Question

Think of someone you recently met for the first time. Do we "automatically" classify people using the Big Five personality dimensions? In other words, do you instictively notice how extraverted or conscientious a person is?Try classifying the person you recently met using the Big Five personality dimensions. Was it easy or hard to do? Was it useful to you in determining whether you wanted to keep interacting with this person?

Answer 1

• I think Extraversion and Agreeableness are some traits which we automatically use to classify people when we meet them for the first time and interact with them for some time.For instance,I met new friend in college,and she openly started talking to me and asking me a lot of questions on our first meeting itself. So I did put her in the category of being a talkative and confident person (extraversion) and a friendly one too (agreeableness),which eventually was true. She is a highly confident and chatter box kind of person who makes friends very easily.
• Somewhere we do tend to use the Big 5 traits to form a general impression about the individual because thats something on the basis of which our future interactions depend as well.It is easy and a natural reaction of classifying people according to these traits,because we dont know anything about the individual and this is the only way we can somewhat judge the person and decide whether we want to interact with them or how to interact.