The game is afoot: A response to three insightful commentaries

Abstract

This is an author response to commentaries on our original article (Wu, Sheppard & Mitchell, 2016). We abstract two main themes from the commentaries, and they are as follows: (1) What kind of clues in target behaviour allow perceivers to infer target EQ? And related with this, by what process do perceivers infer the target's EQ? (2) Do features of the target group naturally lead to a U-shaped function, whereby it is easy for perceivers to identify those at the extremes but not those in the middle of the continuum?

Consistency in personality trait judgments across online chatting and offline conversation

“…Signals and cues of facial expressions and behavior embodied in psychological dispositions (Funder, 2012;Wu et al, 2016b) allow people to accurately judge some dimensions of the big-five traits (e.g., Carney et al, 2007;Thoresen et al, 2012;Back and Nestler, 2016) as well as the extreme levels of the empathic trait (Wu et al, 2016a) and the big-five traits (Wu et al, 2017). Similarly, "digital footprints" such as nicknames, profile images, and postings left on social media embodied in real personalities (Vazire and Gosling, 2004;Marcus et al, 2006;Back et al, 2010) enable people to infer some dimensions of the big-five traits (Tskhay and Rule, 2014;Azucar et al, 2018) and to detect those who are located at the extreme levels of the big-five trait continua (Wu et al, 2021).…”

“…Informative cues are important for personality trait judgments. Pinpointing the ways by which people utilize various cues depending on the personalities judged across the online and offline environments will provide insight into understanding the processes of trait judgments (Wu et al, 2016b).…”

Accurate inferences of others' thoughts depend on where they stand on the empathic trait continuum

“…Mindreading (known otherwise as mentalizing, empathic accuracy) refers to people's (perceivers') ability to infer what another person (the target) might think, feel, and know for the purpose of interpreting and predicting their behavior (Premack & Woodruff, 1978;Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993). Past research on mindreading has explored people's ability to infer others' mental states (e.g., Cassidy Ropar, Mitchell, & Chapman, 2013Ickes, Stinson, Bissonnette, & Garcia, 1990;Pillai, Sheppard, & Mitchell, 2012;Pillai et al, 2014;Sheppard, Pillai, Wong, Ropar, & Mitchell, 2016;Wimmer & Perner, 1983); but much of this research largely ignores the characteristics of the target -the person we are making inferences about (Andrews, 2008;Rai & Mitchell, 2004;Wu, Sheppard, & Mitchell, 2016a, 2016b) -as if we only need to focus on the features of the situation in order to explain mindreading. The empirical work reported here is novel in seeking to explore the possibility that some aspects of target traits might affect how accurately we make mental state inferences.…”