The correspondence between judgments of acquaintance and judgments of photographs is seen to vary with the trait in question. Such traits as neatness, conceit, sociability, humor, and likeability, important as they are for vocational success or failure, show very low correlation. The judgments of the photographs tell almost nothing at all of the nature of the impression which the individual makes on her acquaintances, her true character. With the remaining traits--beauty, intelligence, refinement, snobbishness, and vulgarity--the coefficients are considerably larger, and suggest that the photographs tend to be judged by the strangers in somewhat the same way as the individuals are judged by their acquaintances.
Two points of special importance should be noted in this connection. The first is that these correlations are not between the judgments of single individuals. It is the combined or group judgment of twenty-five judges which is required to yield these coefficients which even then average only about .40 correlation with the estimates of associates. The following table shows the ability of ten judges, chosen at random, to estimate these characteristics through the examination of the photographs. In securing this table the arrangement made by each individual judge was correlated with the established order as determined by the estimates of associates, in the case of the three traits--intelligence, neatness and sociability.
+--------+--------------------------------------+ | | Individual Correctness of Judges in | | | Estimating | | Judge |--------------------------------------+ | | Intelligence | Neatness |Sociability | +--------+--------------+----------+------------+ | I | .51 | .11 | .39 | | II | .11 | .10 | .08 | | III | .15 | .29 | .05 | | IV | -.27 | .06 | .49 | | V | .08 | .24 | .08 | | VI | .43 | .41 | .28 | | VII | .04 | .11 | .02 | | VIII | .39 | -.09 | .32 | | IX | .22 | -.08 | .00 | | X | .30 | .02 | .55 | +--------+--------------+----------+------------+ |Average | .19 | .11 | .22 | +--------+--------------+----------+------------+
These random samples of individual judicial capacity show at once how unreliable individual judgment is in these matters. The individual judges vary widely among themselves and they also depart widely from the established order. Moreover, a judge who may happen to show a reasonable degree of correctness in judging sociability may be very far away from correctness in judging the other traits, or may, indeed, judge in quite the reverse of the correct order. To have accepted the verdicts of a single judge would not only have been manifestly unfair to the individual but also hazardous to the employer. The combined impressions of twenty-five judges is here required for the correlations for even half of the traits to reach over .38.