Consensus Enables Accurate Social Judgments

Abstract

Ubiquitous to theories of social perception is an assumed relationship between anattribute’s (e.g., intelligence) “signal” andjudgment accuracy, with accuracy impossible without the presence and consensualuse of signal. Yet this foundational assumption remains untested. Ourinvestigation focused on consensus (quantified using intraclasscorrelations, ICCs), which should suggest signal availability, accordingto theories of accurate social perception. Study 1 confirmed that judgments ofdifferent social attributes exhibit different degrees of consensus. Study 2specifically tested the consensus → accuracy link, anticipating thatsocial judgments with higher consensus (target ICCs) would showgreater judgment accuracy. Using 497,780 judgments of 3,847 targets from 4,162participants across 45 data sets testing a broad variety of social judgments, wefound that consensus moderated the relationship between targets’self-report and participants’ judgments: Judgment accuracy was higherwhen consensus was higher. Results show the first empirical support for afoundational assumption of theories of social perception.