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For decades, a recurring question in person perception research has been whether people's perceptions of others' personality traits are related to how they see themselves on these traits. Indeed, evidence for such "assumed similarity" effects has been found repeatedly, at least for certain characteristics. However, recent research suggests that these findings may be an artifact of individual differences in how positively or negatively perceivers see others in general, irrespective of trait-specific content. Overcoming the limitations of prior studies, the present work provides a critical test of trait-specificity versus global positivity as sources of assumed similarity in personality judgments. In two large studies (Ns = 2,287 and 3,563) with preregistered hypotheses and analyses, perceivers rated 10 targets (strangers) each on the honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience; HEXACO (Study 1) and Big Five (Study 2) dimensions to capture their perceptions of the "average other" (i.e., perceiver effects). We then computed "positivity-corrected" assumed similarity effects using trait-based and profile-based approaches. Although controlling for global positivity considerably reduced the strength of assumed similarity, perceiver effects were still positively related to self-reports. As predicted, these assumed similarity effects occurred foremostly for traits strongly linked to values. Specifically, in Study 1, positivity-corrected assumed similarity was observed only for honesty-humility and openness to experience, albeit meaningful effects merely occurred on one of the two self-report measures. In Study 2, traits' value-relatedness remained a unique moderator of assumed similarity after accounting for traits' positivity (i.e., social desirability). These findings demonstrate that assumed similarity is indeed, to some extent, trait-specific. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study will investigate the perception of personality feedback on trait morality, defined as the general tendency to think, feel, and behave according to ethical principles, as captured by five dimensions (i.e., honesty, humility, fairness, compassion, and gratitude). To do so, we will combine quantitative (e.g., ad hoc questionnaires on feedback perception) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews) methods.

Supplemental Material for Who is healthier? A meta-analysis of the relations between the HEXACO personality domains and health outcomes by Jan Luca Pletzer, Isabel Thielmann, and Ingo Zettler in European Journal of Personality

Individuals differ in their propensity to participate in intergroup conflict and in particular, in their willingness to harm members of out-groups. We test whether the Dark Factor of Personality (D) and HEXACO dimensions, in particular Honesty-Humility, predict weakly and strongly parochial cooperation in the intergroup prisoner's dilemma-maximising differences (IPD-MD) game.

Megastudy project to investigate the effectiveness of honesty oaths on reducing dishonest behavior. Pilot Study III to check the effectiveness of the honesty oath interventions and aspects of the instructions.

From a theoretical point of view, political orientation and prosociality are closely linked given that supporters of left-wing parties or ideologies tend to endorse social welfare policies whereas supporters of right-wing parties or ideologies tend to oppose such policies. It has thus been proposed that supporters of left-wing parties or ideologies may also show more prosocial behavior as, for example, measured in economic games. However, corresponding results are mixed, with only some studies showing the expected link between political orientation and prosocial behavior. The goal of the current investigation is to shed further light on this issue by measuring both political orientation and prosociality in various ways.

Individuals with high social status can do a lot of good but also a lot of harm to the social world around them. The proposed study investigates when and why people confer status to individuals high in narcissistic rivalry. We hypothesize that individuals high in narcissistic rivalry are more likely to attain status when they have the opportunity to punish uncooperative group members than when they have the opportunity to share their resources. To test this, we will conduct a lab-based behavioral experiment in which groups of seven to nine persons interact in modified versions of the repeated public goods game with punishment. The results will not only inform theories about the narcissism-status link but also debates about the evolution of cooperation.

Megastudy project to investigate the effectiveness of honesty oaths on reducing dishonest behavior. This procedure details how treatments are rated and selected for final inclusion.

Studies show that individuals tend to be more helpful towards certain individuals compared to others (Benson et al., 1976; Dovidio et al., 2017; Eagly & Crowley, 1986; Levine & Manning, 2013; Levine & Thompson, 2004; Levine et al., 2005; Stürmer & Siem, 2017). However, far less is known about how selective people are when donating to different victims of the same natural disaster, that is, whether people donate more to one group of victims compared to another. This poses an interesting avenue for research: How selective are individuals in who they donate to? Even further, are there systematic individual differences in selective donating that can be traced back to differences in personality? Choosing to help one group of victims more compared to another group in the same situation can have great consequences, such as explicit discrimination, negligence, and inter-group hostility. Thus, it is crucial to work towards a better understanding of (1) how selective individuals are in who they help, (2) individual differences in such selectivity, and (3) whether such individual differences can be accounted for by personality traits. The study aims to address these issues by offering participants the opportunity to donate any amount of their participation payment to two charitable organisations currently aiding the victims of the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria, which occurred on February 6th, 2023. Specifically, participants will first fill out a series of personality measures and are then asked whether they would like to donate (any portion of) their participant payment (€2.00). They will be presented with two organisations, one that focuses on the earthquake affected regions in Turkey (AHBAP) and another that focuses on the earthquake affected regions in Syria (MOLHAM). Participants will be free to choose how much to donate (if any) to each of the two organisations. Such a design will allow the assessment of real-life donations at the time of a real-life natural disaster affecting two different groups of individuals. Thus, this study will provide valuable information about individuals’ willingness to donate to different victims of the same natural disaster. Further, it will offer novel insight into whether there are systematic individual differences in selective helping via the assessment of theoretically relevant personality traits.

The Dark Core of Personality vis-à-vis 58 Traits Individuals differ in how they weigh their own utility versus others’. This tendency codefines the dark factor ofpersonality (D), which is conceptualized as the underlying disposition from which all socially and ethically aversive(dark) traits arise as specific, flavored manifestations. We scrutinize this unique theoretical notion by testing, for abroad set of 58 different traits and related constructs, whether any predict how individuals weigh their own versusothers’ utility in proactive allocation decisions (i.e., social value orientations) beyond D. These traits and constructsrange from broad dimensions (e.g., agreeableness), to aversive traits (e.g., sadism) and beliefs (e.g., normlessness), toprosocial tendencies (e.g., compassion). In a large-scale longitudinal study involving the assessment of consequentialchoices (median N = 2,270; a heterogeneous adult community sample from Germany), results from several hundredlatent model comparisons revealed that no meaningful incremental variance was explained beyond D. Thus, D aloneis sufficient to represent the social preferences inherent in socially and ethically aversive personality traits.

We investigate how personality traits are activated in situations per the domain-specific situational affordance (DSSA; De Vries et al., 2016) and how people select themselves into these situations with a diary survey study.

This is the third in this series of studies

This is an addendum to the original preregistration for the project 'preferences and beliefs in intergroup conflict' (https://osf.io/v8j4g).

Initially formulated by Mischel (1977), the situational strength hypothesis has had an important influence on the person-situation debate. The situational strength hypothesis posits that the way personality translates into behavior depends on the strength of the situation. Specifically, strong situations – compared to weak situations – restrict behavioral variance and thus prevent personality from being expressed in behavior. Lately, however, researchers have started to question the restricted behavioral variance assumption, noting that behavioral variance does not seem to be constrained to a greater degree in strong compared to weak situations (Keeler et al., 2019). The current meta-analysis takes two approaches to test the situational strength hypothesis using economic game data. Specifically, we examine whether the situations hypothesized to be stronger based on theoretical grounds (1) are indeed perceived as having higher situational strength by independent raters and (2) whether there is lower behavioral variance in these situations. This allows us to examine whether empirical tests of situational strength produce restricted variance patterns consistent with Mischel’s hypothesis, that is, whether situations hypothesized and/or perceived as strong, respectively, indeed restrict behavioral variance.

The goal of this study is to test the effects of a self-knowledge intervention approach for reducing intentions to eat meat.

Data, analyses scripts, & results accompanying the article "Beyond (low) Agreeableness: Towards a more comprehensive understanding of antagonistic psychopathology "

Materials and data accompanying the article "Daring dishonesty: On the role of sanctions for (un)ethical behavior" by I. Thielmann and B. Hilbig

The Prosocial Personality Project collected data on various aspects of personality and related behaviors. Overall, data collection for the main (base) study included six waves run between November 2019 and April 2020. Information on sample sizes and data cleaning per wave is provided in the document "Data Cleaning & Sample Overview.pdf". All variables assessed per wave, including items and instructions, are provided in the files "Items & Materials.xlsx". The data for all waves will be successively added to this folder after all planned analyses on the data collected in a specific wave were conducted. In addition to the base study, we conducted (and are still conducting) several follow-up studies. Information on the follow-up studies is provided in the respective subfolders of this OSF project. Data collection for the base study was supported by the German Research Foundation (grant number HI 1600/1-2).

Using a variety of modelling techniques and an extensive dataset comprising various measures of personality, we derive empirical benchmarks for the predictive validity of (combinations of) personality traits for social value orientation (SVO).

Theoretical background: Situational strength has been discussed as a determinant of when and how personality expresses itself in behaviors. Mischel (1968) claimed that the way personality translates into behavior depends on the strength of the situation. Specifically, strong situations restrict behavioral variance and thus prevent personality from being expressed. In other words, situations are paramount when they are strong, whereas personality should matter more for behavioral expressions when situations are weak. Meyer and colleagues (2010) conceptualized situational strength on four dimensions. Consequences refer to the extent to which an individual's actions have important outcomes; Constraints refer to the amount of behavioral/decisional restriction placed on an individual; Clarity refers to the extent to which cues and instructions of the situation are clear; whereas Consistency refers to the extent to which various behavioral cues are compatible with each other. Accordingly, they developed the Situational Strength at Work scale (SSW; Meyer et al., 2014), distinguishing between these four dimensions to measure situational strength in the workplace. Despite the undeniable contributions of the scale, notable issues exist: (a) there is conceptual and empirical overlap between the Clarity and Consistency dimensions, and more importantly, (b) the scale is only applicable to work settings, yet a generic situational strength measure is lacking. Methodology: We thereby developed the Generic Situational Strength (GSS) scale aiming to be applied across different contexts. We began with re-conceptualization of the constructs and item generation. Our initial pool of 48 items included a balanced mix of positively or negatively phrased items aligned with the four dimensions of situational strength in prior work. Later, we invited domain experts in either personality psychology or psychology of situations to review the scale. Next, a panel of judges (N = 60) were invited to vet the content adequacy of the scale, wherein items’ content validity was further examined. Subsequently, the scale was administered to various work or interpersonal situations reported by 310 U.S. participants. With the data obtained, we first examined the scale’s dimensionality. Next, item-level analyses were conducted for item selection purposes. We then conducted CFA on the final scale and inspected measurement invariance between work vs. interpersonal situations. The scale’s internal reliability, convergent, and discriminant validity were also examined. Results: Exploratory factor analyses clearly showed two major and interpretable factors: Consequences and Constraints. For Clarity and Consistency, however, items loaded on the same factors, such that positively phrased Clarity and Consistency items loaded on a single factor, as were their negatively phrased items, suggesting that the two factors are indistinguishable. Also, the three- and four-factor models differed only slightly on fit indices and information criteria. Moreover, in the four-factor model where Clarity and Consistency were treated as distinct factors, the latent correlation between the two was high (>.90). We thus decided to adopt the three-factor model by treating ‘Clarity-Consistency’ as a single factor. Next, item-level analysis was performed where we examined items’ standard deviations, convergent and discriminant correlations with the corresponding or respective other dimensions measured by the SSW scale. Together with factor loadings, we applied a weighted sum approach to integrate all information for item culling. The three-factor model with the final items showed an acceptable fit, chi^2(249)=760.50, p

Whereas research focusing on stable dispositions has long attributed ethically and socially aversive behavior to an array of aversive (or “dark”) traits, other approaches from social–cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have emphasized the crucial role of social norms and situational justifications that allow individuals to uphold a positive self-image despite their harmful actions. We bridge these research traditions by focusing on the common core of aversive traits (the dark factor of personality [D]) and its defining aspect of involving diverse beliefs that serve to construct justifications. In particular, we theoretically specify the processes by which D is expressed in aversive behavior—namely, through diverse beliefs and the justifications they serve. In six studies (total N > 25,000) we demonstrate (a) that D involves higher subjective justifiability of those aversive behaviors that individuals high in D are more likely to engage in, (b) that D uniquely relates to diverse descriptive and injunctive beliefs—related to distrust (e.g., cynicism), hierarchy (e.g., authoritarianism), and relativism (e.g., normlessness)—that serve to justify aversive behavior, and (c) a theoretically derived pattern of moderations and mediations supporting the view that D accounts for aversive behavior because it fosters subjective justifiability thereof—at least in part owing to certain beliefs and the justifications they afford. More generally, our findings highlight the role of (social) cognitions within the conceptual definitions of personality traits and processes through which they are expressed in behavior.