Self Judgment Of Personality Analysis

Personality judgments are an indispensable part of our daily lives. A lot of psychology researchers make use of judgments either by participants themselves or by knowledge others such as parents, best friends, peers, teachers and supervisors. But then, what is self-judgment of personality? There are many different definitions, however, in this case, it is defined as self-perception of how we behave, think, feel and the knowledge of how those can be interpreted by others (Vazire & Carlson, 2010). It was examined by the Big Five (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellect/imagination), which was reported in the article of Goldberg’s IPIP scales in 1992 (Goldberg, 1992). Therefore, it is very important because

Firstly, the structure of the questions may affect whether the individuals perceive the information accurately. There are many potential problems with errors on the part of the respondent (McDonald, 2008). Moskowitz (1986) indicated that self-ratings have a lot of potential ‘response biases’, for example, people often respond in such a way that presents them in a more favorable manner, even if these responses do not really reflect how they actually think, feel or behave (as cited in McDonald, 2008). Paulhus and Vazire proposed another two weaknesses in 2007, which are ‘Acquiescent Responding’ and ‘Extreme Responding’ (as cited in McDonald, 2008). Acquiescent responding is in which individuals agree with responses without thinking about the question, whereas extreme responding is to give extreme ratings on scales. Lack of credibility due to biased responding is a major issue because it could obstruct the validity of the self-ratings as a measure for personality (as cited in McDonald, 2008). Another weakness is self-deception, emphasized by Allport in1958 and Greenwald in 1980 (as cited in John &Robins, 1993). Thoren (1989) proposed that due to self-deception, selective inattention or repression, self-ratings may be less accurate than others-ratings since individual’s self-esteem are motivated to be enhanced by self-concept (as cited in John &Robins,

However, the result showed that there was no significant means difference between those types of ratings. Hence, this research provided the evidences and findings for the confounding variables on the self-ratings of measuring personality traits. In addition, there are also several limitations in the study which need to be improved on future studies. First of all, participants used their own perception and values on the assessment of personality, which means that the result might be inaccurate due to misunderstand the questions or they responded in pleasant manner. Second, the inconsistencies of the result may also due to the smaller samples size. Most of the data were collected from the same source, which may minimize the relationship between self-ratings and others-ratings on personality traits. Therefore, the lager sample size should be required in order to strengthen the validity and reliability of the result in future