Judging Others

How We are Often Wrong

People are not good at making accurate judgments of others, which is one reason psychological tests are so useful. Let’s consider three reasons why this might be the case. First of all, people often only encounter certain others in specific situations. For example, we may initially judge Professor Stotland as intelligent, soft spoken and calm based on our impressions of him in class. But teaching a class at a university requires him to act in certain ways which constrain his behaviour. However, there are many other situations that Professor Stotland probably finds himself in every week that don’t force him to act in these specific ways. For all we know, he may normally be, loud, extroverted and rowdy. We are unlikely to be able to find this out about Professor Stotland unless we run into him at a club on the weekend because we only observe him in one type of situation where things like rowdiness are not appropriate. If Professor Stotland took a personality test some of the characteristics that his students never see would probably appear and it would tell us more about what he is like across most situations.

A second reason that people can come to inaccurate conclusions about others is that other others are constrained by our own actions, behaviours and personality. We may not realize this but the way we act produces certain behaviours in those we are interacting with. For example, if you are in a group interview and one person starts boasting about all of the things they excel at, you and many of the others will probably start to boast as well. Once you boast to the group, the other members may come to think of you as cocky and full of yourself. But you do not always boast, you only did this because someone else did it first. In this way, the way others act can influence our behaviour and distort how those others view us. Again, if we took a personality test, others may realize that we are actually quite different from what they think but without this information they cannot alter their perceptions.

One final reason we come to misjudge others is many of us make attributions based on unrelated information. Many of you may have heard of the halo effect, in which attractive people are seen as more outgoing, intelligent, skilled, etc. This is not accurate of all attractive people of course, nor is it inaccurate of people who are unattractive. However, many of us make these assumptions and ones like it without thinking about it. In turn this can influence how we act towards that person and give them little room to disconfirm our assumptions. Yet again, a personality test may help correct some of our inferential errors.

These are just three of the ways that we can misjudge others and there are surely many more. In each of these cases a personality test is one way to help us correct our initially wrong assumptions.