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Category: Project

Description: It may be good to both be seen accurately and feel that you are seen accurately by others. Indeed, both actual expressive accuracy – being perceived in line with your personality – and expressive accuracy beliefs – feeling that you are perceived in line with your personality – have been linked to greater well-being. However, expressive accuracy beliefs and actual expressive accuracy have rarely been examined in the same study, leaving two key questions unanswered: 1) do people who tend to be more expressively accurate know that they have this tendency – that is, do people have expressive accuracy awareness, and 2) do expressive accuracy and expressive accuracy beliefs each independently predict well-being? To address these questions, we used a getting-acquainted round-robin design across two studies. In Study 1 (N = 547, Ndyads = 2,878), we examined targets’ global expressive accuracy beliefs and average actual expressive accuracy levels across perceivers, and in Study 2 (N = 200, Ndyads = 964) we examined targets’ dyadic expressive accuracy beliefs and actual accuracy following each getting-acquainted interaction. In both studies, expressive accuracy and expressive accuracy beliefs were positively associated, indicating that people were aware of whether they tended to be viewed accurately both globally (Study 1), and with specific others (Study 2). Well-being was associated with greater expressive accuracy across studies, and with greater global expressive accuracy beliefs in Study 1. Thus, feeling and being seen accurately seem to go hand in hand, and to have independent links with well-being.