Accuracy or Bias: Judgment About Others’ Intelligence and Moral Identity in a Zero Acquaintance Condition

Abstract

Some studies have revealed that most individuals tend to concentrate on others’ morality and intelligence at their social perception. The present study aimed to examine the accuracy of these social perceptions in zero acquaintance condition. Nine female students who had high, low or average moral identity/intelligence were considered as targets and the short video clips of their lectures about the same nonrelated subject were presented to other students to judge about them through three studies (total N: 208). In the first study the judges (N: 98) have to guess and categorize the targets as highly or lowly moral and also as highly or lowly intelligent. In the second study the judges (N: 96) have to do it in a Likert scale from -5 to +5. In the third study the judges (N: 14) who were senior students of psychology do it with the Likert scale but after a group discussion about any targets. The findings indicated that the perceptions were full of above-than-chance inaccuracies which were consensus across the three studies. Considering the inaccurate positive account about many targets, accurate perceptions about highly moral/intelligent targets were explained by positive bias to targets than by actual accurate perception. Beyond such bias, there were some little traces of accuracy particularly in intelligence. It seems that due to many inaccuracies especially about morality, such little traces of accuracy are not much reliable for judgments in real settings with zero acquaintance.

Keywords

• accuracy of social perception
• intelligence
• moral identity
• zero acquaintance condition