Judgments of personality typically employ ratings of Big Five scale items such as "How emotionally stable is this person?" with choices from 1 (least) to 5 (most). Such questions focus raters' attention on an experimenter's dimensions of interest. We show that the personality traits provided as a result of open-ended questions such as "What personality does this animated character convey to you?" can differ from those observed when raters are given scale questions. Using IVAs that gesture in ways associated with emotionally stable and unstable people, we showed that participants were more likely to describe the unstable agent as disagreeable and the stable agent as extraverted; emotional stability was not usually mentioned. However, a Big Five inventory showed that these agents differed on agreeableness and emotional stability. An open-ended question method of assessing what personality an IVA conveys can potentially be more informative than using scale-item inventories alone.
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