Abstract: The present study is an attempt to investigate the systematic distorti-ve effect of an item's semantic desirability on person perception studies.The subjects were 83 college students. They were randomly divided intothree groups, and instructed to rate the importance of 121 personality tra-its in determining the successful performance in three occupations. Theprofiles of responses were correlated with the desirability index of thetrait terms otained from a previous study. The results show that sem-antic desirability of the trait terms would systematically distort subje-cts' ratings in person perception studies. The methodological issues arisi-ng from these findings were discussed.

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