ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Current Directions in Psychological Science 2018, Vol. 27(5) 309 –314 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0963721418758437 www.psychologicalscience.org/CDPS
ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
We constantly form impressions about other people. Is my superior annoyed with me or just distracted? Is my teenager telling the truth about what he did last night? Will this job applicant be reliable once hired? Is this person genuinely interested in me or just playing nice? The consequences of being wrong can be huge. We might hire or marry the wrong person, jeopardize rela- tionships, and get disappointed by other people.
The skill to accurately assess other individuals’ emo- tions, personality, intentions, motives, and thoughts is called interpersonal accuracy (Hall, Schmid Mast, & West, 2016; Schlegel, Boone, & Hall, 2017). Surely we need this skill for successfully developing, maintaining, and manag- ing our social relationships and for being effective in social interactions. But what is known empirically about the impact of interpersonal accuracy for social interac- tions? Does being interpersonally accurate profit the social interaction partner or the person who is accurate? And how exactly does interpersonal accuracy manifest itself in social interactions? We review the existing litera- ture on outcomes of interpersonal accuracy and discuss when and why it is related to interaction outcomes.
What Is Interpersonal Accuracy?
Although interpersonal accuracy can fluctuate depend- ing on current motives (Smith, Ickes, Hall, & Hodges, 2011), most often it is considered a skill because it improves over development (Isaacowitz, Vicaria, & Murry, 2016), correlates with declarative knowledge on the topic (Rosip & Hall, 2004; Schlegel & Scherer, 2017), and is trainable (Blanch-Hartigan, Andrzejewski, & Hill, 2012; Schlegel, Vicaria, Isaacowitz, & Hall, 2017). It is different from emotional intelligence (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2008) because emotional intelligence is at the same time broader (e.g., it includes the manage- ment of emotions and the expression of emotions in the self and in others and not just the perception of others’ emotions) and narrower (it is about emotions only and not about motivation or personality). Both
758437 CDPXXX10.1177/0963721418758437Mast, HallInterpersonal Perception Accuracy research-article2018
Corresponding Author: Marianne Schmid Mast, University of Lausanne, HEC Lausanne, Department of Organizational Behavior, Quartier Unil-Chamberonne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland E-mail: marianne.schmidmast@unil.ch
The Impact of Interpersonal Accuracy on Behavioral Outcomes
Marianne Schmid Mast1 and Judith A. Hall2 1Department of Organizational Behavior, HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne, and 2Department of Psychology, Northeastern University
Abstract Interpersonal accuracy, the ability to correctly assess other people’s states or traits, has been studied for over 60 years, and many correlates have been uncovered. Furthermore, theorists routinely propose that having this kind of skill matters for social and workplace outcomes. However, much of the empirical work concerned with interpersonal accuracy does not directly address real-life outcomes for people who have, or lack, this skill. The present article summarizes literature pointing to behavioral correlates of interpersonal accuracy and illustrates when and why interpersonal accuracy is related to favorable interaction outcomes. There seems to be no specific behavior associated with high interpersonal accuracy. Instead, interpersonal accuracy seems to foster behavioral adaptability, the ability to change one’s behavior to match the expectations of the social interaction partner. This behavioral adaptability might be responsible for the positive interaction outcomes related to interpersonal accuracy. We illustrate the mechanism and boundary conditions underlying and framing how interpersonal accuracy affects interaction outcomes and discuss future directions in research on interpersonal accuracy.
Keywords interpersonal accuracy, behavioral adaptability, emotion recognition
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concepts overlap with accurate emotion recognition, which is the predominant operationalization of the con- cept of interpersonal accuracy in empirical studies. We know much less about how accurately assessing the personalities of other people, for instance, relates to social interaction outcomes.
Because it is conceptualized as a skill, interpersonal accuracy is mainly measured with performance tests. Participants hear or see other people’s behavior, usually in short videos or in photographs, and infer something about the target people, for instance their status, per- sonality, or what emotions they display. This inference is then compared with a criterion (the operationally defined gold standard, such as the target’s self-reported emotions) to obtain an accuracy score. Research shows that people sometimes overestimate their interpersonal accuracy (Ames & Kammrath, 2004) and that self- reports of interpersonal accuracy are rather weakly cor- related with tested interpersonal accuracy (Hall, Andrzejewski, & Yopchick, 2009), which is why research- ers use performance-based assessments.
Are People Accurate at Assessing Others?
Although many studies have investigated whether peo- ple are accurate in their judgments, it is hard to com- ment on interpersonal accuracy in an absolute sense and to compare accuracy rates across domains and tests of interpersonal accuracy because of methodological decisions made by test developers (e.g., using shorter or longer exposures, selecting items for their difficulty level, presenting posed vs. spontaneous behavior; Hall, Andrzejewski, Murphy, Schmid Mast, & Feinstein, 2008). At the extremes, judging deception is known to be very difficult (Bond & DePaulo, 2006), while judging proto- typical emotions, especially on the face, can be very easy (Hall et al., 2008; Matsumoto et al., 2000). In the present article, we focus on individual differences in interpersonal accuracy.
Who Is Interpersonally Accurate?
Numerous traits are modestly positively correlated with interpersonal accuracy, including tolerance, extraver- sion, conscientiousness, internal locus of control, and mental adjustment (Hall et al., 2009). Interpersonal accuracy measured as emotion recognition accuracy is positively correlated with general mental intelligence (r = .19; Schlegel, Palese, et al., 2017), but intelligence does not explain the effect of interpersonal accuracy on interaction outcomes (Bommer, Pesta, & Storrud- Barnes, 2011). In general, females outperform males, although mostly what is studied are emotion judgments.
The gender difference, although not large, is very con- sistent across tests, ages, and geography (Hall, Gunnery, & Horgan, 2016).
Is Interpersonal Accuracy Related to Interaction Outcomes?
Empirical evidence suggests that a person who is inter- personally accurate is more successful in social interac- tions. Overall, this person’s relationships are of higher quality (Hall et al., 2009). With regard to specific set- tings, salespeople who score higher in interpersonal accuracy have better sales and higher salaries (Byron, Terranova, & Nowicki, 2007). Doctors with high inter- personal accuracy are more attentive to signs of patient distress and have patients who are more satisfied and more likely to keep their appointments (Hall, 2011). More interpersonally accurate superiors have more sat- isfied subordinates (Schmid Mast, Jonas, Cronauer, & Darioly, 2012), and people with higher levels of inter- personal accuracy obtain better results in negotiations (Elfenbein, Der Foo, White, Tan, & Aik, 2007) and are less guided by their stereotypes when evaluating others (Frauendorfer & Schmid Mast, 2013). High school stu- dents who have higher levels of interpersonal accuracy are better at learning new word definitions in a dyadic teaching situation (Bernieri, 1991), and music teachers with high levels of interpersonal accuracy are rated as more effective by their students and by outside observ- ers (Kurkul, 2007). People with high interpersonal accu- racy (together with being extraverted) also emerge more easily as leaders in a group (Rubin, Munz, & Bommer, 2005; Walter, Cole, van der Vegt, Rubin, & Bommer, 2012), and female more than male managers who have high interpersonal accuracy are given better performance ratings by their subordinates (Byron, 2007). Being interpersonally perceptive is correlated with good outcomes in a work context, as confirmed by two articles statistically combining the existing literature (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Hall et al., 2009).
Thus, being interpersonally accurate is related to benefits for the social interaction partner of an accurate individual (e.g., more satisfaction) as well as for the person who is interpersonally accurate (e.g., higher salary, better able to learn, more effective as a teacher). The relationship is probably dynamic and interactive, in that being interpersonally accurate positively affects one’s social interaction partner, which in turn has a positive effect on the person who is interpersonally accurate.
But interpersonal accuracy is not always directly related to better interpersonal outcomes. For some people and under certain circumstances, this link is
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stronger or weaker. Female managers more so than male managers who scored highly on interpersonal accuracy received better performance ratings by their subordi- nates (Byron, 2007). Interpersonal accuracy was also related to better performance in an assessment center, more so for non-Whites than for Whites and more so for people with lower general intelligence…
