Normality evaluations and their relation to personality traits and well-being.

Abstract

Despite frequent discussions of what it means to be normal in clinical, social, and personality psychology theory, the characteristics of individuals who call themselves normal are little understood. In 5 studies, the authors investigated various hypotheses concerning the nature of normality evaluations. The authors add to recent evidence that normality evaluations represent a distinct dimension of evaluative judgments, showing self-judgments of being normal (versus strange) to be relatively independent from self-judgments of being average (versus unique). Normality evaluations showed positive relations with communal traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, a..