Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others

A study in Germany found that intelligent individuals tend to be more accurate judges of other people’s intelligence. Better judges of the intelligence of others also included people with stronger emotion perception abilities and those who were more satisfied with their lives. The paper was published in the journal Intelligence.

Intelligence is the ability to learn, understand, reason, and solve problems. It involves using knowledge effectively in new situations and includes the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.

Psychologists view it as a combination of abilities such as memory, attention, verbal skill, and logical thinking. Some theories describe intelligence as a single general ability, while others see it as a set of multiple distinct abilities.

On average, people are able to estimate the intelligence of others even after very short encounters. This ability is important because intelligence plays a critical role in a person’s ability to adapt to their environment and navigate social exchanges. However, individuals differ in their ability to accurately judge the intelligence of others. While some can recognize the intelligence level of another person quite accurately, the assessments of others are not so good.

Study author Christoph Heine and his colleagues investigated individual differences in the ability to judge others’ intelligence based on short video clips. They hypothesized that intelligent individuals would be better able to accurately judge the intelligence of other people.

They also expected that females would be better judges of intelligence than males, and that the ability to judge the intelligence of others would be positively associated with emotion perception abilities, empathy, openness, subjective well-being, and social curiosity.

The study participants consisted of 198 individuals, 72% of whom were university students. One hundred and forty of the participants were women, and the participants’ average age was 29 years.

Participants viewed 50 one-minute videos showing “target” persons with different, previously verified levels of intelligence. The individuals shown in the videos performed tasks such as reading a weather report aloud, describing a recent enjoyable experience, explaining the meaning of the term “symmetry”, or engaging in a short roleplay. After each video, the study participants judged the intelligence of the target person on a five-point scale.

The study authors assessed the actual intelligence of the study participants using three different tests that covered various forms of cognitive ability. (These same tests had been used to assess the verified intelligence of the target people in the videos). The study participants also completed assessments measuring their emotion perception abilities, empathy, personality traits, and subjective well-being.

Results showed that intelligence judgment accuracy varied significantly across participants, proving that people do indeed differ systematically in their ability to act as a “good judge” of intelligence.

As hypothesized, more intelligent individuals tended to be significantly more accurate in judging the intelligence of the people in the videos. Similarly, participants with better emotion perception abilities and those who reported being more satisfied with their lives also tended to be more accurate judges.

The researchers noted that these “good judges” achieved higher accuracy because they relied heavily on valid behavioral cues—specifically, how clearly the target articulated their words, and the actual content and vocabulary of their speech.

However, several of the researchers’ other hypotheses were not supported by the data. The study found that gender, empathy, openness, and social curiosity did not make a person a more accurate judge of intelligence.

“These findings underscore the importance of perceivers’ cognitive and socio-emotional abilities in social evaluation, and support the idea that being a good judge of intelligence is linked to psychological adjustment,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the ways people judge the intelligence of others. However, it remains unclear whether watching short videos is an ecologically valid way to assess a person’s ability to judge intelligence in real-world, dynamic social interactions.

Additionally, the majority of the participants in the study were university students, many of whom were psychology majors. Their familiarity with psychological concepts might have aided them in detecting intelligence cues in the videos. Given this, findings regarding the general population may differ.

The paper, “The good judge of intelligence,” was authored by Christoph Heine, Johannes Zimmermann, Daniel Leising, and Michael Dufner.