Exploring adult Playfulness: Examining the accuracy of personality judgments at zero-acquaintance and an LIWC analysis of textual information

Playfulness is an individual difference variable that allows people to (re)frame a situation in a way that it is experienced as entertaining, intellectually stimulating, and/or personally interesting. We examined the interpersonal perception of playfulness at zero-acquaintance. One-hundred forty-four participants wrote short self-descriptions which were (1) used by unacquainted judges to infer the author's playfulness and (2) linguistically analyzed using the LIWC methodology. Lens model analyses revealed that playfulness finds its expression through language and that observers utilized linguistic cues to accurately judge playfulness in terms of self-other agreement (0.21-0.37) and consensus (0.31-0.44). The findings add knowledge regarding the interpersonal perception of playfulness, its linguistic expressions, and the applicability of the LIWC paradigm outside broad personality traits.