The Consistency Bias in Judgments of One’s Own Interpersonal Behavior
Two Possible Sources
Abstract
The term “consistency bias” (Sadler & Woody, 2003) refers to people’s tendency to judge their own interpersonal behavior in a given situation in accordance with their general self-images, even if their actual behavior in the situation is partialled out. In the present study, 108 participants first described their own interpersonal dispositions by means of adjectives and then took part in brief, videotaped interviews. The participants and five observers rated the participants’ behavior during the interviews, using the same adjectives. The consistency bias was replicated for the broad interpersonal dimensions of Dominance and Affiliation, as well as for the average individual item. Two possible sources of the consistency bias (i.e., visual perspective and word commonness) were investigated, but neither could explain the effect. The consistency bias may be rooted in self-concept stability. It is likely to inflate estimates of consistency across self-reports of interpersonal behavior.
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