Effects of Personality Disorders on Self-Other Agreement and Favorableness in Personality Descriptions

The authors studied effects of self-reported personality disorder (PD) symptoms on interpersonal perception, particularly self-other agreement and favorableness. Using a round-robin design, 52 groups of four well-acquainted students described themselves and each other on a measure of the Five-Factor model of personality and were administered a self-report screening instrument for DSM-IV (Axis 2). Using the Social Accuracy Model, the peer reports were predicted, across items, from either (a) the target person's self-reports plus the self-report item means, or (b) the items' social desirability. This resulted in separate coefficients for each peer-target dyad, indicating either self-other agreement or favorableness. These coefficients were then predicted from the PD scores of the target and the peer, using multilevel modeling. Main findings were that persons scoring high on PD measures agreed less with their peers on their unique personality characteristics, and that such persons were described by, and described their peers, less favorably.