Predicting personality pathology from self-other disagreement in normative personality measures
Normative personality is typically measured through self-report questionnaires, although many studies now include reports of multiple informants. Informant reports provide incremental validity above that of self-report, which further demonstrates the problem of self-report bias. There are many hypothesized mechanisms for self-report bias elaborated and demonstrated in the current literature. However, pathological personality traits have yet to be thoroughly tested as a mechanism for self-report bias. The current study hypothesizes a relationship between self-other disagreement in normative personality and the presence of pathological personality. Two samples (DeYoung et al., 2015, n = 259 participants; Oltmanns et al., 2014, n = 1630 participants) are used as an exploratory test of this hypothesis. Participants reported on their own personality (normative: BFAS; pathological: PID-5 and MAPP, respectively) and nominated closely acquainted others to report on participant normative personality. Self-other disagreement was calculated by saving residuals resulting from the regression of self-report on other-report. Pathological personality was then regressed onto the saved residuals for each pathological-normative trait pairing, resulting in 250 regression models for the first sample and 80 for the second. A total of 23 models from the first sample and 35 models from the second sample demonstrated significant relationships between pathological personality and self-other disagreement in normative personality. Implications and future directions are discussed.