A mathematical model of person judgment part 1: Cue emergence

Source abstract

We present the first part of a fully parametrized mathematical model of person judgment, in an attempt to streamline and better organize theory in this research area. This first part focuses on the emergence of substantive information (“cues”) about target persons that perceivers may use in forming judgments. It incorporates time as a continuous variable, and accounts for the effects of targets, situations and their interactions. It also accounts for randomness overall, between-target differences in randomness, and overlap between observation intervals. We discuss how all of this influences the rank-order similarity of targets’ substance levels in any two observation intervals, enabling predictions regarding retest reliability, inter-rater agreement, cross-situational consistency, and predictive validity. We also explain how the model relates to existing theories, and to key concepts from the person judgment literature.