A study in Germany found that intelligent people tend to judge others’ intelligence more accurately. People who were better judges of other people’s intelligence also included people who had stronger emotional recognition abilities and people who were more satisfied with their lives. The paper was published in a magazine intelligence.
Intelligence is the ability to learn, understand, reason, and solve problems. This involves using knowledge effectively in new situations and also includes the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Psychologists view it as a combination of abilities such as memory, attention, language skills, and logical thinking. Some theories describe intelligence as a single general ability, while others think of it as a set of separate abilities.
On average, a person is able to estimate the intelligence of another person even after a very brief encounter. This ability is important because intelligence plays a key role in humans’ ability to adapt to their environments and navigate social interactions. However, people vary in their ability to accurately judge the intelligence of others. Some people are quite accurate in perceiving the intelligence level of others, but their evaluations of others are not very good.
Study author Christoph Heine and his colleagues investigated individual differences in the ability to judge the intelligence of others based on short video clips. They hypothesized that intelligent people would be able to more accurately judge the intelligence of others.
They also predicted that women would be better at judging intelligence than men, and that the ability to judge others’ intelligence would be positively associated with emotional recognition, empathy, generosity, subjective well-being, and social curiosity.
The study participants consisted of 198 people, 72% of whom were university students. 140 of the participants were female, and the average age of the participants was 29 years.
Participants watched 50 one-minute videos of previously tested “target” people of varying intelligence levels. The people in the videos performed tasks such as reading out the weather forecast, describing a recent pleasurable experience, explaining the meaning of the term “symmetry,” and doing a short role-play. After each video, study participants rated the subject’s intelligence on a 5-point scale.
The study authors assessed the actual intelligence of the study participants using three different tests that target different forms of cognitive ability. (These same tests were used to assess the verified intelligence of the subjects in the video). Study participants also completed assessments measuring emotional recognition ability, empathy, personality traits, and subjective well-being.
The results showed that the accuracy of intelligence judgments varied widely across participants, proving that people indeed differ systematically in their ability to act as “good judges” of intelligence.
As hypothesized, more intelligent individuals tended to judge the intelligence of the people in the videos more accurately. Similarly, participants who were better at recognizing emotions and who reported being more satisfied with their lives tended to make more accurate judgments.
The researchers noted that these “better judges” achieved higher accuracy because they relied more heavily on valid behavioral cues, specifically how clearly their subjects said their words, as well as the actual content and vocabulary of that speech.
However, some of the researchers’ other hypotheses were not supported by the data. The study found that gender, empathy, openness, and social curiosity do not make people more accurate judges of their intelligence.
“These findings highlight the importance of perceivers’ cognitive and socioemotional abilities in social evaluations and support the idea that making good judgments of intelligence is related to psychological adjustment,” the study authors concluded.
This research contributes to scientific understanding of how people judge the intelligence of others. However, it remains unclear whether watching short videos is an ecologically valid method for assessing the ability to judge intelligence in real-world dynamic social interactions.
Additionally, the majority of participants in this study were college students, many of whom majored in psychology. They were familiar with psychological concepts, which may have helped them detect intelligence cues in the videos. Considering this, findings regarding the general population may differ.
The paper “Good Judges of Intelligence” was written by Christoph Heine, Johannes Zimmermann, Daniel Rising, and Michael Dufner.
