Social roles, social control, and biases in social-perception processes.

To make accurate social judgments, an individual must both recognize and adequately correct for the self-presentation advantages or disadvantages conferred upon actors by their social roles. Two experiments examined social perceptions formed during an encounter in which one participant composed difficult general knowledge questions and another participant attempted to answer those questions. It was found, as predicted, that perceivers fail to make adequate allowance for the biasing effects of these questioner and answerer roles in judging the participants' general knowledge. Questioners, allowed to display their personal store of esoteric knowledge in composing questions, were consistently rated superior to their partners, who attempted to answer the questions. This bias was stronger for the answerers and the uninvolved observers than for the questioners. Some implications of these results for our understanding of the biased perceptions of the powerful and the powerless in society are noted. More general implications for an understanding of the shortcomings of the intuitive psychologist are also discussed.