Social and reputational aspects of personality

Abstract

Following the notion that the psycho-lexical approach in personality psychology is suboptimal if it does not encompass all the word categories potentially personality-relevant (De Raad, 2000), this paper describes the development of the Croatian taxonomy of social and reputational descriptors of personality. In the first step of the first study, a master list of social and reputational terms in the Croatian lexicon was constructed. In the second step, the personality-descriptive adjectives that were not captured by the earlier Croatian taxonomy (Mlačić & Ostendorf, 2005) were categorized by seven judges into 13 different types of descriptors, based on the classification system developed by Angleitner, Ostendorf, and John (1990). In the second study, the 532 adjectives that the majority of judges classified as prototypical for the three subcategories of interest of Social and Reputational aspects (social roles and relationships, social effects, and attitudes and worldviews) were used for self-ratings by a large sample of (N=524) University of Zagreb students and for peer-ratings by (N=502) those students’ best acquaintances. Results from factor analyses are presented, as well as the relations of the underlying dimensions of Social and Reputational aspects of personality with two different measures of social attitudes and with the Big-Five factors of personality.