Generalizability of self–other agreement from one personality trait to another

If you are an accurate judge of your friends’ openness, are you also good at rating their conscientiousness? In this paper we examined how well self–other agreement on one personality trait accords with self–other agreement on other personality traits. Data from four Estonian and Belgian samples containing 818 targets and 1281 knowledgeable raters were analyzed. Results demonstrated that self–other agreement only moderately generalizes from one personality trait to another suggesting that the predictability of an individual can vary for different personality traits. When trait agreement was decomposed into the contributions of individual pairs of raters, these were only moderately correlated with different coefficients of profile agreement, suggesting that these two forms of agreement are far from being identical.