Introduction: When Intuition Isn’t Enough

All of us are personality experts. Ever since childhood, we’ve been paying attention to people’s distinctive ways of being and trying to figure out what to expect from them. We depend on this information to get along.

Our innate ability to size people up is an amazing gift we take for granted. With it, we form an instantaneous impression of the personality of everyone we meet. Most of our assessments of people are formed in this automatic and unconscious way.1

But there are times when we want to take a closer look by consciously and systematically evaluating someone’s personality.2 We may, for example, want to understand what it is about our boss that makes us avoid her. We may want to sort through the ...

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