Trait interrelations in implicit personality theories and questionnaire data.

Abstract

To assess the validity of naive Ss' implicit personality theories, the correspondence among the theories, and the influence of social desirability on them, 18 female high school seniors classified the items from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Psychopathic Deviate scale into clusters representing different traits. These clusters agreed significantly with the factors obtained in previous factor analyses of self-reports to these items and were consistently similar for individual Ss. Desirability was significantly related to the clusters but generally did not mediate their correspondence with the factors or with each other. Results indicate that the lay theories possessed some validity as well as a degree of communality and that desirability had a distinct but limited involvement with the theories. (51 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)