Salience, Centrality and Self‐relevance of Traits in Construing Others

Salient traits were hypothesized as having importance for the individual in two respects: (i) because they allow more effective inferences to other traits (centrality); (ii) because they are typically used in characterizing the self, and thus afford self‐other comparison (self‐relevance). The study reported assessed the differences between salient and non‐salient traits on measures of centrality and self‐relevance, and found support for both hypotheses. Centrality and self‐relevance appeared to be relatively distinct features of salient traits, in that the overlap between them was fairly small. Other aspects of the data are also discussed.