Morality and competence in perception of experts

Abstract 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 general 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.摘要 本研究基于既往研究提出假设：道德性（morality）与能力（competence）是描述和评判被称为"专家"这一特定社会群体的基本维度。然而，与部分文献提出的"道德性在社会知觉（social perception）中占据主导地位且具有无条件正向性"的观点相悖，本研究认为，人们在对专家形成评价性判断时，主要以专家的能力为导向。本研究通过三项实验（总被试量N=413）验证了这一假设：实验1要求被试对理财顾问形成总体印象，实验2针对汽车维修技师，实验3则针对医师。实验结果验证了本研究的假设：专家的能力决定了其总体评价性印象的效价，而道德性仅会调节此类评价的强度。本研究从功能主义视角（functionalist standpoint）对上述研究结果进行了解释。此外，本研究还得到了一些意外发现：即专家在某一维度上的行为信息，会影响人们对其另一维度属性的评价，且该效应在能力维度上表现得更为显著。