Judging Competence
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competence through observation without engaging in any conversation or being involved in the
situation at all.
Reputation is indirect and low conversational involvement with the target. Information
about the competence of a coworker comes from a third party’s description. For example, an
accounting manager may gather information about a particular marketing manager’s competence
by listening to the marketing staff’s descriptions about the marketing manager’s successful
performance.
Given the high correlation between information availability and conversational
involvement found in the research of conversational memory (Farr & Anderson, 1983; Jones &
Nisbett, 1971; Sillars, 1986; Stafford, Waldron, & Infield, 1989), we expect that people will
report using information gathering methods that provide high information availability more than
those that provide low information availability for judging a competent coworker. Therefore, we
hypothesize that:
H1: People rely more on information gathering methods with high rather than low
conversational involvement for judging a competent coworker.
Information about a coworker is more likely to be perceived as accurate when it is
gathered by the judge than provided by others. We expect that people will report using direct
sources more than indirect sources for judging a competent coworker.
H2: People rely more on direct than indirect information sources for judging competence.
Judgments of Task-related Competence
Our discussion so far has been devoted to information gathering methods used in
judgment of competence in general. In this section, we examine whether people report using
different information gathering methods for judging general and task-specific competence.
Convention