Properties of Person Descriptors in the Natural German Language: A Preregistered Replication and Extension

Understanding language is crucial to psychological research, as it is the basis for most psychological measurements. Building on previous work, we conducted a preregistered replication study, analyzing 876 person descriptors generated by 187 participants using a free response format. These person descriptors were rated for social desirability, observability, importance, abstractness, base rate, and stability by approximately 15 human raters each ( n = 456). Key findings were replicated, including a bimodal distribution of social desirability, a greater number of negative vs. positive person descriptors, and a U-shaped relationship between importance and social desirability. Furthermore, human ratings of social desirability could be closely approximated using a fine-tuned encoder model and GPT-4o. However, GPT-4o’s performance in approximating human ratings of the other person descriptor properties showed some deviations. This suggests that, despite showing potential for more economical data collection, there is significant room for improvement in using AI-applications for emulating human ratings of natural language person descriptors.