Perception of experts

On the basis of previous research, we hypothesized that morality and competence are the basic dimensions for describing and judging the particular social group known as experts. However, contrary to some of the literature claiming that morality predominates in social perception and is unconditionally positive, we assume that when people form evaluative judgments of experts, they are guided primarily by experts’ competence. We tested this assumption in three experiments (N = 413) in which we asked people to form a global impression of financial advisors (Study 1), car mechanics (Study 2), and physicians (Study 3). The results confirmed our hypotheses ; it was the experts’ competence that determined the valence of their general evaluative impression, whereas their morality only modified the intensity of these evaluations. We explain these findings with reference to the functionalist standpoint. We also obtained some unexpected results showing that information about experts’ behavior in one dimension may influence the evaluation of their attributes in a second dimension. This effect was stronger for competence.本研究基于既往研究成果，提出假设：道德性（morality）与能力性（competence）是描述与评判专家这一特定社会群体的两大核心维度。然而，与部分文献提出的"道德性在社会知觉（social perception）中占主导地位且具备无条件正向性"的观点相悖，我们认为，人们在对专家形成评价性判断时，主要以专家的能力性为导向。我们通过三项实验（总被试量N=413）对这一假设进行了验证：实验1要求被试对金融顾问形成整体印象，实验2针对汽车维修技师，实验3则以医师为对象。实验结果验证了我们的假设：专家的能力性决定了其整体评价性印象的效价（valence），而道德性仅会调节此类评价的强度。我们从功能主义视角（functionalist standpoint）对本研究发现进行了解释。此外，我们还得到了一些意料之外的结果：即专家在某一维度的行为信息，会影响人们对其另一维度属性的评价，且该效应在能力性维度上表现得更为显著。