Abstract
Interpersonal accuracy correlates modestly across different domains. Although some research has explored factors that predict accuracy within specific domains of interpersonal judgment (e.g., social attributes), whether any variables might predict interpersonal accuracy generally across different domains remains in question. Subjective socioeconomic status (SES) has recently emerged as an important moderator of various social cognitions, such as contextual focus and empathic accuracy. Moreover, people lower in SES tend to show greater interpersonal engagement and attention; thus, we wondered whether individuals with lower subjective SES might exhibit superior interpersonal accuracy in multiple domains. Indeed, across four studies, we found that subjective SES inversely correlated with accuracy in three different domains of interpersonal accuracy: social attributes, situational affect, and emotion. These findings therefore demonstrate that subjective SES may predict broad interpersonal accuracy abilities and suggest that, despite modest relationships between different types of first impression accuracy, the correlates of such accuracy can still operate across domains.
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Notes
Though men tended to be higher in subjective SES, adding gender to our regressions did not change the results in any of our studies. Subjective SES continued to predict accuracy when controlling for gender but gender did not consistently predict accuracy when controlling for subjective SES.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by Grants from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship to RTB and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to RA and NOR.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Research Ethics Board at the University of Toronto and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Bjornsdottir, R.T., Alaei, R. & Rule, N.O. The Perceptive Proletarian: Subjective Social Class Predicts Interpersonal Accuracy. J Nonverbal Behav 41, 185–201 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-016-0248-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-016-0248-6