Social Psychology, Vol 54(5), 2023, 283-293; doi:10.1027/1864-9335/a000527
We replicated and extended research on implicit simplicity: the tendency for personality judgments of acquaintances to be of lower dimensionality than those made for self or well-known others. Three hundred participants completed the Big Five Inventory for themselves, two well-known others, and two casual acquaintances, the latter four in a social and an academic/work setting. Correlations among the Big Five traits were higher for casual targets and close academic/work targets than for self or close social targets. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses of BFI items showed that casual and close academic/work targets were predominantly defined by an evaluative dimension. MDS revealed that judgments of Conscientiousness and Openness were rendered in finer detail—perceived trait granularity—for self and close social targets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)