Age Differences in Personality Traits and Social Desirability: A Multi-Rater Multi-Sample Study

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 in-formants 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.