This study examined sources of self-informant agreement in life-satisfaction judgments. Pairs of participants (92 dating couples, 145 friendship pairs) provided self-ratings and informant ratings of life-satisfaction and domain satisfaction in five domains (family, health, academics, friends, and weather). Key findings were (a) significant self-informant agreement for life-satisfaction and all five domain satisfaction ratings, (b) significantly higher agreement for domain satisfaction than for life-satisfaction judgments, (c) discriminant validity of domain satisfaction judgments, (d) a top-down effect of general satisfaction on domain satisfaction, and (e) self-informant agreement in life-satisfaction judgments was fully explained by bottom-up effects of family satisfaction, health satisfaction, and academic satisfaction on self-ratings and informant ratings of life-satisfaction.
Accurate knowledge about oneself and others is important to set attainable goals and to avoid negative events in the future. A large literature has examined how individuals form perceptions of others and how accurate these perceptions are (Funder, 1995). These studies typically demonstrate that personality ratings by knowledgeable informants show moderate convergent validity with self-ratings of personality (Connolly, Kavanagh, & Viswesvaran, 2007). Informant ratings also tend to predict objective behaviors above and beyond self-ratings (Vazire & Mehl, 2008).
Relatively few studies have examined the accuracy of well-being judgments (i.e., judgments of life-satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and negative affect; Lucas et al., 1996 and Schneider & Schimmack, 2009), although inaccurate perceptions of others’ well-being have considerable practical and theoretical implications. Suicides are probably the most dramatic example of costly failures to recognize low well-being in others. Relatives of individuals who committed suicide sometimes experience guilt because they failed to notice that somebody close to them suffered from severe depression (Cleiren, Grad, Zavasnik, & Diekstra, 1996). Inaccurate perceptions of others’ well-being can also have serious consequences for social relationships. For example, it is not uncommon for spouses to assume that their partners are happily married, only to find out one day that their partner was actually having an affair for several years (Kingston, 2008). Even self-perceptions of well-being can be error prone. For example, people may focus too much on a salient aspect of their lives or they may use denial and other defense mechanisms to boost self-perceptions of well-being. A better understanding of biases in self-ratings and informant ratings of well-being requires a closer examination of the cognitive processes underlying these judgments (Schimmack, Diener, & Oishi, 2002).
Another reason for studying these processes is that self-ratings of life-satisfaction are often used to examine the determinants of well-being (Diener et al., 2009 and Schimmack, 2009). Many key findings in well-being science rest on the assumption that self-ratings of life-satisfaction are valid (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). Unfortunately, it is difficult to examine the validity of life-satisfaction judgments because well-being is by definition a subjective construct (Diener et al., 2009 and Schimmack, 2009). The most widely used validation criterion for self-ratings of life-satisfaction have been informant ratings of life-satisfaction by knowledgeable informants (see Schneider and Schimmack (2009), for a review). In these studies, it is commonly assumed that the shared variance between self-ratings and informant ratings reflects valid variance in well-being. In contrast, the nature of unique variance in self-ratings and informant ratings is less clear. This variance may reflect rater specific biases (Anusic, Schimmack, Pinkus, & Lockwood, 2009) or it may reflect valid information that is not shared across raters (Vazire & Mehl, 2008). So far, the sources of self-informant agreement and disagreement in well-being judgments have not been systematically examined. A better understanding of these sources can provide helpful information about the validity of well-being judgments.
One study examined whether even brief video clips contain valid information about well-being (Yeagley, Morling, & Nelson, 2007). The evidence was mixed with significant self-informant correlations for male targets, but not for female targets. Overall agreement was considerably lower than agreement in studies with well-acquainted informants (Schneider & Schimmack, 2009). Moreover, we have demonstrated that self-informant agreement increases with length of relationship (Schneider, Schimmack, Petrican, & Walker, 2010). These findings suggest that information about others’ well-being is acquired slowly over time. The main purpose of this article is to reveal the sources of agreement in self-ratings and informant ratings of well-being. Our study focused on life-satisfaction judgments for several reasons. First, life-satisfaction judgments are conceptually the closest indicator of well-being (Diener et al., 2009). Second, life-satisfaction judgments are the most widely used indicator of well-being. Third, life-satisfaction judgments produce higher self-informant agreement than affective indicators of well-being (Schneider & Schimmack, 2009). Finally, bottom-up theories of life-satisfaction judgments suggest that life-satisfaction ratings are based on information about satisfaction with specific life domains (Schimmack, 2008 and Schimmack et al., 2002). Thus, we could rely on domain satisfaction as a set of potential cues that produces self-informant agreement in life-satisfaction judgments.
