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Age Differences in Personality Traits and Social Desirability: A Multi-Rater Multi-Sample Study
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Description: Little research has examined age differences by using more than one source of information. We compared age differences in Five-Factor Model (FFM) facets and nuances in self-reports and ratings by knowledgeable informants using samples from three countries (Estonia, Germany, and the Czech Republic; N=5,624). We hypothesized that age differences would be larger in self- than informant-reports, because of greater social desirability in self-descriptions with advancing age. Indeed, we found that age differences were systematically smaller in informant-reports compared to self-reports; this trend was stronger for traits independently rated as socially desirable. As age differences may be best approximated by average trends of self- and informant-reports, we provide meta-analytic age trends for multi-rater composite scores of the FFM facets and nuances.