On The Acquisition of Knowledge About Personality Traits: Does Learning About The Self Engage Different Mechanisms Than Learning About Others?

We report the case of R. J., an individual with autism. R. J.'s developmental disorder has impaired his ability to retrieve episodic memories as well as his ability to acquire consensually shared knowledge of animals, foods, and objects (Klein, Cosmides, Costabile, & Mei, 2002). Nevertheless, R. J. has developed normal, consensually accurate knowledge of his own personality traits (Klein, Chan, & Loftus, 1999). Moreover, his self–ratings show that he sees his own personality as distinct from the personalities of others. But R. J.'s facility in learning about his own personality does not translate into a facility in learning about the personality traits of others: He fails to differentiate between the personalities of his various family members, and his ratings of them appear to be less nuanced and less situationally specific than his ratings of his own personality. This pattern is radically at variance from that shown by cognitively normal individuals. Because R. J.'s dissociation is developmental in origin, it can illuminate the nature of the learning mechanisms by which knowledge of personality traits is acquired. It suggests that learning about one's own personality traits may engage a different set of mechanisms than learning about the personality traits of others.