New personality model highlights differences on how we see ourselves and how others see us

Trait-Reputation-Identity (TRI), can help organisations improve their recruitment process and save money

A new personality model aims to identify personality traits more accurately by setting a comparison between how individuals see themselves versus how others see them.

“If someone believes they are very outgoing or more friendly than they actually are based on peer assessment, that’s important information to have about that person,” explained Brain Connelly, an associate professor at U of T Scarborough, who developed the model.



Connelly’s model, Trait-Reputation-Identity (TRI), can help organisations improve their recruitment process by giving a clearer picture of candidates’ personalities, helping recruiters save money and predict employee performance.

An expert on organisational behaviour and human resources, Connelly noted the importance of predicting outcomes like performance, motivation, leadership, procrastination, and commitment to an organisation. He highlighted problems with the current system for evaluating job applications, which relies heavily on reference checks that only give a narrow view of personality and often lead organisations to choose manipulators and egoists over more suitable candidates.



TRI uses a unique blend of self and peer ratings to gather feedback on an individual’s relationship to the big five personality traits – extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness. What sets it apart from previous models is that it provides a robust method and analytical framework to determine whether there’s agreement or divergence about an individual’s personality traits.

“It’s a bit of a departure from the way we’ve typically studied personality in the past,” Connelly told Neuroscience News. “This difference has been talked about in the past from a theoretical standpoint, but now we can assign a number to a trait or reputation score, and identify a score for a particular personality construct like extroversion,” he added.



“From a practical perspective I hope this model will help people learn something new about themselves from the assessment and to think about aspects of their personality they may not have otherwise considered,” Connelly said.

The model, which was developed with Samuel McAbbe, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, is outlined in an article published in the journal Psychological Review.

This article originally appeared on Neuroscience News.