Agreement and disagreement biases are personality traits, not just measurement errors

Evidence

Behavior that is consistent for one person over a range of situations and also different from one person to another is a personality characteristic. Response sets to agree or disagree first appeared as sources of error in personality inventories but we have come to realize that they are also personality characteristics in their own right; they may be characteristics of greater interest than most of those that the inventories were designed to measure. In 1960, Couch and Keniston gave names to the two personality types involved—“Yeasayers” and “Naysayers.” — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 589

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the Yeasayer/Naysayer distinction as a personality typology rather than a mere measurement artifact.
• XREF: Connects to thinking about acquiescence bias and response set as substantive psychology rather than noise; parallels later work on measurement and construct validity. — connects to: Stereotyped scale items penalize nuanced agreement and reward blanket rejection — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1771