The Social Awareness Inventory: Development and Applications
The Social Awareness Inventory (SAI), which assesses individual differences in eight social-perceptual styles, is introduced and applied in three studies. The model is derived by crossing the three binary dimensions of target (self or other), perspective (own or other's), and content (overt appearance or covert experience). Studies 1 and 2 describe the development of the SAI and show that its subscales are meaningfully associated with related constructs such as public and private self-consciousness, empathy, social anxiety, and narcissism. Studies 2 and 3 explore the factor structure of the SAI, showing that people high on a self-divided factor regulate themselves according to environmental controls, list more self presentational strivings, and are higher on neuroticism and depression. In contrast, people high on a self-grounded factor tend to be autonomy oriented. The SAI appears to provide an integrative conceptual and empirical framework for considering many personality and motivational constructs.