Response Processes During the Description of Others

Each subject described a person he knew well by responding to items adapted from Jackson's Personality Research Form. He then indicated whether, in responding, he had felt uncertain of his response, had found the item ambiguous or difficult to apply, etc. The closeness of each item to each described person was computed in terms of the Rasch model. Correlations between closeness and presence of each inappropriate response component were computed for each subject on each of two scales. Most of the proportions of positive correlations were significant, as in previous studies of closeness and inappropriate response processes in self-descriptions, suggesting that similar processes are involved in describing self and others.