How experts and novices judge other people's knowledgeability from language use.

ABSTRACT: How accurate are people in judging someone else's knowledge based on their language use, and do more knowledgeable people use different cues to make these judgments? We address this by recruiting a group of participants ("informants") to answer general knowledge questions and describe various images belonging to different categories (e.g., cartoons, basketball). A second group of participants ("evaluators") also answer general knowledge questions and decide who is more knowledgeable within pairs of informants, based on these descriptions. Evaluators perform above chance at identifying the most knowledgeable informants (65% with only one description available). The less knowledgeable evaluators base their decisions on the number of specific statements, regardless of whether the statements a

SUBMITTER: Bower AH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11358192 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature