Abstract

The perceived relationships among traits measured by the two method, trait inference method and trait sorting method were contrasted. 30 trait adjectives were used in this study, which were the most frequent trait in the free-response descriptions when we asked students to describe target person. For 786 subjects(M : 420, F : 384), they were asked to judge each of the 435 pairs of 30 trait adjectives according to the trait co-occurrences. For 32 subjects(M : 22, F : 10), they were asked to sort trait adjectives into boxes, each box representing a different person. The two similarity data were used as input for clustering analysis. Differences between the two method measuring the similarity of traits was found in the resulting structures. The implications of these findings were discussed. When subjects were asked to judge for traits co-occurrences in traits inference task, their judgment was based on conceptual or semantic similarity. In trait sorting task, subject's judgment was reflected more the relationship actually observed in behavior.