Normality evaluations and their relation to personality traits and well-being.
Despite frequent discussions of what it means to be normal in clinical, social, and personality psychology theory, the characteristics of individuals who call themselves normal are little understood. In 5 studies, the authors investigated various hypotheses concerning the nature of normality evaluations. The authors add to recent evidence that normality evaluations represent a distinct dimension of evaluative judgments, showing self-judgments of being normal (versus strange) to be relatively independent from self-judgments of being average (versus unique). Normality evaluations showed positive relations with communal traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and were negatively related to openness to experience. Supporting a broader hypothesis that normality evaluations may be involved in directing or motivating personality development processes, normality evaluations were positively associated with well-being and a sense of fitting in with one's peers, and individuals who felt abnormal felt a heightened sense that they needed to improve their personality. Finally, the personality correlates of normality evaluations were found to change over the lifespan, largely in parallel with the actual mean-level development of personality traits with age.
Wood
Dustin
D
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA. dwood@wfu.edu
Gosling
Samuel D
SD
Potter
Jeff
J
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D007087:Illinois; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010549:Personal Satisfaction; D010551:Personality; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013781:Texas