Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Understand Ourselves and Other People?
Follow each prediction from observability and evaluativeness to its behavioral criterion, then compare single-observer and aggregated ratings.
Why you’re reading it. Move from the standards of self-evaluation to the information that supports or limits self-knowledge.
A question to consider. When your own judgment and a friend's judgment disagree, what criterion could help without assuming either viewpoint is the answer?
Why this reading
Neither an inside view nor an outside view has to be best for every judgment. Vazire proposes that access to information and the personal stakes of an evaluation help explain what selves, friends, and strangers can know.
Before you read
Observability concerns how readily a characteristic is visible to others. Evaluativeness concerns its social desirability. A criterion is the measure used to assess a judgment's accuracy; it also needs scrutiny. Aggregating ratings means combining several observers' reports.
Read for
- Connect the model's predictions to the particular characteristics and criteria in Table 2.
- Compare results for one observer with results averaged across several observers.
- Separate agreement among people from prediction of behavior, and a proposed mechanism from a measured difference.
Consider afterwards
- You and a friend disagree about how anxious you appear when speaking. Which observations could address your experience, your visible behavior, and the accuracy of each report?
Editorial context
The study involved 165 U.S. undergraduates, selected characteristics, and laboratory criteria. Some advantages of friends' judgments depended on combining ratings. Public-speaking anxiety does not represent all neuroticism, and brief ability tasks do not exhaust a person's capacities. Differences across traits support a model without experimentally isolating observability or self-protection as causes. The findings do not make friends infallible or self-report dispensable.