edgeable informants. We postpone until Chapter 8 an evaluation of pro -
jective methods and focus for the moment on the other two approaches.
Observer Ratings
Ratings can be obtained from friends, neighbors, or fellow students,
from parents or spouses, or from psychologists or other trained observ -
ers. In all these cases, the rater does not simply make a tally of behav -
iors, but instead interprets all the information he or she has about the
person being rated—the target—as the basis for ascribing traits. Al -
though friends and neighbors may be biased by favorable (or occasion -
ally unfavorable) opinions of the target, they are less likely than the tar -
get to deceive themselves about the target’s personality . Even more
importantly , researchers who use peer ratings need not rely on any sin -
gle view but can ask several raters for their judgments, examine the
agreement among these, and combine them into an average rating.
Observer rating studies have played an important role in personal-
ity theory . The FFM itself was first identified in studies of ratings (Nor-man, 1963; T upes & Christal, 1961/1992), and, as we will see, some im-portant studies of age and personality have used peer, spouse, or expertratings. In sheer quantity , however, self-report studies have far outnum-bered observer rating studies, and perhaps the most important contri-bution of rating studies has been what they have been able to showabout the validity of self-reports.
Rate yourself on the six Extraversion items listed earlier on a 1-to-5
scale, and then ask a friend who knows you well to rate you. You maybe surprised at the differences of opinion. We would be guilty of failingto learn from decades of criticism if we did not acknowledge that thereis a substantial element of illusion in the views we hold of others (Fiske,1978) and in our idea of what their view of us is like (Swann, 1983). Weeasily and rapidly form opinions about others’ personalities, often withlittle basis in fact. This is particularly true of those with whom we haveonly a passing acquaintance.
But these limitations should not cause us to despair. When knowl -
edgeable raters are asked to assess a target’s personality using reliable
and valid trait measures, the results are generally encouraging (McCrae,1982b). We asked subjects in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study ofAging (BLSA) to complete the self-report form of the NEO PersonalityInventory; with their permission, we also obtained ratings from spousesMeasuring Personality 41