Forty‐five British adults rated 573 person‐descriptive terms on category breadth (defined as the diversity of behavioural referents of a trait) and social desirability. These values are presented here, along with American values where available. The British ratings proved highly reliable, and they correlated substantially with the American values, thus demonstrating the generalizability of category‐breadth judgements between these two cultures and the stability of the social‐desirability values over a 20‐year interval.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AllenR. B.EbbesenE. B. (1981). ‘Cognitive processes in person perception: Retrieval of personality trait and behavioral information’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 17:119–141.
2.
AndersonN. H. (1968). ‘Likableness ratings of 555 personality‐trait words’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9:272–279.
3.
BussD. M.CraikK. H. (1983). ‘The act frequency approach to personality’, Psychological Review, 90:105–126.
4.
EdwardsA. L. (1957). The Social Desirability Variable in Personality Assessment and Research, Dryden, New York.
5.
GoldbergL. R. (1982). ‘ From Ace to Zombie: Some explorations in the language of personality’. In: Spielberger, C. D. and Butcher, J. N. (Eds), Advances in Personality Assessment(Vol. 1, pp.203–234). Erlbaum, Hillsdale NJ.
6.
GoldbergL. R. (1986). ‘The validity of rating procedures to index the hierarchical level of categories’, Journal of Memory and Language, 25:323–347.
7.
HampsonS. E. (1982). ‘Person memory: A semantic category model of personality traits’, British Journal of Psychology, 73:1–11.
8.
HampsonS. E.JohnO. P.GoldbergL. R. (1986). ‘Category breadth and hierarchical structure in personality: Studies of asymmetries in judgments of trait implications’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51:37–54.
9.
KirbyD. M.GardnerR. C. (1972). ‘Ethnic stereotypes: Norms on 208 words used in their assessment’, Canadian Journal of Psychology, 26:140–154.
10.
NormanW. T. (1963). ‘Toward an adequate taxonomy of personality attributes: Replicated factor structure in peer nomination personality ratings’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66:574–583.
11.
NormanW. T. (1967). 2800 Personality Trait Descriptors: Normative Operating Characteristics for a University Population, University of Michigan, Department of Psychology, Ann Arbor.
12.
OsgoodC. E. (1962). ‘Studies on the generality of affective meaning systems’, American Psychologist, 17:10–28.
13.
PeabodyD. (1967). ‘Trait inferences: Evaluative and descriptive aspects’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph, 7: (4, Whole No. 644).
14.
RoschE. (1978). ‘ Principles of categorization’. In: Rosch, E. and Lloyd, B. B. (Eds), Cognitive and Categorization, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp.27–48.
SerlinR. C.KaiserH. F. (1976). ‘A computer program for item selection based on maximum internal consistency’, Educational and Psychological Measurement, 36:757–759.
