Jeremy Biesanz

University of British Columbia | UBC ·  Department of Psychology

We present a global experience‐sampling method (ESM) study aimed at describing, predicting, and understanding individual differences in well‐being during times of crisis such as the COVID‐19 pandemic. This international ESM study is a collaborative effort of over 60 interdisciplinary researchers from around the world in the “Coping with Corona” (Co...

States refer to our momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Average states (aggregates across multiple time points) are discussed as a more accurate and objective measure of personality compared to global self-reports since they do not only rely on people’s general beliefs about themselves. Specifically, Finnigan and Vazire (2018) argued that,...

The present manuscript aims to test the primary hypothesis of Dunlop, McCoy, and Staben’s (2017) study that perceivers are able to accurately form impressions of broad personality traits from reading a target’s set of personal strivings. For increased reliability, the pre-registered N = 250 perceivers rated the traits of 167 sets of strivings (each...

It may be good to both be seen accurately (expressive accuracy) and feel that you are seen accurately (expressive accuracy beliefs). But do people's expressive accuracy beliefs align with their actual expressive accuracy? And do expressive accuracy and expressive accuracy beliefs each independently predict well-being? Across two getting-acquainted...

States refer to our momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Average states (aggregates across multiple time points) are discussed as a more accurate and objective measure of personality compared to global self-reports since they do not only rely on people’s general beliefs about themselves. Specifically, Finnigan and Vazire (2018) argued that,...

Individuals with social anxiety are sensitive to social hierarchies and tend to compare themselves unfavorably with others, perceiving themselves as inferior or lower in social rank. The current study explores patterns of change in these negative perceptions, and their associated emotional outcomes, in an online social context. Undergraduate studen...

How accurate are teachers’ first impressions and what moderates the degree of first impression accuracy? In previous teacher judgment accuracy research, teachers judged students who were well-acquainted to them, focusing on single traits. Here, we follow the zero-acquaintance paradigm and apply the Social Accuracy Model (SAM; Biesanz, 2010) to exam...

Objective Good targets are those individuals who are seen more accurately than others. The present study examines the extent to which the good target is consistent across two domains and two contexts as well as how being perceived accurately is moderated by target well‐being. Method N = 194 participants completed a round‐robin forming first‐impres...

People vary widely in their expressive accuracy, the tendency to be viewed in line with one's unique traits. It is unclear, however, whether expressive accuracy is a stable individual difference that transcends social contexts or a more piecemeal, context‐specific characteristic. The current research therefore examined the consistency of expressive...

A great range of person perception phenomena may be conceptualized in terms of how much perceivers know about the targets, how much they like the targets and how these factors relate to the extent to which target descriptions reflect actual target characteristics and/or evaluative bias. We present a comprehensive empirical analysis of this interpla...

Daily life is full of emotional ups and downs. In contrast, the objective conditions of our lives usually remain relatively stable from day to day. The degree to which emotional ups and downs influence life satisfaction-which prima facie should be relatively stable-remains a puzzle. In the present article, we propose the Individual Differences in E...

Expressive accuracy, being viewed in line with one's unique, distinctive personality traits, is emerging as an important individual difference that is strongly linked to psychological well-being. Yet little is known about what underlies expressive accuracy and its associations with well-being. The current studies examined whether personality-behavi...

Information quantity is an important moderator of personality judgment accuracy. Some evidence suggests that the amount of available information is positively related to accuracy. The current study utilized the social accuracy model to investigate the effects of differences in thin slices of information quantity on the distinctive accuracy and norm...

Objective Solitude is a ubiquitous experience, often confused with loneliness, yet sometimes sought out in daily life. This study aimed to identify distinct types of solitude experiences from everyday affect/thought patterns and to examine how and for whom solitude is experienced positively versus negatively. Method 100 community‐dwelling adults a...

Are some people truly better able to accurately perceive the personality of others? Previous research suggests that the good judge may be of little practical importance and individual differences minimal. In four large samples we assessed whether expressive accuracy (the good target) is a necessary condition for perceptive accuracy (the good judge)...

A great range of person perception phenomena may be conceptualized in terms of how much perceivers know about the targets, how much they like the targets and how these factors relate to the extent to which target descriptions reflect actual target characteristics and/or evaluative bias. We present a comprehensive empirical analysis of this interpla...

In this investigation of cultural differences in the experience of obligation, we distinguish between Confucian Role Ethics versus Relative Autonomy lay theories of motivation and illustrate them with data showing relevant cultural differences in both social judgments and intrapersonal experience. First, when judging others, Western European herita...

INTRODUCTION: Although there is a robust connection between dispositional personality traits and well‐being, relatively little research has comprehensively examined the ways in which all Big Five personality states are associated with short‐term experiences of well‐being within individuals. OBJECTIVES: To address three central questions about the n...

Introduction: The Dark Tetrad traits (subclinical psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and everyday sadism) have interpersonal consequences. At present, however, how these traits are associated with the accuracy and positivity of first impressions is not well understood. Objectives: The present manuscript addresses three primary questions....

Empathy, the practice of taking and emotionally identifying with another’s point of view, is a skill that likely provides context to another’s behavior. Yet systematic research on its relation with accurate personality trait judgment is sparse. This study investigated this relation between one’s empathic response tendencies (perspective taking, emp...

Two experience sampling studies were examined in order to replicate the key findings from Baird, Le, and Lucas (2006) which demonstrated that intra-individual variability in personality traits was not correlated with adjustment when measured with experience sampling methods after correcting for dependencies between means and standard deviations on...

In this article, we describe two new programs that compute both p-values and confidence intervals (CI) for the indirect effect in mediational models, including (a) a p-value based on the partial posterior method, which we refer to as p3 computed across the posterior distribution of the regression coefficients; (b) a variant of p3 that uses a normal...

There are strong differences between individuals in the tendency to view the personality of others as similar to the average person. That is, some people tend to form more normatively accurate impressions than do others. However, the process behind the formation of normatively accurate first impressions is not yet fully understood. Given that the a...

Although much is known about the performance of recent methods for inference and interval estimation for indirect or mediated effects with observed variables, little is known about their performance in latent variable models. This article presents an extensive Monte Carlo study of 11 different leading or popular methods adapted to structural equati...

Following initial interactions, other people are less willing to pursue ongoing contact with socially anxious individuals than with those who are not socially anxious. To better understand this process, we conducted two studies that examined peers’ first impressions of target individuals. Unacquainted individuals (N = 104 and 114) participated in r...

Group membership can have a profound impact on perceptions of group characteristics; yet how group membership influences the accuracy of personality impressions for specific individuals remains unclear. In small groups, participants (N = 519) formed impressions via naturalistic, dyadic interactions. We then investigated whether impressions of in-gr...

Well-adjusted individuals are highly judgeable in that their personalities tend to be seen more accurately than the personalities of less adjusted individuals (Colvin, 1993a, 1993b; Human & Biesanz, 2011a). The mechanisms behind this effect, however, are not well understood. How does adjustment facilitate judgeability? In the present video-percepti...

A person's judgeability, or the extent to which a person is easy to understand, plays an important role in how accurately a target will be perceived by others. Research on this topic, however, has not been systematic or well-integrated. The current review begins to remedy this by integrating the available research on judgeability from the fields of...

Above and beyond the benefits of biases such as positivity and assumed similarity, does the accuracy of our first impressions have immediate and long-term effects on relationship development? Assessing accuracy as distinctive self-other agreement, we found that more accurate personality impressions of new classmates were marginally associated with...

Do liberals and conservatives have qualitatively different moral points of view? Specifically, do liberals and conservatives rely on the same or different sets of moral foundations-care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity (Haidt, 2012)-when making moral judgments about influential people? In Study 1, 100 experts evaluated the impact that 40 i...

Objective: Personality change is emerging as an important predictor of health and well-being. Extending previous research, we examined whether two types of personality change, directional and absolute, are associated with both subjective and objective indicators of health. Method: Utilizing the longitudinal Midlife in the United States Survey (MIDU...

How are accuracy and assumed similarity associated in first impressions of personality? In a large-scale video perception study, accuracy and assumed similarity were strongly negatively associated across traits, consistent with past research (e.g., Beer & Watson, 2008). However, across perceivers and perceiver–target dyads, the ability to perceive...

How does trying to make a positive impression on others impact the accuracy of impressions? In an experimental study, the impact of positive self-presentation on the accuracy of impressions was examined by randomly assigning targets to either “put their best face forward” or to a control condition with low self-presentation demands. First, self-pre...

Do people have insight into the validity of their first impressions or accuracy awareness? Across two large interactive round-robins, those who reported having formed a more accurate impression of a specific target had (a) a more distinctive realistically accurate impression, accurately perceiving the target’s unique personality characteristics as...

Are well-adjusted individuals good targets or accurate self-judges? Across two round-robin studies, the current research first demonstrates that well-adjusted individuals' personalities are viewed with greater distinctive self-other agreement by new acquaintances. Is this enhanced self-other agreement a function of greater judgeability, improving o...

Gender is associated with interpersonal sensitivity across different domains, with females, on average, demonstrating higher levels of interpersonal sensitivity than males. What underlies these gender differences in the accuracy of first impressions of personality remains unclear. Across two large video studies and a large round-robin design, perce...

The current study investigated how self-esteem and self-concept clarity are implicated in the stress process both in the short and long term. Initial and 2-year follow-up interviews were completed by 178 participants from stepfamily unions. In twice-daily structured diaries over 7 days, participants reported their main family stressor, cognitive ap...

Do well-adjusted individuals have particularly accurate insight into what others are like or are they biased, primarily seeing their own characteristics in others? In the current studies, the authors examined how psychologically adjusted individuals tend to see new acquaintances, directly comparing their levels of distinctive accuracy (accurately p...

Beautiful people are seen more positively than others, but are they also seen more accurately? In a round-robin design in which previously unacquainted individuals met for 3 min, results were consistent with the "beautiful is good" stereotype: More physically attractive individuals were viewed with greater normative accuracy; that is, they were vie...

Using data from the National Early Head Start (EHS) Research and Evaluation Project (N=1851), the current study examined relations among cumulative family and social risk, assessed during infancy and the preschool years, and children's prekindergarten achievement, self-regulatory skills, and problematic social behavior, testing if these association...

The social accuracy model of interpersonal perception (SAM) is a componential model that estimates perceiver and target effects of different components of accuracy across traits simultaneously. For instance, Jane may be generally accurate in her perceptions of others and thus high in perceptive accuracy—the extent to which a particular perceiver's...

Theoretical models specifying indirect or mediated effects are common in the social sciences. An indirect effect exists when an independent variable's influence on the dependent variable is mediated through an intervening variable. Classic approaches to assessing such mediational hypotheses (Baron Kenny, 1986; Sobel, 1982) have in recent years been...

Does the motivation to form accurate impressions actually improve accuracy? The present work extended Kenny's (1991, 1994) weighted-average model (WAM)--a theoretical model of the factors that influence agreement among personality judgments--to examine two components of interpersonal perception: distinctive and normative accuracy. WAM predicts that...

Recurrent pains are a complex set of conditions that cause great discomfort and impairment in children and adults. The objectives of this study were to (a) describe the frequency of headache, stomachache, and backache in a representative Canadian adolescent sample and (b) determine whether a set of psychosocial factors, including background factors...

The current study examines the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on preschool children's cognitive and behavioral outcomes and if these relations are mediated by the quality of children's home environment and moderated by family nativity status. Data come from 1459 low-income families (n = 257 and 1202 immigrant and native families, respectivel...

Positive self-presentation may have beneficial consequences for mood that are typically overlooked. Across a series of studies, participants underestimated how good they would feel in situations that required them to put their best face forward. In Studies 1 and 2A, participants underestimated the emotional benefits of interacting with an opposite...

Theory and research examining length of acquaintance and consensus among personality judgments have predominantly examined each dimension of personality separately. In L. J. Cronbach's (1955) terminology, this trait-centered approach combines consensus on elevation, differential elevation, and differential accuracy in personality judgments. The cur...

The present study explored the possibility that notetaking would help accuracy-minded interviewers to avoid cognitive expectation biases. Interviewers in simulated employment interviews were given bogus pre-interview expectations about their applicants and were either encouraged or not encouraged to take extensive notes. Consistent with past resear...

The current study examines relations of mean-level estimates, linear changes, and instability in income and family processes to child outcomes and addresses whether income, through its impact on family functioning, matters more for children living in poverty. Temporal changes and instability in family processes, but not income, predicted children's...

Multitrait-multimethod analyses were used to examine the degree of convergent and discriminant validity of the Big Five. Phase 1 examined self-reports of the Big Five across three measurement occasions. Self-reports of the Big Five traits were stable, but were moderately intercorrelated. Phase 2 examined assessments of the Big Five across different...

The coding of time in growth curve models has important implications for the interpretation of the resulting model that are sometimes not transparent. The authors develop a general framework that includes predictors of growth curve components to illustrate how parameter estimates and their standard errors are exactly determined as a function of rec...

Numerous studies have been conducted on the impact of dual-earner parents' employment on their children, yet the reverse process-the impact of children and their behavior on the work functioning of their parents-has been ignored. This study investigated spillover from the mother role to the work role in a sample of more than 300 families. At 4 mont...

Although theories of personality emphasize the integrative, enduring, and dynamic nature of personality, the current modal research design in personality ignores the dimension of time. We consider a variety of recent methods of longitudinal data analysis to examine both short-term and long-term development and change in personality, including mean-...

or at least diminishing puzzles about intentionality and representation, and it is for perhaps this reason that so much philosophical attention has recently focused on the problem of consciousness. Lloyd's (2002) study suggests an approach to consciousness that, to our knowledge, marks a promising departure from the status quo. In the first place,...

This article extends Bollen's two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimator to estimate confirmatory higher-order factor analysis models. This includes estimation of the higher-order and lower-order factor loadings and their intercepts. This 2SLS estimator does not require that the observed variables come from normal distributions, and it is less sensit...

The ability of accuracy-motivated perceivers to form individuated impressions of targets and to avoid creating self-fulfilling prophecies is hypothesized to depend on sufficient attentional resources. Accuracy-motivated interviewers were led to believe that their applicants were either well suited for the job or not and were given either no task or...

Traditional research on moderator variables in personality has focused on measures of relative consistency. In contrast, using Goldberg's (1992) adjectives representing the Big Five personality traits, the authors examined the applicability of moderator variables to measures of personality coherence. The authors considered 3 traditional moderator v...

Accurate prediction requires information not only about central tendencies but also about variability. In personality prediction, however, most research has focused on trait-level central tendencies. Previously proposed moderators of personality prediction are all conceptually similar in comparing an individual's central tendency in response patter...

The authors explored the role of target self-presentational goals in the expectation confirmation process within the context of simulated employment interviews. As predicted, applicants encouraged to be deferential inadvertently succumbed to their interviewers' expectation; applicants encouraged to be challenging, to advance their own agenda, did n...

Outcomes for 112 clients with severe mental disorders in a community mental health center that converted its rehabilitative day treatment program to a supported employment program were assessed during the year after the program conversion. The study replicated a previous study in showing that the rate of competitive employment improved, especially...

Standardized instruments are widely used to assess homeless persons, but basic data on their reliability and validity in these populations have not been available. The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability of standardized instruments used in a cooperative agreement on homeless persons with substance use disorder. This study examined...

Previous research has shown that family history of alcoholism (FHA) is associated with several aspects of the development and expression of alcohol use disorder in people who are not mentally ill. This study examined FHA in a group of 66 schizophrenic outpatients who were well characterized in terms of their alcohol use and were followed prospectiv...

Day treatment remains a core component in many community mental health programs for persons with severe mental disorders throughout the United States. Many other mental health centers are moving away from day treatment toward psychosocial and vocational rehabilitation programs. Empirical research directly comparing these two systems of organizing o...

The use of alcohol by persons with schizophrenia is common and has been associated with increased severity of psychiatric symptoms, multiple psychosocial problems, abuse of other drugs, and poor treatment outcomes. Most of the previous research in this area has been with urban patients. The authors examined the correlates and outcomes of alcohol us...