Getting to know you: Accuracy and error in judgments of character

Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of research on trait attribution have shown that these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This raises a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has some deeply disturbing implications. I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: Under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character‐trait judgments are in fact quite trustworthy. I then propose a mindreading‐based account of trait attribution that explains both why these judgments are initially unreliable, and how they eventually become more accurate.