in her 2010 master’s thesis, examined the consensus between
different classes of perceivers for each of the Big Five. She studied four
different classes of knowledgeable perceivers: roommates, friends, coworkers,
and family members. She examined 142 correlations in all. The results showed
that an average correlation of target effects between perceivers of two
different classes is .73.
The Person Model treats P or Personality, N or
Norm times overlap, and S or Stereotype as shared variance leading to
consensus. As seen in Figure 4.2 in the 2020 book, consensus starts out at .20
at zero acquaintance, all of which is due to S and asymptotes at .40, all of
which is due to P. Note also the change is very abrupt with most of it
occurring after just a few acts. The PERSON Model predicts relatively small
effect of overlap, q, on consensus. See the shaded area in Figure 4.2, labelled
N.
Biesanz, J. C., West, S. G., & Millevoi, A. (2007). What do
you learn about someone over time? The relationship between length of
acquaintance and consensus and self-other agreement in judgments of
personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
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Connelly, B. S., & Ones, D. S. (2010). An other
perspective on personality: Meta‑analytic integration of observers’
accuracy and predictive validity. Psychological Bulletin,
136, 1092-1122.
Flink, C., & Park, B. (1991). Increasing consensus in trait
judgments through outcome dependency. Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, 27, 453-467.
Geeza, A. A. (2010). A meta-analytic examination of
consistency in informants’ perspectives across contexts. Master’s
Thesis, University of Connecticut.
Kenny, D. A., Albright, L., Malloy, T. E., & Kashy, D. A.
(1994). Consensus in interpersonal perception: Acquaintance and the
big five. Psychological Bulletin, 116,
245-258.
Neuberg, S. L., & Fiske, S. T. (1987). Motivational influences
on impression formation: Outcome dependency, accuracy-driven attention, and
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