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Shared Meaning and the Convergence among Observers' Personality Descriptions
Author(s) -
Chaplin William F.,
Panter A. T.
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1993.tb00782.x
Subject(s) - psychology , meaning (existential) , similarity (geometry) , personality , social psychology , consistency (knowledge bases) , trait , openness to experience , cognitive psychology , psychotherapist , artificial intelligence , computer science , image (mathematics) , programming language
“Shared meaning” is a parameter in Kenny's (1991) rater agreement model concerning the extent to which two raters agree about the trait‐implicative meaning of the observations they have made of a target. In the first study, 201 individuals rated observations relevant to friendliness and organization on the meaning dimensions of typicality, difficulty level, and evaluation. They also rated 25 targets on the two constructs. We found strong support for a modest relation between the similarity of meaning ratings and the similarity of target ratings, especially for raw, as opposed to standard score, ratings. In Study 2 we considered shared meaning in a version of Kenny's model that included the consistency and communication parameters. Judge pairs ( N = 110) evaluated two targets described by play and openness on several personality dimensions. Shared meaning significantly contributed to rating agreement for both targets, but consistency and communication, as manipulated in this study, did not. Implications of employing the broader consensus model in experimental studies are discussed. If I say “sorrow,” you'll know exactly what I mean only if you've experienced it in the same sense I have. ‐Joel Peterson, Ravenswood's Winemaker, in Darlington (1991)