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成果提出假设：道德性（morality）与胜任力（competence）是描述和评判专家这一特定社会群体的两大基础维度。然而，与部分文献提出的‘道德性在社会知觉中占主导地位且具备无条件正向性’的观点相悖，本研究认为，人们在对专家作出评价性判断时，主要以专家的胜任力为依据。为此，本研究开展三项实验（总样本量N=413）：实验1要求被试对理财顾问形成整体印象，实验2针对汽车维修技师，实验3则以医师为研究对象。实验结果验证了本研究的假设：专家的胜任力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。本研究从功能主义视角对上述研究结果进行阐释。此外，本研究还获得了若干非预期结果：专家在某一维度的行为信息，会对人们评价其另一维度的属性产生影响，且该效应在胜任力维度上更为显著。