Personality Evaluated: What Do People Most Like and Dislike About Themselves and Their Friends?

What do people think their best and worst personality traits are? Do their friends agree? Across three samples, 463 college students (“targets”) and their friends freely described two traits they most liked and two traits they most disliked about the target. Coders categorized these open-ended trait descriptors into high or low poles of six trait domains (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness, and honesty-humility) and judged whether targets and friends reported the same specific best and worst traits. Best traits almost exclusively reflected high levels of the major trait domains (especially high agreeableness and extraversion). In contrast, although worst traits typically reflected low levels of these traits (especially low emotional stability), they sometimes also revealed the downsides of having high levels of these traits (e.g., high extraversion: “loud”; high agreeableness: “people-pleaser”). Overall, targets and friends mentioned similar kinds of best traits; however, targets emphasized low emotional stability worst traits more than friends did, whereas friends emphasized low prosociality worst traits more than targets did. Targets and friends also showed a moderate amount of self–other agreement on what the targets’ best and worst traits were. These results (a) shed light on the traits that people consider to be most important in themselves and their friends, (b) suggest that the desirability of some traits may be in the eye of the beholder, (c) reveal the mixed blessings of different traits, and, ultimately, (d) provide a nuanced perspective on what it means for a trait to be “good” or “bad.”