Friends know us even when they are different from us : accuracy and bias in self-other perceptions of the big five

Abstract

Friendships pervade people’s social lives across their lifespans. But how accurately can friends perceive each other’s personalities? Person perceptions are typically a mixture of fact and fiction, but as friends share a lot of information, they should be able to form relatively accurate assessments. We referred to the truth and bias model of judgment to study accuracy in friendship dyads (N = 190). Participants completed self- and peer-rating versions of the Big Five Inventory-10. Actor-partner interdependence models were used to decompose truth and bias forces: Friends achieved significant perceptual accuracy on each Big Five trait. Friends were actually rather similar in conscientiousness and also assumed they were similar to each other in this trait. For agreeableness, there was no actual but there was assumed similarity. There was neither actual nor assumed similarity for openness, extraversion, or neuroticism. Moreover, there was a considerable directional bias for all traits: Friends’ peer-ratings were positively biased: They assessed their friends as being more open, and conscientious, et cetera, than the friends did themselves. This research adds to the similarity-dissimilarity debate in social and personality psychology and the social perception literature in employing a sophisticated assessment of accuracy.