Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 14, Issue 4, December 2005, Pages 739-751
Consciousness and Cognition

Meta-perception for pathological personality traits: Do we know when others think that we are difficult?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.07.001Get rights and content

Abstract

The self allows us to reflect on our own behavior and to imagine what others think of us. Clinical experience suggests that these abilities may be impaired in people with personality disorders. They do not recognize the impact that their behavior has on others, and they have difficulty understanding how they are seen by others. We collected information regarding pathological personality traits—using both self and peer report measures—from groups of people who knew each other well (at the end of basic military training). In previous papers, we have reported that agreement between self-report and peer-report is only modest. In this paper, we address the question: Do people know that others disagree with their own perceptions of themselves? We found that expected peer scores predicted variability in peer report over and above self-report for all 10 diagnostic traits. People do have some incremental knowledge of how they are viewed by others, but they do not tell you about it unless you ask them to do so; the knowledge is not reflected in ordinary self-report data. Among participants who expect their peers to describe them as narcissistic, those who agree with this assessment are viewed as being less narcissistic by their peers than those who deny being narcissistic. It therefore appears that insight into how one is viewed by others can moderate negative impressions fostered by PD traits.

Introduction

Studies of interpersonal perception are concerned with inferences that people make about each other. Kenny (1994) outlined a number of fundamental questions involving ways in which people see themselves and others. These include issues such as consensus (do others agree on their assessment of a target person?), accuracy (does the perceiver’s impression agree with the target person’s actual behavior?), and self-other agreement (do others view the target person in the same way that she sees herself?). Another important issue is known as meta-perception, or the ability to view one’s self from the perspective of other people. Do we know what other people think of us? If they think that we have problems, are we aware of those impressions? The literature on meta-perception for normal personality traits suggests that people do have some accurate knowledge of what others think of them. They are not particularly good at knowing what specific other people think of them, but they do have a generalized view of what most other people think of them (Kenny and DePaulo, 1993, Norman, 1969).

Although it has been studied primarily with regard to normal personality traits, meta-perception is also an important topic with regard to personality disorders (Damour, 1997, Westen and Heim, 2003). Personality disorders are defined in terms of enduring patterns of behavior and emotion that bring the person into repeated conflict with others or prevent the person from performing expected social and occupational roles. People with personality disorders often make their own interpersonal problems worse because they are rigid and inflexible, unable to adapt to the social challenges that they face (Chen et al., 2004, Johnson et al., 2004, Pagano et al., 2004).

Ten specific forms of personality disorder are listed in the official diagnostic manual for mental disorders (DSM-IV). They are organized into three clusters on the basis of broadly defined characteristics. Cluster A includes three disorders: paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal forms of personality disorder. The behavior of people who fit the subtypes in this cluster is typically odd, eccentric, or asocial. Cluster B includes antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders. According to DSM-IV-TR, these disorders are characterized by dramatic, emotional, or erratic behavior, and all are associated with marked difficulty in sustaining interpersonal relationships. Cluster C includes avoidant, dependent, and obsessive–compulsive personality disorders. The common element in all three disorders is presumably anxiety or fearfulness. This description fits most easily with the avoidant and dependent types. In contrast, obsessive–compulsive personality disorder is more accurately described in terms of preoccupation with rules and with lack of emotional warmth than in terms of anxiety.

Most forms of mental disorder, such as anxiety and depression, are considered to be ego-dystonic; that is, people who have these problems are distressed by their symptoms and would prefer to change something about their behavior or their experience. In contrast, personality disorders are usually ego-syntonic (Hirschfeld, 1993). In other words, the characteristics or behaviors with which they are associated are acceptable to the person. They see these characteristics as being an important part of their own personality, perhaps even one of their strongest features. People with personality disorders frequently do not see themselves as being disturbed; they do not have insight into the nature of their own problems. Many forms of personality disorder are defined primarily in terms of the problems that these people create for others rather than in terms of their own subjective distress.

The ego-syntonic nature of many forms of personality disorder raises important questions about the limitations of self-report measures (interviews and questionnaires) that provide the basis for their assessment in clinical as well as research settings. Many people with personality disorders are unable to view themselves realistically and are unaware of the effect that their behavior has on others. Therefore, assessments based exclusively on self-report may have limited validity (Grove and Tellegen, 1991, Klonsky et al., 2002, Westen, 1997).

Our research group has collected data designed to compare self-report with peer-report measures of pathological personality features (Clifton et al., 2005, Oltmanns and Turkheimer, in press, Oltmanns et al., 1998, Thomas et al., 2003). The study is concerned with several elements of interpersonal perception as it applies to characteristics that are used to define personality disorders. We are studying ways in which people see themselves, ways in which they are seen by other people, and their beliefs about what other people think of them. We collected information using peer nominations and self-report measures in a large, non-clinical sample of military recruits who were near the end of basic training (60% male). This sample was chosen for our study because it allowed us to obtain self-report and peer-report data simultaneously from groups of people who had been assigned randomly to the groups and who had all known each other for the same length of time. Members of the training groups had been through basic military training (a demanding and stressful experience) together, and they were all relatively well acquainted. The challenging circumstances of this experience increased the opportunities for each recruit to observe characteristic response styles that were exhibited by his or her training colleagues over a period of 6 weeks.

Although the military recruits were a non-clinical sample, we did expect to find people who would qualify for a diagnosis of personality disorder. Previously reported epidemiological data suggest that approximately 10–13% of adults living in the community (i.e., people who are not selected because they are seeking psychological treatment or living in an institution) would qualify for a diagnosis of at least one DSM-IV personality disorder (Mattia and Zimmerman, 2001, Weissman, 1993). A similar rate is found in our military sample. We conducted semi-structured diagnostic interviews with 433 of the recruits (Jane, Turkheimer, Fiedler, & Oltmanns, unpublished manuscript), a subsample selected in part because they had demonstrated evidence of personality pathology on either the self-report or peer nomination measures. The exact prevalence rate in the overall sample is difficult to compute because we did not select people for interviews using a specific cut-off score on any of our screening measures. Nevertheless, we estimate that approximately 9.4% of the overall military sample would have qualified for a definite PD diagnosis (Oltmanns & Turkheimer, in press). Using various assessment methods, this sample of military recruits did include people who exhibited features of a wide range of personality problems.

The first element of interpersonal perception that we examined in this study was consensus. Did the peers agree with each other when they identified members of their group who exhibited features of personality disorders? We found very high levels of agreement among peers with regard to the people whom they nominated as exhibiting features of personality disorders. The median reliability (coefficient α) for peer scores across all PD features was .74 in the military sample (Thomas et al., 2003). These data support the conclusion that peers develop meaningful perspectives on the personality problems of other group members, and there is a relatively high degree of consensus across the peer group regarding which members exhibit these characteristics.

The second issue that we examined was self-other agreement. In both our military and college samples, correlations reflecting self-other agreement for pathological personality features are typically in the range from .25 to .35 (Clifton et al., 2004, Oltmanns and Turkheimer, in press). In other words, when the target people were asked to describe their own personality problems, their perceptions of themselves were quite different than those provided by the other members of their groups. The magnitude of these correlations is influenced by several factors. For example, self-other agreement is somewhat higher for subgroups of people who are better acquainted, and self-other agreement is higher for positive personality traits than for more negative traits, such as those that define personality disorders. Nevertheless, the most important element of our findings with regard to self-other agreement is that the target person’s impressions of their own personality problems disagreed substantially with the descriptions provided by their peers.

The apparent discrepancy between self and other perceptions raises the important question of the accuracy of these scores (Funder, 1999, Kenny, 1991). Which perspective is most useful or valid? There are, of course, many ways to examine the issue of accuracy. We have completed one comparison of self-report scores and peer nominations which has focused on the predictive validity of these scores. Four years after we began to collect personality data in our military sample, we examined the job status of all participants (Fiedler, Oltmanns, & Turkheimer, 2004). All of the recruits had enlisted for a period of four years. At the time of follow-up, we divided them into two groups: (1) those still engaged in active duty employment, and (2) those who had been given an early discharge from the military (after completion of basic training but before the end of their expected four-year tour of duty). An early discharge is typically granted by a superior officer on an involuntary basis, and is most often justified by repeated disciplinary problems, serious interpersonal difficulties, a poor performance record, or some combination of these considerations.

The predictive validity data were analyzed using survival analysis because the recruits had not completed our initial personality assessment process simultaneously. The self-report measures and the peer nominations both revealed meaningful connections between personality problems and early separation from the military. The self-report measures emphasized features that might be described as internalizing problems (subjective distress and self-harm) while the peer-report measure emphasized externalizing problems (especially antisocial personality features). When they were considered together, the peer nomination scores were more effective than the self-report scales in predicting occupational outcome (i.e., who remained on active duty).

The next question regarding interpersonal perception and personality disorders involves meta-perception. We have already reported that descriptions of personality problems based on self-report measures are often in disagreement with descriptions based on the perceptions of peers. Furthermore, there is relatively good consensus among the peers about which members of the group exhibit pathological traits, and there is also reason to believe that, in some circumstances, the peers’ perceptions are more accurate than the self-report scores. Is the target person aware of what other people think of him or her, even if those two perspectives are at odds with each other? That question is the focus of the analyses to be presented in this paper.

Section snippets

Participants and design

Participants were 2026 Air Force recruits at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas (1265 males; 761 females) who agreed to participate in the current study 1 day before the end of basic military training. Basic training lasted for 6 weeks during which recruits lived and trained together in flights (groups) of 27–55 individuals (Median = 41; Mean = 41.3). Most of the 49 flights that participated were mixed gender flights (31 flights; 52.5% male on average), but 14 flights consisted only of

Results

Table 2 displays the correlations between self, expected peer, and peer scores on all ten personality disorders. As can be seen both self and expected peer ratings have small, but significant, associations with peer ratings. To explore the associations further we conducted a series of partial correlations. The correlations between self and peer ratings when controlling for expected peer ratings become much smaller and a majority become negative. Conversely the correlations between expected peer

Discussion

Cognitive science has recently been concerned with a variety of processes involved in knowledge about the self and knowing what others think (e.g., Nickerson, 1999). The ability to take the perspective of others plays an essential role in many aspects of our lives. Errors that are made in generating estimates of the beliefs of others can disrupt our relationships with other people. Conversely, the ability to recognize the negative impact that our behavior can have on others may mitigate the

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